Between the late 19th and early 20 centuries, over 14 million Italians decided to leave Italy in search of fortune: around 2.5 million of them moved to France, Switzerland, Germany and Belgium in the last quarter of the 19th century, often working in mines and construction companies. During the same period, another 2.5 million Italians headed for the Americas, and many of them joined the ranks of the legendary 100,000 Klondike gold prospectors. The gold soon ran out and not many became rich, but the dream – which had, in the meantime, become a legend – did not fade, and the meta-phorical search for the gold vein that would allow them to turn their lives around continued.
Today, around 600,000 catering businesses worldwide claim to be Italian: of these (data from Il Sole 24 Ore, 2024), around 33% are concentrated in EU coun-tries, 23% across Asia and Oceania, almost 30% in North America, 13% in Latin America and the remaining 10% across Africa, the Middle East and non-EU Europe. It is in this light that we can say the frantic search for gold in the late 19th century has transformed into a more complex yet equally enriching construction of identity, making Italy a treasure trove of excellence, sought after and loved in every corner of the world.

As if in an endless loop, however, it is now Italy itself that attracts cultures from other parts of the world into the catering sector: according to the Cgia di Mes-tre, by 2025 one in four new hires in our country will be foreign workers, and the catering sector has recorded 231,380 new recruits, including chefs, assistant chefs and dishwashers, mainly from Romania, Albania, Ukraine, Morocco, Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India. These are the reasons that drive us, in a world that glorifies war, to change our vocabulary to write and build peace, toning down the language, shortening articles, giving equal prominence to English and Italian on every page, whilst remaining, in essence, what we have always been: the Italian magazine of pizza and pasta for the ‘people of pizza and pasta’ across the globe. We do this to tell our readers here, in Italy and across the globe, that this is – and will remain – our true PEPITA.

 

Nio