Carlo Petrini obituary

Italian activist, author and pioneer of the Slow Food movement

On 20 April 1986, Carlo Petrini was part of a group who cooked and distributed spaghetti to passers-by in Piazza di Spagna in Rome. The huge pot of pasta was their response to the opening, the previous month, of the biggest McDonald’s in the world just metres from where they stood. For Petrini and fellow members of Arcigola, a group dedicated to the pleasures of food and shared political ideals, the opening of McDonald’s in the centre of Rome represented an attack on Italian culinary identity, local biodiversity and the natural rhythms of life: the spaghetti was a declaration of resistance.

A few months laters, during a meeting over dinner at Osteria dell’Unione in Treiso, southern Piedmont, the group came up with the idea of ​​trying to stem the fast food invasion, whose single value was profit. The essayist Folco Portinari, then head of the Rai TV company, wrote the text, while Petrini gathered signatures, and on 3 November 1987, a manifesto was published on the front page of Gambero Rosso, a supplement of the communist newspaper Il Manifesto.