La festa e il cibo. Cultura popolare e cultura di élite

Massimo Montanari

Professore Emerito di Storia medievale

Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna, Accademico Effettivo

Abstract

Food and feast are always linked. This anthropological assumption holds true for all social classes, but something distinguishes popular culture from elite culture: for the ruling classes feast merely represents the emphasis on everyday food luxury and abundance; for the lower classes, on the contrary, it represents a change from everyday reality and is experienced with particular emotional attachment. Therefore, it can be assumed that especially popular culture is sensitive to inventing special dishes to mark the annual calendar of festivities. The hypothesis advanced in this essay is that these dishes were sometimes adopted and “ennobled” by elite cuisine (even if deprived of their festive status) and contributed to the formation of a collective gastronomic heritage. Despite the abysmal distance between the two worlds – even theorized on an ideological level in the Middle Ages – popular culture and elite culture have intersected and hybridized much more than we might think, not only in a top-down direction but also in the opposite direction.

Keywords

© Massimo Montanari, 2025 / Doi: 10.30682/annalesm2503b

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license