FEDERALISM ON THE TABLE: NOT ITALIAN CUISINE, RATHER, THE MANY ITALIAN CUISINES. A HERITAGE OF FOOD AND KNOWLEDGE THROUGHOUT THE PENINSULA HAS FORMED OUR CULTURE, SAYS PROFESSOR MASSIMO MONTANARI, EXPERT ON THE HISTORY OF FOOD

Anyone interested in history knows: Italy is a country in search of its national identity, ever since it was divided into communes, republics and nation states - even more so, since it was united. The year was 1861. But if we look more carefully at the curriculum vitae of Italy, we can see that the divisions have been an asset rather than a weakness.
If not politically, they have been culturally. The cultural level is, perhaps above all, the table, rather, the tables. That is, the various local cuisines use their knowledge to prepare the products, which are also local and then they circulate throughout Italy. “The unity of a country is based more on culture than politics, food and habits that have to do with food tastes,” Professor Massimo Montanari, a leading expert on the history of food, told WineNews. The circulation of various food cultures is the “mortar” that unites the people of Italy and gives them an identity.
“Culinary traditions are an essential part of national unity,” Montanari continues, “and for this reason, cultural unity precedes political unity: there has been a network of Italian culture since the Middle Ages. Knowledge, tastes and foods circulated all over Italy, with a common denominator that even then defined the “Italian space”. It was an elitist space, which expanded socially from the nineteenth century onwards, thanks to Artusi, and then in the twentieth century it was diffused throughout the society. “One can speak, therefore, of cultural federalism of food: moving products, people, recipes, knowledge, that mix with Italian spaces and time, and that allow for a rich and diverse variety of dishes and know-how. It is this that makes Italian cuisine (and Italian cuisines) alive - alive, like culture.