Carlin Petrini: 'Food is politics. The Langhe model winning in the world

In that strange mixture that is the small life of individuals and the great currents of History, Petrini has managed to generate something new - an option to escape from industrial and manufacturing modernity through the colour of wines and the aroma of food - starting precisely from a political experience. "I was a member of the Communist Party. I chose to approach the 'Manifesto' group. And then I joined the Party of Proletarian Unity: in Bra, in the mid-1970s, the Pdup reached 15 per cent'.

For a living he is a household products salesman. His immersion in politics is deep, but it is not - as for many of his peers at the time - exciting but blind, liberating in appearance but in substance hierarchical and totalising. Two trips to France show him the Langhe through a different lens. Not only the lands of poverty, but also the lands of potential (in income and everyday life) and real (in symbols and culture) wealth. Petrini weaves the web of the Amici del Barolo, Arcigola and then Slow Food. And he built a minimal infrastructure based on books and communities of people with the bookstore La Torre in Alba, with the Premiata Libreria Marconi in Bra and with the Spaccio di Unità Popolare, run by pensioners and volunteers, when there were no supermarkets yet.

"The bookshops still exist, from the very beginning I understood that they had to stand economically. I have always built parallel and complementary realities, based on the principle of economic sharing: if one went wrong, the others would come to its aid,' he says with great concreteness, recalling two cardinal principles - sustainability and mutuality - of the Italia of the territories in which the spirits of Giuseppe Mazzini, Luigi Einaudi and, in the end, Giuseppe Di Vittorio coexist.

Rice and cabbage agnolotti were served on the table: 'It was the dish of the poor Langhe. We didn't have the meat to fill them. So we stuffed them with rice and cabbage. They are delicious. Taste them. Feel how light they are,' Petrini explains with the enthusiasm of someone who has helped transform the abstract meanings of things and the concrete balances of reality. A salad of fresh tomatoes arrives on the table. Petrini continues: 'The Langhe model is the model of territories, where each component tries to dialogue with the others. The food and wine producers. The cultural organisers. The small businesses. The administrators. The voluntary work and the Third Sector. Italia is full of under-exploited riches. I am thinking of a marvellous place that is still compressed in all its potential such as Sicily, where there are places that take one's breath away, sublime culinary traditions, great autochthonous wine cellars dating back to the 19th century, and investments by wineries that have arrived from the Continent. Where, however, the mechanism capable of transforming society and the economy, widespread culture and people's identity has not yet been activated.

And I think, on the contrary, of parts of the country that have taken these steps forward, such as Valpolicella, which has centred its new prosperity on an excellence such as Amarone'. Carlin Petrini holds three dimensions together: an economic and cultural movement such as Slow Food, a way out for the left, which has liquefied in its twentieth-century Fordist and vertical party dimension, and an elastic and efficient mentality: 'I have always worked to keep affective intelligence and austere anarchy together. Nothing is worse than monolithism and ideology. In politics, in organisations, in the economy.

When, here in the Langhe, the religious war was fought in the 1990s over whether or not wine should be put in wooden barrels, I took a secular point of view. Diversity is richness. Today there are orthodox winemakers who continue to produce great Barolo. And winemakers who, having learned to use the barrique wisely and skilfully, make equally important wines'.

Lisetta Burlotto brings a wine peach for dessert. And, at Petrini's invitation, she opens a 2016 Barolo Massara, the old vineyard formerly belonging to the House of Savoy. Petrini is not worried. But he knows that everything he has generated over time will have to survive him: 'The charismatic founder has to step aside. I have tried to do so. I left the presidency of Slow Food Italia in 2006. Now the president is Barbara Nappini. I did the same with Slow Food International in 2022. Now the president is Edward Mukiibi, a Ugandan. I will still be president, at least until 2026, of the University of Pollenzo. But I know that, here too, governance will be needed that can prevent the charisma of the aged founder from damaging the organisation, as often happens in civil and ecclesial organisations, with a feigned cession of power, with a psychological dependence on the founder, with the latter's inability to call himself out of day-to-day operations and new strategies'.

Another half glass of Barolo, with pieces of hazelnut cake. And so, while he explains to you the centrality of the experience of the seventy-three 'Laudato si' Communities that he has set up all over the world together with Bishop Domenico Pompili in the wake of Pope Bergoglio's encyclical, you understand that Carlo Petrini from Bra - known as Carlin Petrini - is a kind of secular and non-violent Fra Dolcino from Novara, instinctive and pragmatic, both inside and outside the world, not at all destined to be burnt at the stake by his restlessness but rather capable of taking old things that are worth little to others and transforming them into new and precious things for everyone.