Carlo Petrini: from the left wing of the 1970s to the cultural and economic renaissance of the Langhe

The second thing that Carlin Petrini did was, precisely, to participate in the transmutation of the Langhe from a poor and sad place to a rich and - as transient human affairs can be - happy place.

The Langhe was made by a handful of people. By the brotherhood of Nebbiolo, who made Barolo and Barbaresco an international phenomenon: Mascarello, Rinaldi, Conterno, Cappellano, Gaja. From winemakers with an inexhaustible commercial aptitude: Ceretto and Gaja again. From Signor Michele, of Ferrero in Alba. And from Carlin Petrini. Who, to quote Fenoglio's Three Marenghi, chose not to sell himself for a pittance, but instead, with love and dedication, understood how poetic, good and a source of work and profit was that which, from his hills and his stables, from his first plain and his kitchens, originated for centuries, in poverty, on his land.

This second thing done by Carlin Petrini - the invention together with others from the Langhe - had a double effect, in fact perfectly closing the circle.

The first effect is participation in a project to quickly move a land from anonymity to stardom and from poverty to prosperity.

 The second is the landing of that energy of Sixty-eight and Seventy-seven Italy to a situation that is dignified and unambiguous, constructive and unproductive, clear and unruffled, not selfish but for many, if not for all.

At bottom, the Slow Food initiative contains the communitarian and individualistic heresy that, from extreme experiences of medieval Christianity, arrived in crystal-clear form at the Christian personalism of Maritain and Mounier, and in peaceful and violent form at the same time at Third Worldism, with the myth transfigured into iconoclasm by Che Guevara and in the harsh meekness of Monsignor Hélder Pessoa Câmara.

But let us not digress. Carlin Petrini, solid and concrete, would not have appreciated it. His ability was to start from the agnolotti stuffed only with vegetables - typical of when people were so poor that they could not even afford meat stuffing - to build a small idea of a different world - critical of multinationals, one would have once said in today's stale language - and in natural connection with thousands of other communities around the world.

From South America to Africa. With the peasant patience of someone who organises and coordinates, makes mistakes and angers friends, has a taste for provocation and the psychological and political need to have someone to argue with and feel distant from, he works and searches for new paths: Slow Food, Terra Madre and the University of Pollenzo, a unicum that not even the French had ever thought of before.

That's how it was, Carlin. A political, community and international writer like Pier Vittorio Tondelli wrote in his book as desperate as life and death, 'Altri Libertini': 'In my land, only what I am will help me live'.

After all, now that you are gone, we can say: 'In our land, only what we are will help us to live'.

This too is a piece of what - good and warm, clean and well-lit - has left us, in the chaos of lives and history, Carlin Petrini, born by chance and died by choice in Bra, province of Cuneo.