Italian cuisine in the world is not just an idea of cooking, but a lifestyle, an idea of society. The world celebrates the III Week of the Italian cuisine in the world.
When and how?
It is celebrated from 19 to 25 November la III Week of Italian Cuisine in the World, an initiative born from EXPO Milano 2015. 300 are the IIC, Italian Cultural Institutes (annexed to our diplomatic representations scattered around the planet), at the forefront of this initiative.
This is an initiative that involves, in addition to diplomacy, small, medium and large entrepreneurs, agri-food exporters Made in Italy abroad. Pivotal theme: feed the world with the Mediterranean diet. This year, however, the initiative falls due to an extraordinary moment for our exports, a year in which our exports reached all-time highs. It is known that if Italy is one of the EU's major exporters, it is thanks to its agri-food excellence and creativity, wisely combined with industry, from generation to generation. The Barillas were humble Parma pasta makers, the Ferreros were sellers of hazelnuts from Alba, just to name two examples.
Why?
There is no doubt that Italian cuisine is what it is not only for objective sensorial and nutritional qualities, recognized and appreciated everywhere, but also for a connected philosophy.
The culture of Athens, which never had a great empire like the Romans, would hardly have come down to us if it had not been firmly at the basis of a way of conceiving life and society, of which we Europeans can still call ourselves children. If Athens more than two thousand five hundred years ago had only started exporting craters to drink wine, they would have only added to the many archaeological finds of antiquity. But drinking from those craters led to the events of Achilles, Ulysses, Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Ethics and Politics. As he had already guessed in his book "Maccheroni & Co" (Longanesi, Milan, 1957), the brilliant Giuseppe Prezzolini, pasta is not just what it seems. The poet Marino Moretti, Aldo Fabrizi, Gianni Rodari and many others have dedicated poems to bread and pasta. In cinema, just think of Sordi and Totò.
Feed with the great kitchen
Thomas Jefferson, founding father of the USA, had already wanted to import the machine for making macaroni in his country. In macaroni he had seen a formidable source of sustenance for starving crowds. It is no coincidence that an Expo was held in Italy which focused on the theme of world hunger. It was from that Expo that the Ambrosian refectory, from the chef's idea Massimo Bottura, author ofFranciscan tavern Modenese.
The idea is recover what you would throw away, not because it spoiled, but because of a reckless economic culture of waste. Dry bread becomes one of the main ingredients to serve delicious dishes, prepared by the best chefs in the world, who come to provide their work for free, to feed the poor of Milan who flock to the Ambrosian refectory. This idea has been imitated in many other places in Italy and around the world. For years, Bruno Serato, Madonna's personal chef, has been feeding thousands of poor people in Los Angeles for free with pasta dishes.
The pasta that feeds the stomach and the spirit
The pasta, so demonized by the fundamentalists of high-protein diets, returns to be warmly sponsored by nutritionists, precisely in countries where too much protein is consumed. It seems even affects the good mood and the quantity and quality of our sleep, a nice plate of pasta (lightly seasoned) in the evening.
In the week of Italian cuisine, it will be served with the Pesto, to support the Ligurian population, hit by recent disasters. As well as the sauceAmatriciana it was used to trigger, following the earthquake in central Italy, aid from restaurants around the world. Few Lepratti, an Italian-Argentine, killed at the age of 35 by the police a Rosary, during the clashes for the 2001 crisis, he fed the poor of Rosario by traveling by bicycle from the suburbs to the suburbs and cooking pasta for everyone. Today a book, published by the Marotta Cafiero publishing house, by brave boys from Scampìa (in the capital region of pasta and pizza), tells the story of the Angel on a Bicycle. This is how the rosarines remember him in the murals, in one of the most culturally Italian cities in the world, where the Week of the Bagna cauda.
Italy The longest-lived and healthiest country
Longevity seems to be another component of the fame of our cuisine. If in Piemonte we had the oldest woman in the world, in Sardinia and in Marche we have countries with generally the longest-lived people in the world. But long-lived Italians are scattered everywhere. An example is Antonio Mancinelli, 107, a barber from New York. Still active, he opens the shop every morning and cuts the hair of New Yorkers for a century and eats a lot of pasta.
The week is linked to the Year of Food 2018, the Celebrations of the Rossini Centenaries, the awareness and promotion activities of our country's controlled and protected denomination products, targeted by imitations. For a broad and open culture of eating that is for the benefit of the public, the environment, eco-sustainability and a consumption and an industry that sees its ends and not the means in man and the environment.
Do not forget the intrinsically multicultural aspect of the kitchen. In fact, spaghetti and pizza have been made multiform by our creativity, but we have inherited them from Chinese and Arabs. Cooking is sharing between peoples.
