Italian Cuisine UNESCO Heritage
Casa Artusi is the organization that officially promoted and prepared the nomination dossier for the Italian government, in collaboration with the magazine "La cucina italiana" and the Italian Academy of Cuisine
Following its UNESCO designation, Casa Artusi established the International Observatory on Italian Cuisine and Good Taste, conceived as a research and outreach center dedicated to gastronomic culture, the value of “good taste,” and the social, economic, and identity-defining role of Italian cuisine around the world
That which characterises Italian cuisine most is its extraordinary variety of local variations, even over small distances. This situation arises from a mixture of geographical and historical factors. On the one hand, the extreme diversity of its landscapes, climates and microclimates, hence its resources; on the other, diversification of traditions, practices and uses. These are the result of a complex history, in which, over the years, different peoples and cultures have come together and mixed.
Does this perhaps mean that "Italian" cuisine doesn't really exist? Those who support it, believe it to be quite simply the result of merging local cultures, but this is misleading. Indeed, over the centuries local cultures have not simply "added up", but rather multiplied, contrasting and interacting with as well as mutually enriching one another through the exchange of knowledge, flavours/awareness and practices. Thus, Italian cuisine has been pieced together like a mosaic, consisting of many different tesserae, each of which is unique and has its own identity. Yet when pieced together, said tesserae form an entire image that would not exist without the contribution of each and every one.
The acknowledgement proposal Italy has presented to UNESCO focusses mainly on this idea, variety, biocultural diversity as a distinctive feature of Italian cuisine, which is both one and many at the same time.
The second point upon which the proposal focusses is sustainability. This ancient tradition is linked to the fact that, in constructing the Italian gastronomic heritage, there has been an important, or better decisive, contribution from peasant culture. Said culture, by its very nature, is attentive to maintaining the environmental balances that guarantee the continuity of resources. Systematic integration between popular tradition and elite culture, peasant and aristocratic (then bourgeois) culture, has always characterised Italian history, even in terms of food. Thanks to this integration, thanks to this bond, cooking knowledge and practices have maintained a strong tie with the experiences of individual areas, to which popular tradition is closely linked. Haute cuisine, in turn, has taken steps to rework and spread local experiences. A symbolic case of this mechanism is Pellegrino Artusi's cookery manual, which at the end of the 19th century, addressing a wealthy city-dwelling public, took up, reworked and shared many experiences of popular cuisine.
The idea of proposing to acknowledge Italian cuisine as a universal heritage came from these considerations. This is true both horizontally by sharing the cultures of different areas, and vertically, by sharing socially diversified experiences, it has managed to create an interesting interactive model, in which "national" and "local" reflect rather than contradict each other.
I believe that this model, which is so characteristic of Italian tradition, has a more general value, also as a model of civil coexistence. It therefore deserves to be well-known - and acknowledged.
Massimo Montanari, University of Bologna
