Even more than a person, Artusi is a cookbook, indeed, the cookery book par excellence, the one at the basis of modern Italian cuisine. With fifteen editions in twenty years, from 1891 to 1911, compiled and revised directly by the author, the book has been re-edited, copied, translated (till now in seven languages -English, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, German, French, Polish) right up to the present day, so becoming the ambassador of Italian cuisine in the world.
The collection of recipes is also a political project, as Pellegrino Artusi aimed to give a contribution to the making of Italy. He thought that sharing the national gastronomic habits and a common language – as “concrete” as the one spoken in the kitchen, when it is necessary to name ingredients and practices- could be an important element in the project of cultural unification then ongoing.
Moreover, the “practical manual” forged an immediate contact between the author and his readers, who started writing him to express opinions and doubts, to ask for and give advices and to suggest new recipes. The book become a sort of inter-active text, a collective work enriched in the course of twenty years of revision with further 315 recipes over the 475 of the first edition.

The exhibit “Pellegrino Artusi & the Culinary Unification of Italy” illustrates Pellegrino Artusi’s life, the up-to-dateness of his work and the project the city of Forlimpopoli -his native land and his testamentary heir to his own will- is developing about home cooking.
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