I don’t design trips. I design transformations, for people who want to stop being tourists in Italy and start belonging there. Language, culture, identity, woven into one.
An onion from Calabria
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At the end of September, Turin turned its own center into a map of Italy. Terra Madre Salone del Gusto. Slow Food’s great gathering. After many years, it moved into the heart of the old city: Piazza San Carlo, Piazza Castello, Via Roma. And it was laid out by region. You could walk from Piedmont to Sardinia in twenty steps. Turn a corner, and you were in Calabria. That’s where I stopped. I bought an onion in agrodolce. Sweet, sour, and stubborn. It’s in my kitchen now and I use it with meat. But what the heck is Slow Food? In 1986, a journalist from Bra named Carlo Petrini heard that a McDonald’s was opening at the Spanish Steps in Rome. He organized a protest. Out of that protest grew a movement with a strange name and a simple idea: food should be good, clean, and fair. Slow Food. Forty years old this year. Present in more than 160 countries. Carlin, as everyone called him, died this May at 76, in his home in Bra. He had always wanted this edition in the streets. So the city gave it to him. And it wasn’t only Italy. I walked past the Americas. Past Asia. Producers from the other side of the planet, standing next to a Calabrian onion (cipolla) as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Because it is. Farm to fork sounds like a slogan on a menu. In Italy, it’s a chain of people. Someone kept those seeds. Someone grew that cipolla. Someone decided the recipe was worth a jar. Break one link and the onion disappears. Not from the market. From memory. Petrini liked to say that whoever sows utopia harvests reality. I think about that every time I open a door for someone in Italy. The producer, the village, the dialect, the onion. I don’t hand over a product. I hand over the chain. That’s what belonging in Italy tastes like. Sweet and sour. Never fast. Un abbraccio, P.S. What’s one food you’d cross a city for? Hit reply and tell me. |
Fabiana Stringa
I don’t design trips. I design transformations, for people who want to stop being tourists in Italy and start belonging there. Language, culture, identity, woven into one.
Look closely at yin and yang. Black and white, curled around each other. Most people stop there. But there’s a detail that changes everything: a small white dot inside the black half. A small black dot inside the white. Each one carries a trace of the other. Always. I call what I do Italian Taoism. I was born in Genoa, on the same Ligurian coast as Portofino and Cinque Terre. Then I spent a decade across three continents. None of those places erased Genoa. Genoa didn’t erase them either. They...
The other day I was waiting at a red light in Turin. Impatient. Counting the seconds. And I remembered something I’d read about The Italian Job. Not the 2003 remake. The original, 1969. Michael Caine, three Mini Coopers, and a gold heist in the middle of Turin. The screenwriter, Troy Kennedy Martin, moved the story here for one reason. At the time, Turin had one of the most advanced computerized traffic systems in Europe. Traffic lights run by a computer. In 1969, that sounded like science...
Late 1980s. A young Italian at university, Francesco Cirillo, can’t focus. He sits down with his books, and every few minutes his mind wanders off. So he grabs a kitchen timer. Shaped like a tomato. Un pomodoro. He sets it and makes himself one promise: until it rings, I do only this. Twenty-five minutes of attention. A short break. Repeat. After four rounds, a longer break. The Pomodoro Technique. It works because it doesn’t ask for willpower. It asks for a small, honest container. Your...