What we do know is that Italian food culture emerged through difference: local products, practices and cuisines became part of a wider cultural language because regional diversity came to be acknowledged as a defining feature of a shared cultural space (Montanari, 2010). Food therefore became a way of expressing territory, memory and belonging, while connecting remarkably different places through a common cultural framework.

Sobremesa begins its Italian exploration in the island of Sardinia. Among Italy’s twenty regions, Sardinia is the third largest and, because of the extraordinary diversity of ecosystems contained within its maritime borders, has often been described as “un’isola come un continente” — an island like a continent (Contu, 1993).

Considering its unique insular dimension, the ecosystems diversity, layered history embedded in its social fabric and geography, Sardinia offers an ideal ground on which to test and develop the methodology for a future Atlas of Taste, which employs food as a lens through which anthropological relationships between landscape, and contemporary life are observed and interpreted.

Reversocollettivo, the Sobremesa consortium partner with an established documentary and editorial practice, coordinates the project’s Italian research and the development of the Atlas of Taste methodology.