Well not in Italian actually, my grammar is no where near up to it!
In October 2004 the doors of the University of Gastronomic Sciences (UNISG) in Piedmont, Northern Italy opened for its first academic year and I was one of the first intrepid gastronomes to step through.
The only British student among a collection of equally excited yet wary international foodies of all ages (19 to 42) and backgrounds, I was to embark upon studying for a degree that very few had heard of let alone knew what it involved.
If like me, you had seen a copy of the very first prospectus from UNISG then you would be aware of the dream it would create in the mind of a knowledge hungry, passionate follower of all things snail-paced and food-related.
The University site was a historical yet stylishly modernised red brick castle glowing in the late summer Italian sun, surrounded by the heaving vines of the Roero and the Langhe. The teachers included international names such as Vandana Shiva, Alice Waters and Hugh Johnson, with the subject matter stretching through the hard and social sciences of food and drink.
Then there was the promise of study trips - “stages” as they are called - to visit the many food producers of Italy plus the rich and varied regions of a country that can easily adopt an air of smugness in discussions about gastronomic national pride. But not only are the stages in and around beautiful Italy, in each of the three years of study a lucky UNISG student would get to visit and learn about the produce and food cultures of if not one, then two other countries ranging from France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Spain, the USA… So my mind had already drifted away. Where would I get to go? Who would I meet? What would I learn? The opportunities were opening up to me and I hadn’t even started the application process.
The back page of the prospectus jerked me out of my idyll; 60 students from all over the world, a degree studying at an Italian university when I spoke no Italian, and a yearly fee that equalled my annual earnings. But a friend told me that if I didn’t even enquire about it then I would stand zero chance rather than maybe one percent chance, so I did.
And that is how I got to be there when Carlo Petrini welcomed the first, now 71 International students, in his Piedmontese Italian speech to the Pollenzo Campus and to what for me was nine months of the most exhilarating, confusing, exciting, frustrating and memorable learning curve I have ever had the pleasure to assail.
To be continued...
Elizabeth Merryweather