27 November: Italian National Food Collection Day

The way food has been depicted in images has always mirrored human cravings. Starting, for example, with the late Renaissance paintings of butchers and meats hanging on hooks, as well as of tables laid out for feasts (which were really allusions to memento mori). Nowadays, there’s always a rich panoply of dishes on our mobile ‘phones. Composition, light, saturation: everything seems cooked to perfection. Yet, food on social media looks about as fresh as the victuals on display at the waxworks.

We’d like to invite you instead to visit the tableaux vivants which you’ll see in shops and supermarkets around Italy today where a lot of sorting out, organising and donating will be going on. Finally, it won’t just be a question of merely looking at the ‘artwork’ but of actually stepping inside it. It’s the National Food Collection Day which, for the past twenty-five years, has been teaching us that solidarity can be just around the corner.

And in order to convey to you the full meaning of this special day, we’ve put the freshest ingredients we could get our hands on into our ricotta basket.

Name Day:
St Virgil