Italian cooking has been added to Unesco’s list of “intangible” world heritage after a campaign by Giorgia Meloni’s government to extol the merits of pizza, salami, risotto, tiramisu and the hundreds of other specialities that make up the country’s cuisine.
Italian cooking now joins a list of global cultural traditions, including Albanian folk singing and Portuguese boat building, that is compiled alongside Unesco’s traditional listing of endangered castles and monuments.
Meloni, the Italian prime minister, said the recognition “honours who we are and our identity”. She added: “For Italians our cooking is not just food or a collection of recipes. It is much more: it is culture, tradition, work and wealth.”
L’Isola della pizza, next to the Vatican, was frequented by the Pope before his elevation
LAURA LEZZA/GETTY IMAGES
Giorgia Meloni at the 2023 Artigiano in Fiera artisan fair in Milan
PIER MARCO TACCA/GETTY IMAGES
The listing was announced at a Unesco meeting in Delhi, where other nominees included Swiss yodelling, Bangladeshi sari making and Chilean family circuses.
Individual foods like the French baguette and Neapolitan pizza have previously been listed, as has the French tradition of gathering for good meals. But Italian campaigners said it was the first time a country’s entire cuisine had been honoured.
• Czechs seek Unesco status for their pub culture
Italian cuisine stretches from wurstel sausages in German-speaking areas in the north of the country to rich risottos to the French-influenced baba dessert in Naples to Sicilian ricotta-stuffed cannoli, making it hard to define.
But Francesco Lollobrigida, Italy’s agriculture minister, made a virtue of the diversity. “Italian cuisine is like a puzzle: each of us holds a piece of it, a unique way of interpreting cooking, their own recipe, their own dish,” he wrote in Italy’s Unesco campaign brochure.
“It is the combination of these pieces — none the same as the others — that forms the authentic image of our gastronomic identity,” he added.
Traditional orecchiette pasta being prepared in the old town in Bari
PIERO CRUCIATTI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Meloni, who has made Italian food a cornerstone of her brand of national identity politics, said: “Today we celebrate a victory for Italy: the victory of an extraordinary nation which has no rivals and can amaze the world when it believes in itself and understands what it is capable of.”
• 16 of the best Italian cities for food
To celebrate, the Colosseum in Rome was due to be lit up on Wednesday afternoon.
Italy’s campaign team claimed 19 per cent of all food served in restaurants around the world was Italian, adding that Unesco recognition would boost tourism to Italy by 6 to 8 per cent in the coming years, meaning about 18 million extra visitors in the next two years.
Dining and Cooking