The myth of a pristine, unchanging Italian cuisine has captivated the world, but the truth is far more complex. Italy’s food has now been added to UNESCO’s intangible heritage list, a milestone celebrated across the country with the kind of joy usually reserved for unlikely World Cup runs or political upheavals. It wasn’t that the world needed permission to love pizza; rather, the recognition soothed a national irritant: France and Japan had already received similar accolades in 2010 and 2013, leaving some Italian food aficionados with a subtle ache that others had been validated first.
Yet Italian cuisine’s strength never rested on a single ancient canon. Much of what is treated as long-standing regional tradition was actually assembled in the late 20th century for tourism and domestic reassurance. The real history of Italian food is a turbulent tale of hunger, improvisation, migration, industrialization, and sheer survival. It isn’t a serene lineage of grandmothers, sunlit meals, and recipes carved in stone. It resembles instead a national sprint away from famine—an image Italy chose to sidestep when presenting itself to UNESCO.
To complicate matters (or perhaps to spice them up, depending on your sense of humor), the “Italian” cuisine that conquered the world isn’t the one most Italians carried when they emigrated. Those early migrants didn’t have a ready-made Italian cuisine to bring with them. They left because they were hungry. If daily access to tortellini, lasagna, or bowls of spaghetti had been available, many would not have boarded ships to New York, Buenos Aires, or São Paulo to confront discrimination, exploitation, and at times violence. They arrived with memories and a strong resolve to never eat bad polenta again.
What happened next was extraordinary: they encountered abundance elsewhere—meat, cheese, wheat, and tomatoes in quantities unimaginable back home. Encountering ingredients they’d never seen together, they crafted new dishes. These creations, not ancient recipes, later returned to Italy as “tradition.” In short: Italian cuisine didn’t migrate; it was invented abroad by people who had finally found something to eat, a reality that sits awkwardly with UNESCO’s preference for millennium-old continuity.
But the decisive transformation occurred not abroad but at home during Italy’s remarkable postwar boom between 1955 and 1965. In that decade, culinary life in Italy underwent a transformation akin to a religious conversion. Refrigerators entered kitchens, supermarkets replaced corner shops, and meat ceased to be a luxury. Families who had once measured cheese in small grams discovered, with a mix of disbelief and guilt, that they could buy it in abundance. What the world interprets as Italy’s enduring culinary self-confidence is, in reality, the afterglow of that moment. Italians did not inherit abundance; they stepped into it, somewhat dazed, as if they had wandered into the wrong cinema and decided to stay.
This context makes Italy’s current wave of culinary sovereignty feel almost surreal. We hear admonitions against “globalist contamination” from politicians who grew up eating industrial Panettone and Kraft slices in school lunches. We’re told Italian food must remain pure, fixed, and inviolable—like purity somehow reflects a past it never truly possessed. Italian cuisine is a champion of adaptation. It has always thrived by borrowing, assimilating, and reinventing. The Darwinian logic is simple: the cuisines that change survive. Yet sovereigntist rhetoric demands a freeze-frame, as if the national menu were a sealed snow globe.
The British have helped shape this narrative too. Britain has cultivated a fond fantasy of Italy: perpetual sunshine, tomatoes tasting like childhood, and families gathered around the table as if auditioning for a commercial. TV personalities like Stanley Tucci have polished this fantasy into a marketable export—an exuberant, bouncy Italian savior of bland British fare. It’s entertaining, sells well, and has little real bearing on Italian history.
This British fantasy intersects with Italy’s own habit of mythmaking. For centuries, Italians endured real hunger—pellagra, famine, malnutrition—foundations of the idea of “tradition.” Because the past was so harsh, modern Italians often built a gleaming golden myth of themselves: a narrative in which the grandmother is a sage, the tomato a sacred relic, and “tradition” a serene, ancient truth rather than a post-1960s reconstruction.
So what did Italy actually submit to UNESCO—the real story forged by hunger, migration, innovation, and sudden prosperity, or a glossy brochure version designed to charm tourists? Or perhaps the sanitized phrasing of a relationship with food, described in airport-security-brochure language? A heritage not of recipes but of feelings—vague, flattering, and not fully verifiable.
The first version would deserve recognition. The second would be a caricature. The third turns heritage into national therapy.
Italy did not need UNESCO to feel important. It needed to shed the insecurity that a cuisine is valuable only when validated by an external judge. Instead, the country reached for the certificate, not the substance. In doing so, it preserved a living cuisine, while continuing to evolve in homes, restaurants, and workplaces.
Here lies the paradox worth noting. The world already adores Italian food, but often cherishes a version shaped by television, tourism, and decades of gentle mythmaking. Italians rarely reject the myth—it is flattering and profitable—but myths are fragile foundations for an UNESCO bid. In the end, what Italy submitted was not a complete history but a postcard: beautifully composed, carefully lit, designed to please.
And like all postcards, it risks being forgotten in a drawer, while the true story of Italian cuisine—restless, inventive, and gloriously impure—continues to unfold elsewhere.
Alberto Grandi is the author of La Cucina Italiana Non Esiste and a professor of food history at the University of Parma.
