There are many ways to combine food and culture, above all in Italy!
The gourmet could even say that food and cooking is, in itself, culture and we absolutely agree with them, but today we are not talking about it in this sense.
Instead, we would like to talk to you about a “space” or “architecture” combination: in the historical heart of Bologna, halfway between Maggiore Square and the Two Towers, the Ambasciatori has recently been restored (December 2008), a meeting point promoted by librerie.coop, which is the Coop Adriatica bookshop chain and Eataly, a wine-and-food market where you can buy, eat and study high quality food and drinks.

We have visited it and the first thing that has impressed us is exactly the architectural structure, that develops on three floors, in total 1,200 square metres.
This building dates back to the second half of the nineteenth century and was used as a covered market; later on it was transformed into a cinema (precisely called “Ambasciatori”). However this area has Roman origins, with medieval stratifications among which the front of St Matteo degli Accarisi Church still survives inside the building.

So the renovation of the building has considered its history and the result is a delightful meeting of present and past.
In the bookshop you can find 42.000 titles, from fiction to the books about leisure time, but also a piece of the Bolognese culture: an area where a small part of the Palmaverde volumes by Roberto Roversi is available for sale, the historical antiquarian bookshop situated in via dei Poeti.
There are also two areas dedicated to cultural meetings, presentations of new books, entertainment for children.

And what about the food aspect?
Eataly, supported by the advice of Slow Food, offers the best handcrafted products (for example: the pasta from Gragnano, the different kinds of cheese from Bra, the salami from Soragna), directly from the producer to the consumer, with absolutely affordable prices. As it is declared in the official web site, “The goal of Eataly is to increase the percentage of those who feed with awareness by choosing first- rate products and by paying a particular attention to the place of origin and the processing of the row materials”.

We must say that we like this goal, obviously, and we have also appreciated the possibility to eat in a “good, clean and right” way (just to quote the Slow Food slogan), choosing among a coffee on the ground floor, a trattoria and a gastronomy on the first floor and a pub/wine house on the second floor.
In conclusion, we think that this sodality between (good) food and culture represents an interesting novelty and an incentive to feed rightly … our body and our mind!

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 2:28 pm and is filed under italian cooking, italian culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.