Italy doesn’t do Hairy Bikers - just immaculately groomed Gucci models sipping espresso as their scooters zip from one bunga-bunga party to the next.

Two Greedy Italians (BBC2, Wednesday 8pm) sent the Romulus and Remus of Italian cooking to suckle from the lupine teat of their homeland’s cuisine.

Paradoxically, this hunt for the foodie soul of Italy was led by a couple of real-life Dolmio puppets. National stereotypes can be offensive, but not when so warmly embraced as by Gennaro Contaldo, his accent on loan from Allo Allo’s Captain Bertorelli, and mentor Antonio Carluccio, stately gravitas oozing from him like olive oil from Carmela Soprano’s pasta fazool.

Aesthetically the duo has little in common with Blighty’s Bikers, but they did share the bearded brothers’ reverence for mums. For this was an extended love letter to the family and, more specifically, the stern-looking matriarchs who, more than any celebrity chef, are the spiritual guardians of Italian cooking.

Antonio and Gennaro lamented how young women in Italy are no longer interested in cooking. To illustrate the passing of the old ways, they grilled a female journalist over whether a cookbook wouldn’t make her happier than a notebook.

There were hints of avuncular chauvinism, as when they linked rising divorce rates to women no longer wanting to spend 18 hours a day slaving over a stove. And almost a genuine Burlusconi moment when the bachelor Carluccio bagged a blind date half his age (if that).

But you couldn’t help warm to them, like ripe vine tomatoes in the Mediterranean sun. They gorged on balsamic and amaretto, ribbed Giovanni Rana here resembling a startled puffin and honked in delight as comely teenagers hand-rolled tortellini, “pulses of love” also known locally as Venus’s navels.

And there was a rather a poignant scene when the 70-something Carluccio reflected on having not raised a family. Mind you, if there’s any truth to the legends about the restorative properties of the olive groves, it would be hasty in the extreme to rule it out just yet.

As Captain Bertorelli, and most likely Contaldo too, would put it: whadda mistake-a to make-a.