History simmered on my stove that morning.
I was in my small flat in Tirana, the window fogged from boiling pasta water, the air thick with the smell of garlic and tomatoes, when my phone lit up: “La cucina italiana è ufficialmente Patrimonio culturale immateriale dell’umanità UNESCO.” For a second, the sound of the saucepan bubbling and the hum of traffic outside went quiet in my head. It felt like someone had just hung a gold medal around the neck of every grandmother, every waiter, every farmer, every tired home cook who ever said, “Mangia, che si raffredda.”
I set down the wooden spoon, wiped my oily fingers on a too-small kitchen towel, and just stared at the screen.
A date that smells like ragù and fresh bread
Wednesday, 10 December 2025. You know those dates that stick in your mind not because of a big speech, but because of a smell? This one, for me, will always smell like gently burnt garlic and slightly over-salted pasta, because I was distracted by the news. That was the day UNESCO officially added the entire Italian gastronomic system to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage—the first time in the world that a whole national cuisine, not just a single dish, made it in.
This recognition doesn’t just applaud pizza, Parmigiano, or some fancy Michelin-star tasting menu. It recognises the full culture around food in Italy: the way we choose ingredients, the link to our land and local supply chains, the daily rituals of cooking and eating together, the songs of markets at dawn, and the endless small arguments about “how it’s done”. The article that broke the news stressed that what matters is not only recipes, but an entire living system made of tradition, sharing, and creativity.
To simplify the official language a bit: UNESCO basically said that in Italy, food is not just fuel—it’s a social ritual, a way of passing stories, skills, and values from one generation to the next. The taste is just the surface; underneath, there’s the sound of plates being set on the table, the rough feel of a wooden spoon worn down by years of stirring, the warm weight of a hand on your shoulder as someone says, “Assaggia questo.”
That’s a big statement. And it deserves more than patriotic slogans.
Three ideas that almost stole my joy
The moment the news spread, the internet filled with tricolour gifs, ecstatic headlines, and lots of “Finally! We deserved it!” shouted over the hiss of espresso machines in bars. Somewhere between my pride and my smile, three nagging ideas tried to creep in, like the smell of something slightly burnt from the oven. I want to bring them up honestly, because facing them is exactly what makes this recognition worth celebrating even more.
The first idea was: “Isn’t this just nostalgia with a fancy stamp?” As if UNESCO were only rewarding an old photograph of Italian life that barely exists anymore. The second: “Italian cuisine had already won the world—what difference does this make?” You can hear that in the click of cutlery in any tourist restaurant packed with people ordering carbonara in ten languages. The third: “Will this turn our food into a museum piece, frozen and untouchable, like plastic fruit in a window?”
So here’s what I want to do with you: question those three ideas, then gently flip them.
Not with theory alone, but with a story, a date, and the way a kitchen sounds when history quietly changes.
What UNESCO actually said about us
Let’s start from the facts, quickly, before we go back to the smells and memories. In 2023, Italy presented its candidacy to UNESCO, asking not just for a dish but for the entire national gastronomic system to be recognised as Intangible Cultural Heritage. After a long evaluation, in 2025 the answer came: yes.
UNESCO acknowledged that in Italy, cooking and sharing meals form a social ritual deeply rooted in families and communities. Think of Sunday lunches where the radio murmurs football scores, the clink of plates competes with kids shouting, and the house fills with steam from boiling pots. The article explains that meals in Italy are moments that strengthen ties, pass down recipes, and carry values across generations.
The recognition also embraces our connection with the land—agricultural traditions, local supply chains, and attention to ingredients. Regions like Campania, Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Sicily, and Piedmont are highlighted not only for iconic dishes such as Neapolitan pizza, Parmigiano Reggiano, or cured meats, but for how they maintain and pass on an entire cultural system built around food. Each area forms a tiny tile in a huge mosaic of flavours, smells, dialects, and textures that together make Italy a reference point for food worldwide.
Government voices called this a tribute to national identity, creativity, and tradition. They underlined that Italian cuisine, as recognised by UNESCO, supports social inclusion, intergenerational education, and sharing, while also offering new economic and tourism opportunities and protecting authentic Made in Italy products. You can almost hear the confident echo of those words bouncing off formal meeting room walls that smell of coffee and printed paper.
Now let’s walk out of those rooms and back into a noisy kitchen.
A galaxy of kitchens (simplified for us non-physicists)
I’m an astronomer and physicist by training, so my head automatically turns things into galaxies. Let me put it in very plain language—and yes, I’m intentionally simplifying a quite complex scientific idea so it feels friendly and clear.
Think of Italian cuisine as a glowing galaxy seen from far away. To an outside observer, it might look like one bright swirl: “Italian food”. But once you zoom in, you find millions of stars. Each star is a home kitchen, a trattoria, a mountain refuge, a bakery, a field of tomatoes in the sun, a cheese ageing in a cool cellar that smells of humidity and hay.
On 10 December 2025, UNESCO basically turned the telescope toward that galaxy and said: “We see you. As a whole. Not just your brightest stars.” It didn’t pick only pizza, or only Parmigiano, or only some fancy dish; it recognised the full movement of that galaxy—its habits, rhythms, and the invisible threads that pull everything together.
The gravity holding that galaxy together isn’t the UNESCO stamp; it’s our daily gestures. It’s the scrape of a knife on a cutting board at 7 p.m., the dull thud of potatoes on a counter, the soft “Mamma, quanto manca?” It’s farmers getting up before sunrise to harvest, hands in the wet soil that smells of earth and dew. It’s the old neighbour knocking on the door with still-warm ciambella, its sugar crust slightly sticky to the touch.
So no, this isn’t just nostalgia framed on a wall. This is an international way of saying: “What you’ve always done, without cameras, has value for all of us.”
My grandmother’s kitchen, upgraded to world heritage
When I read that UNESCO sees Italian cooking and eating as a ritual that passes down recipes and values, my mind teleported straight to my grandmother’s kitchen in Rimini. The tiles were always a bit too cold under the wheels of my chair, the table was cluttered with flour, eggs, and that greyish metal grinder that squeaked every time we turned it. The air was thick with the smell of ragù, tomato and meat slowly melting together for hours, with that slightly sweet note that only appears when you’ve been patient.
She didn’t know about UNESCO, of course. She probably wouldn’t have cared. For her, it was simple: you cook, you call people to the table, you refill plates until no one can move, you send them home with leftovers in plastic tubs that still smell faintly of last week’s soup. But looking back now, I realise that every one of those Sundays was a world heritage class long before the world showed up.
I learned proportions not from books, but from how the wooden spoon felt when the sauce thickened. I learned respect for ingredients from the way she stroked a tomato before cutting it, as if greeting an old friend. I learned that food is never just food from the sound of the front door—how it opened wider when someone unexpected came by at lunchtime.
UNESCO’s wording about intergenerational transmission, about community bonds around the table, is just a formal way of describing what my grandmother did, what your uncle does, what countless homes across Italy (and beyond) already practice without thinking about it. That’s what makes this recognition so sweet: it shines a gentle light on ordinary magic.
Is this only for Italy? Spoiler: absolutely not
There’s a tempting thought floating around: “This is our victory. Italian excellence. A medal pinned on our apron.” You can hear that tone in some political comments celebrating a tribute to national identity and Italian creativity. And sure, I won’t lie—it feels good. There’s a warm, slightly smug glow when you taste your favourite dish and think, “Hey, this is UNESCO-approved now.”
But if you listen a bit more closely, this win is bigger than our borders. UNESCO didn’t say, “Italian food is the only good food.” It said something much more interesting: a whole food culture, taken seriously from soil to table, can be considered world heritage. That opens the door—wide—to other countries, other traditions, other kitchens that smell completely different but carry the same human weight of memory and care.
So this isn’t a trophy to lock in a glass case. It’s more like the first candle lit on a long table. The flame flickers, warming your fingers if you stretch them out above it. And in that gentle light, you can already see where other candles might stand: in the sizzling streets of Mexico City, in the quiet tea rooms of Japan, in the smoky corners of Ethiopian coffee ceremonies.
Celebrating ours, if done right, means we’re also saying: “Your daily food culture matters too. The world is finally ready to listen.”
Regions, accents, and the joy of not agreeing
One thing I love about the article is how it stresses the diversity of Italian regional cuisines and the special role of areas like Campania, Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Sicily, and Piedmont. Each region brings its own colours and scents: the sea breeze over a Neapolitan pizzeria, the warm, nutty smell of Parmigiano wheels resting in cool warehouses in Emilia, the herb-infused air of a Tuscan hillside grill, Sicilian markets screaming with citrus and fried arancini, Piedmontese cellars heavy with truffle and Barolo. None of these cancels the others; together they form a crazy, delicious patchwork.
Growing up in Rimini, I already felt this clash of tastes just driving a couple of hours. You cross one valley, and suddenly the flatbread on the table changes name, texture, and thickness. What we call piadina has a different bite in another town; your teeth sink into it in a new way, and the filling drips down your wrist. You order ragù and get a sauce that feels like a cousin of the one you know, with a different rhythm of meat, tomato, and time.
Now imagine extending that across the whole country, multiplied by centuries, festivals, economic changes, and family quarrels about what goes in a proper broth. The UNESCO recognition doesn’t flatten this colourful map into a single postcard image; it respects that what makes Italian cuisine strong is precisely this internal argument, this joyful refusal to agree on “one right way”.
The future, I hope, will keep sounding like those arguments—raised voices over clattering plates and the squeak of chairs—because that’s the sign of a culture still very much alive.
A dinner in Tirana that proved the point
Let me jump back to Tirana, to my rented flat with thin walls that let in the constant hum of scooters and distant dogs barking. A few days after the announcement, I hosted friends for dinner to “celebrate the UNESCO thing”, as one of them called it. The kitchen is tiny, the counter is scratched, the stove isn’t exactly state-of-the-art, but that night it felt like a little embassy of Italian culture, smells and all.
On the table: cheap but decent Albanian wine that tasted of red berries and a hint of dust, a big pot of pasta, a sauce that started very Italian and then took a tour of half the world, some grilled vegetables, and bread still slightly warm from the bakery downstairs. The air filled with tomato, garlic, and the smoky scent of slightly charred peppers. Glasses clinked, someone’s playlist played old Italian hits mixed with Balkan pop, and the neighbour’s TV added a soft background noise of some dramatic soap opera.
Among us were two Albanians, me, a Greek friend, a Kosovar student, and a guy from Morocco who works in a local restaurant. I started the sauce the way my grandmother would approve: onions, garlic, olive oil, then passata, slow fire, basil. The Moroccan friend, with fingers still carrying the smell of cumin and coriander from his own kitchen, asked if he could “adjust” it a bit.
He added a light touch of his own spice mix, just enough to deepen the aroma without erasing the original profile. The smell changed slowly, becoming rounder, almost smoky. When we served the pasta, the first forkful tasted like home and newness at the same time—familiar texture, familiar basic notes, but with a warm echo that my childhood Sundays never had. Someone laughed and said, “This must violate five Italian laws,” while still reaching for a second serving.
In that moment, the UNESCO recognition made perfect sense. Not as a strict recipe pinned on the world’s noticeboard, but as a shared starting point, a base sauce that can travel, blend, and still carry its core story.
Why this isn’t just nostalgia marketing
So let’s go back to that first nagging idea: “Is this just nostalgia with a fancy logo?” I don’t buy it. Yes, of course, there will be brands slapping “UNESCO heritage” next to their products, packaging that smells more of ink than of real tomatoes. That’s part of the world we live in.
But the heart of this recognition is not a marketing slogan. It’s an official way of acknowledging what people have been doing for generations: turning simple ingredients into moments of connection. You can’t fake the sound of three generations squeezed around a too-small table, or the way someone absent is remembered by redoing “their” dish and quietly checking if the smell matches the memory.
Nostalgia alone freezes things. This recognition, instead, names something alive. The proof is in kitchens like mine in Tirana or yours wherever you are, where official lists don’t show up—but pots still boil, and recipes are still whispered over sizzling pans. The past is present every time someone says “Come, sit, eat,” and means it.
That’s not nostalgia. That’s continuity.
The “We’d already won” myth
What about the second idea: that Italian cuisine had already conquered the world, so nothing really changes? Yes, Italian food is everywhere. You can walk into a small town on another continent and smell pizza in the air, hear the hiss of espresso machines, see dried pasta lined up in supermarket aisles. TasteAtlas even ranked Italian cuisine as the best in the world before UNESCO said anything.
But there’s a big difference between popularity and recognition of depth. Before this decision, much of the global idea of “Italian food” stopped at pizza, pasta, and espresso. People saw the bright stars of the galaxy but not the faint ones: the farmers, artisans, home cooks, and the whole social ritual surrounding meals.
By recognising the “entire gastronomic system”, UNESCO widened the frame. It’s no longer just “we like your dishes”; it’s “we see how your society lives around food, from field to family table, and we think that way of living is important for humanity.” That sentence, when you breathe it in slowly, feels bigger than any restaurant review.
So yes, Italian cuisine had already won many hearts and stomachs. But this time, what’s being celebrated is the slow, quiet, daily choreography behind the plate. And that, for me, changes everything.
Museum piece or living recipe?
The third worry was about turning food into a museum object. When something becomes “heritage”, there’s the fear that it gets frozen: you’re not allowed to touch it, change it, or experiment. Every deviation feels like sacrilege. We already see sparks of that when online wars erupt over cream in carbonara or pineapple on pizza, the comments section smelling faintly of burnt ego.
Yet if you read the recognition carefully, what UNESCO honours is a living, evolving practice: the tradition of cooking and eating together, the passing on of knowledge in families and communities, the relationship with local territories and supply chains. That implies movement, change, adaptation. Static things don’t need supply chains; living cultures do.
Traditional Italian cuisine is full of past “innovations” that used to be shocking. Tomatoes themselves, now the smell of home, were once exotic arrivals. Coffee, now the heartbeat sound of mornings in every bar, was foreign. The first time someone put cocoa in a savoury dish, I’m sure a relative frowned over a steaming pot.
The recognition doesn’t build glass walls around our recipes. It builds a spotlight around the way we cook, share, and care—today, not only yesterday. The future of this heritage will sound like metal ladles scraping pots in school canteens, like new immigrants in Italy cooking lasagne with spices their grandparents used far away, like kids inventing dishes after watching videos. That’s not a museum; that’s life.
Identity without a closed door
The Italian Minister Francesco Lollobrigida and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni framed the recognition as a tribute to national identity, creativity, and tradition. I know how loaded the word “identity” can be. Sometimes it smells comforting, like clean sheets and your favourite dish; other times it tastes bitter, like exclusion disguised as pride.
What I find beautiful, though, is that UNESCO’s wording about Italian cuisine highlights inclusion, intergenerational education, and sharing. A cuisine that “favours social inclusion” is, by definition, one that leaves the door ajar, that makes space at the table. The image isn’t of a castle with closed gates, but of a house where the noise of many voices around the table spills out into the street.
Yes, this recognition strengthens the Made in Italy brand and offers new economic and tourism opportunities. I hope those opportunities reach small trattorie that smell of frying oil and fresh parsley, family bakeries where dawn tastes like flour and coffee, markets where plastic crates hit the pavement with a hollow thump as farmers unload their produce. If this title helps protect authentic products and sustain local communities, then “identity” starts to feel less like a slogan and more like a shared responsibility.
For me, real identity is the feeling you get when you walk into a stranger’s kitchen in another country, catch a familiar smell of soffritto, and suddenly feel less alone.
A simplified physics lesson in your plate
Let me sneak in one more small scientific analogy, again cleaned up from heavy jargon on purpose. In physics, when you study complex systems, you often look not only at single objects, but at the patterns connecting them. You can stare at one star, but unless you see how it pulls on others, you miss the real story.
Italian cuisine, as UNESCO recognised it, is exactly that: not single dishes, but the pattern of relationships between fields, markets, homes, and tables. The “force” holding all this together isn’t gravity but something just as invisible and real: care. You can’t see care, but you hear it in the way someone says “Hai mangiato?” as if that question covers half of life’s problems. You taste it in a sauce that took four hours instead of thirty minutes. You feel it in the texture of a hand-made raviolo that’s not perfectly uniform, slightly thicker in one corner, proof that a human thumb was there.
If we protect that pattern—the care, the time, the sharing—then the details can change and evolve without the culture breaking apart. If we lose that pattern, no recipe book will save us.
That’s the part that makes this recognition worth celebrating with lights on, glasses raised, and maybe a little extra dessert.
Where we go from here
So, where does all this leave us, sitting at our different tables, some in Italy, some far away, each with our own smells filling the room? For me, it leaves three simple invitations, as concrete as the weight of a fork in your hand.
The first is to keep cooking together. Not like an Instagram performance, but like a daily act of care. Invite friends, family, neighbours. Let kids stir the pot even if they risk spilling. Let older relatives talk too long about “how it was done back then” while the sauce quietly thickens. Each shared meal is a tiny confirmation of what UNESCO described.
The second is to honour ingredients and those who grow them. When you pick up a tomato, notice its smell, its slight give under your fingers, its colour. When you buy cheese, think of the cold mornings in the barn where it began. Support local producers when you can; their work is the physical backbone of this heritage, the part that smells of soil, hay, sea, and hard labour.
The third is to stay curious and open. Let your Italian recipes travel. Add something from your current home, from your friend’s kitchen, from your partner’s childhood. Keep what matters—time, care, sharing—and let the rest breathe. That way, in 20 or 50 years, our cuisine will not just survive; it will still surprise.
My personal toast
So here I am, Gerd, an Italian from Rimini who moved to Tirana, sitting in a room that smells faintly of yesterday’s coffee and tomato sauce, writing about a decision taken in halls I’ll never enter. I hear the city outside—horns, voices, an ambulance far away—and feel this odd mix of distance and belonging.
When UNESCO wrote that Italian cuisine is a “living cultural heritage” built on tradition, sharing, and creativity, it unknowingly described the story of so many of our lives. My wheelchair next to my grandmother’s stove. Your late-night pasta with friends after a concert. A migrant worker in Italy stirring polenta while thinking in another language. A kid in London learning to roll gnocchi from a YouTube video filmed in Naples.
So tonight, whether you’re holding a slice of pizza on a noisy street, eating leftover pasta in silence, or planning your next attempt at tiramisù, take a second. Smell. Listen. Feel the fork between your fingers. Remember that you’re not just feeding your body; you’re taking part in something the world has officially called “heritage”.
And then do the simplest, most Italian thing you can do with that grand idea.
Share your food. Invite someone. Say, “Assaggia.”
That’s where this story really lives.
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