Italian Cooking And Its Rituals Get UN Designation As World Heritage
Rome : Italian food is known and loved worldwide for its fresh ingredients and palatable flavors. The UN’s cultural agency gave food lovers another reason to celebrate their pizza, pasta and tiramisu on Wednesday by listing Italian food as part of the world’s “intangible” cultural heritage.
UNESCO has added rituals related to the preparation and consumption of Italian food to its list of traditional practices and expressions around the world. It’s a name celebrated alongside the better-known list of UNESCO World Heritage sites, where Italy is well represented by sites such as the Colosseum in Rome and the ancient city of Pompeii.
The quote did not mention specific dishes, recipes, or regional specialties, but emphasized the cultural importance Italians place on the rituals of cooking and eating: Sunday family lunches, the tradition of grandmothers teaching their grandchildren how to fold tortellini dough, even the act of coming together to share a meal.
“Cooking is a gesture of love; it is a way of telling others something about ourselves and how we care for others,” said Pier Luigi Petrillo, an Italian UNESCO campaigner and professor of comparative law at La Sapienza University of Rome.
“The tradition of being at the table, standing for a while at lunch, a little longer at dinner, and even longer at large events, is not very common around the world,” he said.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni congratulated the title, which he said honored Italians and their national identity.
“Because for us Italians, cuisine is not just a collection of dishes or recipes. It is much more: culture, tradition, business, wealth,” he said in his statement.
Many gastronomic cultures are recognized
This is not the first time a country’s cuisine has been recognized as a cultural expression: in 2010, UNESCO listed the “gastronomic food of the French” as part of the world’s intangible heritage, highlighting the French tradition of celebrating important moments with food.
Other national cuisines and surrounding cultural practices have been added in recent years: the “cider culture” of Spain’s Asturia region, the Ceebu Jen culinary tradition of Senegal, the traditional way of making cheese in Minas Gerais, Brazil.
UNESCO meets every year to consider adding new candidates to the “intangible heritage” list. There are three types: One is a representative list, another lists applications that need “urgent” protection, and the third is a list of good protection practices.
This year, at the committee meeting in New Delhi, 53 candidates were evaluated for the representative list, which currently consists of 788 items. Other nominees included Swiss singing, Bangladesh’s handloom weaving technique used to make Tangail saris, and Chile’s family circuses.
An Italian campaign focused on sustainability and diversity
In its presentation, Italy emphasized the “sustainability and biocultural diversity” of its food. Its campaign noted how Italy’s simple cuisine values seasonality, fresh produce, and limiting waste, while its diversity highlighted regional culinary differences and influences from immigrants and others.
“For me, Italian cuisine is at the best, at the highest level. Number one. Nothing comes close,” said Francesco Lenzi, a pasta maker at the Osteria da Fortunata restaurant near Rome’s Piazza Navona. “There are people who say, ‘No, spaghetti comes from China.’ OK, OK, but here we turned noodles into a global phenomenon. Today, wherever you go in the world, everyone knows the word spaghetti. Everyone knows pizza.”
Lenzi owed his passion to his grandmother, “the queen of this big house by the sea” in Camogli, a small village on the Ligurian coast where he grew up. “I remember making manti with a rolling pin on Sundays.”
“This stayed with me for many years,” he said in the restaurant kitchen.
Mirella Pozzoli, a tourist from the Lombardy region of northern Italy who visited Rome’s Pantheon, said that the act of eating together is unique to Italians: “Sitting at the table with family or friends is something that we Italians value and care about very much. It is a festive tradition that you cannot find anywhere else in the world.”
Italy is already well represented on the list
Italy already has 13 other cultural elements on UNESCO’s intangible list, including the Sicilian puppet theatre, the fiddling of Cremona and the practice of transporting animals along seasonal migration routes known as transhumance.
Italy has previously appeared on two food-related lists: a 2013 citation for the “Mediterranean diet” covering Italy and a half-dozen other countries, and a 2017 recognition of pizza makers in Naples.
Italian campaigner Petrillo said that after 2017, the number of accredited schools training Neapolitan pizza makers increased by more than 400%.
“Following UNESCO’s recognition, there have been significant economic impacts on both tourism and product sales, education and training,” he said.
