M F Fontefrancesco
Biographic Data
| ID | 16933 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M F Fontefrancesco |
| GIVEN NAMES | M F |
| FAMILY NAME | Fontefrancesco |
| SIGNATURE | FONTEFRANCESCO M F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Gastronomic Sciences |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3247-6110 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 51 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Unveiling the Youth Worlds and Future
This article explores three applied anthropology interventions conducted in Italy, aiming to understand and value youth experiences in non-formal educational settings. Using a participatory methodological approach, the projects examine young people’s relationships with public space, food culture as an identity element, and psychological challenges in the post-pandemic context. The interventions (“Bang! Immagini da Valenza!”, “Il Cibo a 4 Occhi,” …
Oltre il Verde della Campagna. Beyond the Countryside Green
To Renzo
Making Typicality
This article addresses the concept of “typicality” in community products, proposing a performative interpretation of this category. It ethnographically demonstrates how identifying products as “typical” is a process that involves a community in constructing both the product and its meaning. To illustrate this, this study delves into the case of Torta Mattone from Bressana Bottarone (PV) and its history. It highlights how, over 50 years, this dess…
Risvegli di un paese. Awakenings of a rural community
Throughout Europe, particularly in Italy, the rapid phenomenon of rural marginalization and depletion is one of the most significant social and environmental challenges characterizing contemporary reality. Where, in the second post-war era, about half of the Italian population lived in rural settings, today this percentage has precipitously fallen, leading to an estimated urbanization rate of 70%, concentrated within an area that covers about 30%…
Searching for Germane Questions in the Ethnobiology of Food Scouting
In the past two decades, ethnobiologists have increasingly paid attention to the scouting and documentation of endangered corpora of local food elements and associated traditional knowledge. In this endeavor, food scouting encompasses the methodological tools used for mapping, inventorying, and documenting food and food-related resources. The growing body of research in this field is shedding light on the potentialities of these practices in obta…
Keeping the Knives Sharp
This paper investigates the socioeconomic and cultural transformation in food artisan entrepreneurship due to the complexification of the food sector and ongoing globalisation through a case study conducted among the artisan butchers of Genoa, Italy. The butcher’s trade has enjoyed centrality and social and cultural promotion that made butcher shops key places in the urban foodscape. However, this centrality is challenged by both new consumption …
The kitchen rediscovered
Italy was among the first countries worldwide and the first in Europe to implement a complete lockdown to curb the spread of the coronavirus. This two-month lockdown significantly disrupted daily routines, leading to the reorganization of space, time, and modalities of meals. This article presents a study conducted in Italy during the lockdown, aiming to capture real-time changes in home-based eating practices. The study highlights how food-relat…
A Local Cheese
This research delves into the intricate relationship between objects and communities, focusing on the central question: Can an object, such as cheese, contribute to the development and structure of a community? The paper explores the affective economy of the Formatge of San Lazzaro in the Italian Western Alps, exploring the product’s role as a cultural resource and community builder. Specifically, the article analyzes the connection between produ…
Food Narrations and Teaching Migration
Is the clash of civilizations, or that of racism, the paradigm that best describes the intercultural dynamics that characterize the cultural horizon of young people today? This article addresses this question based on research conducted between 2012 and 2016 in four secondary schools in Piedmont by researchers at the University of Gastronomic Sciences. The research looked at adolescents and dealt with the topic of “knowing the Other” through the …
My Home’s a Prison”
Since early 2020, the anthropological community has investigated the cultural and social impact of the pandemic and the exceptional countermeasures of the Italian government. This paper contributes to the debate by exploring how the lockdown experience is linked to the sense of dwelling and the changed sense of place in one's residence and home. In particular, the processes of signification of urban and rural space and the relationship between th…
Perceptions and Revitalization of Local Ecological Knowledge in Four Schools in Yasin Valley, North Pakistan
Mountains are often recognized as sites of biocultural diversity, and local ecological knowledge (LEK) is an integral part of community life. Rapid cultural standardization and urbanization have threatened biocultural diversity, posing threats to LEK in mountain areas. The current study aimed to gather data on the status of LEK in the Yasin Valley, Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, and discuss options with the local population for revitalizing LEK in f…
Scouting for Food Heritage for Achieving Sustainable Development
Over the last two decades, scholars and organizations across the world have carried out research projects and promoted dissemination tools aimed at promoting food and food-related elements embedded in local and traditional foodways. In this regard, the documentation of food and biocultural heritage has been seen as the starting point of processes directed toward their safeguarding and promotion. Drawing from this premise, the paper presents an or…
Migrant Entrepreneurship and Social Integration
Migration and migrants’ integration are prominent aspects of globalized contemporary society. In this respect, a key question appears of how to foster the full participation of migrants in the host society. This article investigates the role of migrant entrepreneurship as a vector of integration. Based on case-study research conducted among Bangladeshi vendors in Nuovo Mercato Esquilino in Rome, the article highlights the potentialities in terms …
Why the ongoing occupation of Ukraine matters to ethnobiology
Ethnobiology and ethnomedicine investigate the continuously changing complex and inextricable relations among culture, nature, and health. Since the emergence of modern ethnobiology a few decades ago, its essence and mission have been the study of biocultural diversities and the centers of its inquiries have been and are local communities and their co-evolutionary interrelationships between natural environments and social systems. At the core of …
The potatoes of Otro
The article analyzes the trajectory of the reconstitution of the gastronomic heritage among the Italian Walser community. It focuses on the case study of potato production in the Otro Valley, in Alagna Valsesia (VC), and explores how the process of heritagization linked to these products allowed the community to reconstitute a trait of their biocultural diversity lost during the twentieth century. In so doing, it offers details about the gastrono…
Jogging during the Lockdown
Jogging is the most practiced physical activity in the west. This form of light running appears a solution to the health problems caused by the sedentary of contemporary dwelling and affirmed the role of the extensive use of urban space as a key to individual well-being and health. The COVID-19 pandemic and the imposition of lockdowns imposed a new form of kinesthetic morality based on domestic confinement; a morality that is in open contrast to …
Food festivals in Italy
Food festivals are rising in popularity across the world. In particular, in Italy, they are among the main touristic summer events. In the past decade, the country has witnessed the proliferation of these feasts, in particular in rural areas. This article investigates this success exploring the socio-cultural needs that move rural communities to organize the events. Through exploration of the ethnographic case of San Rocco and its Ravioli Festiva…
Just beautiful green herbs
BackgroundThe use of plants in rituals is a little explored corner of biocultural diversity which has developed through time within a complex socio-ecological system. Indeed, rituals are complex interactions between humans and biodiversity shaped by history, culture, and ethnic belonging. Yet, in Western Ukraine, such rituals were forbidden for over 50 years (1939-1991). The current revival of rituals by rural inhabitants is an untapped reservoir…
Food Festivals and Local Development in Italy
The Reterritorialization Device
Raise Your Voice
At a time when Italian society is experiencing a surge of ethnic intolerance and xenophobia, the paper addresses the question: "what role can migrant literature play in creating a multicultural society?" In so doing, the paper continues the debate opened in the 50th issue of this journal concerning the anthropological relevance of migrant literature. It shifts the analysis to Italy and looks at the period of fast demographic, legal, and cultural …
Eating at Work
Workers’ wellbeing at work is a central theme for the development of institutions and enterprises. Within this debate, a central issue relates to the search for the best ways to organize lunch-breaks and food services for employees. In the past, canteens had a crucial role for workers, yet the last twenty years have marked a profound transformation of the European economy, with the effect of diversifying workers’ foodways and their food-related p…
Expanding the reach
Background Initiatives for beekeeping intensification across the tropics can foster production and income, but the changes triggered by the introduction of modern beehives might permeate traditional knowledge and practices in multiple ways, and as such should be investigated and understood. We conducted an ethnobotanical study in the Eastern part of the Mau Forest among Ogiek beekeepers who customarily practice forest beekeeping and who are invol…
Traditional festive food and fragile aspirations of development in Italy
This research draws from memories, and the deep sense of belonging, tradition, and presence that is linked with a dish of Italian regional tradition; agnolotti pasta, one example of what can be considered an Italian ethnic food. It does so in order to challenge an assumption that is widely spread in the public debate and as well as in scholarship, which automatically links the popularization of traditional, ethnic cuisine with a fulgid prospectiv…
Baby pangolins on my plate
The Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine (JEET), throughout its 15 years of existence, has tried to provide a respected outlet for scientific knowledge concerning the inextricable links between human societies and nature, food, and health. Ethnobiology and ethnomedicine-centred research has moved at the (partially artificial and fictitious) interface between nature and culture and has investigated human consumption of wild foods and wild ani…
Baby pangolins on my plate
The Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine (JEET), throughout its 15 years of existence, has tried to provide a respected outlet for scientific knowledge concerning the inextricable links between human societies and nature, food, and health. Ethnobiology and ethnomedicine-centred research has moved at the (partially artificial and fictitious) interface between nature and culture and has investigated human consumption of wild foods and wild ani…
Just beautiful green herbs
BackgroundThe use of plants in rituals is a little explored corner of biocultural diversity which has developed through time within a complex socio-ecological system. Indeed, rituals are complex interactions between humans and biodiversity shaped by history, culture, and ethnic belonging. Yet, in Western Ukraine, such rituals were forbidden for over 50 years (1939-1991). The current revival of rituals by rural inhabitants is an untapped reservoir…
Keeping or changing? Two different cultural adaptation strategies in the domestic use of home country food plant and herbal ingredients among Albanian and Moroccan migrants in Northwestern Italy
BACKGROUND: Ethnobotanical field studies concerning migrant groups are crucial for understanding temporal changes of folk plant knowledge as well as for analyzing adaptation processes. Italy still lacks in-depth studies on migrant food habits that also evaluate the ingredients which newcomers use in their domestic culinary and herbal practices. METHODS: Semi-structured and open in-depth interviews were conducted with 104 first- and second-generat…
Expanding the reach
Background Initiatives for beekeeping intensification across the tropics can foster production and income, but the changes triggered by the introduction of modern beehives might permeate traditional knowledge and practices in multiple ways, and as such should be investigated and understood. We conducted an ethnobotanical study in the Eastern part of the Mau Forest among Ogiek beekeepers who customarily practice forest beekeeping and who are invol…
Traditional festive food and fragile aspirations of development in Italy
This research draws from memories, and the deep sense of belonging, tradition, and presence that is linked with a dish of Italian regional tradition; agnolotti pasta, one example of what can be considered an Italian ethnic food. It does so in order to challenge an assumption that is widely spread in the public debate and as well as in scholarship, which automatically links the popularization of traditional, ethnic cuisine with a fulgid prospectiv…
Why the ongoing occupation of Ukraine matters to ethnobiology
Ethnobiology and ethnomedicine investigate the continuously changing complex and inextricable relations among culture, nature, and health. Since the emergence of modern ethnobiology a few decades ago, its essence and mission have been the study of biocultural diversities and the centers of its inquiries have been and are local communities and their co-evolutionary interrelationships between natural environments and social systems. At the core of …
Risvegli di un paese. Awakenings of a rural community
Throughout Europe, particularly in Italy, the rapid phenomenon of rural marginalization and depletion is one of the most significant social and environmental challenges characterizing contemporary reality. Where, in the second post-war era, about half of the Italian population lived in rural settings, today this percentage has precipitously fallen, leading to an estimated urbanization rate of 70%, concentrated within an area that covers about 30%…
A Local Cheese
This research delves into the intricate relationship between objects and communities, focusing on the central question: Can an object, such as cheese, contribute to the development and structure of a community? The paper explores the affective economy of the Formatge of San Lazzaro in the Italian Western Alps, exploring the product’s role as a cultural resource and community builder. Specifically, the article analyzes the connection between produ…
Migrant Entrepreneurship and Social Integration
Migration and migrants’ integration are prominent aspects of globalized contemporary society. In this respect, a key question appears of how to foster the full participation of migrants in the host society. This article investigates the role of migrant entrepreneurship as a vector of integration. Based on case-study research conducted among Bangladeshi vendors in Nuovo Mercato Esquilino in Rome, the article highlights the potentialities in terms …
Jogging during the Lockdown
Jogging is the most practiced physical activity in the west. This form of light running appears a solution to the health problems caused by the sedentary of contemporary dwelling and affirmed the role of the extensive use of urban space as a key to individual well-being and health. The COVID-19 pandemic and the imposition of lockdowns imposed a new form of kinesthetic morality based on domestic confinement; a morality that is in open contrast to …
Food festivals in Italy
Food festivals are rising in popularity across the world. In particular, in Italy, they are among the main touristic summer events. In the past decade, the country has witnessed the proliferation of these feasts, in particular in rural areas. This article investigates this success exploring the socio-cultural needs that move rural communities to organize the events. Through exploration of the ethnographic case of San Rocco and its Ravioli Festiva…
Eating at Work
Workers’ wellbeing at work is a central theme for the development of institutions and enterprises. Within this debate, a central issue relates to the search for the best ways to organize lunch-breaks and food services for employees. In the past, canteens had a crucial role for workers, yet the last twenty years have marked a profound transformation of the European economy, with the effect of diversifying workers’ foodways and their food-related p…
Crafting the Local
This article examines the effects that GI (geographic indication) brands may have on the commodity producers who employ this marketing strategy. By analyzing the case of jewelry production in Valenza, Italy, and the creation of the DV brand, it demonstrates that GIs tend to impose new forms of production over the local milieu. Although based on a rhetoric about the maintenance of traditional practices, GIs enforce a techno-scientific approach ove…
Тhe Spectacles of the Crisis
In this article, the case of the economic crisis of Valenza (Italy) and its jewellery industry is presented. The crisis has occurred since 2008 as an effect of the plunge of international jewellery market. Drawing from ethnographic materials collected during my fieldwork in the city (2008-2010), I intend to point out that an the most recent economic downturn had strong cultural effects on local population (goldsmiths and others). Following Kant’s…
The making of a community
Photos are by their very nature evocative objects (Turkle 2007). This paper investigates the ability of a photo's capacity to trigger narratives about the self and the past. It argues that the collection of historic, private photos and the creation of a public photographic archive build a sense of community. The paper is the result of an ethnographic work conducted in Lu (AL) between 2010 and 2012. In this village, the local museum curetted a pub…
Invisible Presences and Visible Absences
Since 2008, Valenza, one of the World's largest jewellery production centres, has experienced a period of profound economic uncertainty. In four years, about a third of the jobs and workshops of the city were lost. The paper investigates the practices and the form of knowledge Valenza people used to speak and understand the crisis. While economic data were marginally known by the population, the crisis emerged in the words of Valenzani as a visua…
Exploring Limbo
The article investigates the experience of job-loss and the following unemployment. Based on the ethnographic research conducted in Valenza, Italy, between 2008 and 2012, the article challenges an interpretation of unemployment as a liminal phase. I argue former workers experience unemployment as a “Limbo” – an existential condition underpinned by the ambiguity of being and at the same time not-being a worker. The exploration of this “Limbo” shed…
Native anthropology and uncertain ‘otherness
Food Festivals and Expectations of Local Development in Northern Italy
This essay offers an ethnographic analysis of the role of food in modern Italian food festivals. Starting from the ethnographic case of Borgonovo, a rural town in Southern Piedmont, and its festival, it highlights the nonlinear role played by food in the festivals and points out gastronomic festivals should be read as a local response of rural, and marginal communities to the phenomenon of their social marginalization
Between Change and Stability
This article presents an ethnographic analysis of the perception of tourism in small, rural municipalities in Italian internal areas, by focusing on the UNESCO territory of Monferrato, in North-Western Italy. The paper looks at how communities consider tourism in relationship with the specificities of their land and the need of transforming it in order to create a functional tourist destination. In so doing, the paper answers to key questions con…
Erlich, Reese. The Iran Agenda Today
Keeping or changing? Two different cultural adaptation strategies in the domestic use of home country food plant and herbal ingredients among Albanian and Moroccan migrants in Northwestern Italy
BACKGROUND: Ethnobotanical field studies concerning migrant groups are crucial for understanding temporal changes of folk plant knowledge as well as for analyzing adaptation processes. Italy still lacks in-depth studies on migrant food habits that also evaluate the ingredients which newcomers use in their domestic culinary and herbal practices. METHODS: Semi-structured and open in-depth interviews were conducted with 104 first- and second-generat…
Our carbon footprint
Food Festivals and Local Development in Italy
The Reterritorialization Device
Raise Your Voice
At a time when Italian society is experiencing a surge of ethnic intolerance and xenophobia, the paper addresses the question: "what role can migrant literature play in creating a multicultural society?" In so doing, the paper continues the debate opened in the 50th issue of this journal concerning the anthropological relevance of migrant literature. It shifts the analysis to Italy and looks at the period of fast demographic, legal, and cultural …
Eating at Work
Workers’ wellbeing at work is a central theme for the development of institutions and enterprises. Within this debate, a central issue relates to the search for the best ways to organize lunch-breaks and food services for employees. In the past, canteens had a crucial role for workers, yet the last twenty years have marked a profound transformation of the European economy, with the effect of diversifying workers’ foodways and their food-related p…
Expanding the reach
Background Initiatives for beekeeping intensification across the tropics can foster production and income, but the changes triggered by the introduction of modern beehives might permeate traditional knowledge and practices in multiple ways, and as such should be investigated and understood. We conducted an ethnobotanical study in the Eastern part of the Mau Forest among Ogiek beekeepers who customarily practice forest beekeeping and who are invol…
Traditional festive food and fragile aspirations of development in Italy
This research draws from memories, and the deep sense of belonging, tradition, and presence that is linked with a dish of Italian regional tradition; agnolotti pasta, one example of what can be considered an Italian ethnic food. It does so in order to challenge an assumption that is widely spread in the public debate and as well as in scholarship, which automatically links the popularization of traditional, ethnic cuisine with a fulgid prospectiv…
Baby pangolins on my plate
The Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine (JEET), throughout its 15 years of existence, has tried to provide a respected outlet for scientific knowledge concerning the inextricable links between human societies and nature, food, and health. Ethnobiology and ethnomedicine-centred research has moved at the (partially artificial and fictitious) interface between nature and culture and has investigated human consumption of wild foods and wild ani…
Jogging during the Lockdown
Jogging is the most practiced physical activity in the west. This form of light running appears a solution to the health problems caused by the sedentary of contemporary dwelling and affirmed the role of the extensive use of urban space as a key to individual well-being and health. The COVID-19 pandemic and the imposition of lockdowns imposed a new form of kinesthetic morality based on domestic confinement; a morality that is in open contrast to …
Food festivals in Italy
Food festivals are rising in popularity across the world. In particular, in Italy, they are among the main touristic summer events. In the past decade, the country has witnessed the proliferation of these feasts, in particular in rural areas. This article investigates this success exploring the socio-cultural needs that move rural communities to organize the events. Through exploration of the ethnographic case of San Rocco and its Ravioli Festiva…
Just beautiful green herbs
BackgroundThe use of plants in rituals is a little explored corner of biocultural diversity which has developed through time within a complex socio-ecological system. Indeed, rituals are complex interactions between humans and biodiversity shaped by history, culture, and ethnic belonging. Yet, in Western Ukraine, such rituals were forbidden for over 50 years (1939-1991). The current revival of rituals by rural inhabitants is an untapped reservoir…
Food Narrations and Teaching Migration
Is the clash of civilizations, or that of racism, the paradigm that best describes the intercultural dynamics that characterize the cultural horizon of young people today? This article addresses this question based on research conducted between 2012 and 2016 in four secondary schools in Piedmont by researchers at the University of Gastronomic Sciences. The research looked at adolescents and dealt with the topic of “knowing the Other” through the …
My Home’s a Prison”
Since early 2020, the anthropological community has investigated the cultural and social impact of the pandemic and the exceptional countermeasures of the Italian government. This paper contributes to the debate by exploring how the lockdown experience is linked to the sense of dwelling and the changed sense of place in one's residence and home. In particular, the processes of signification of urban and rural space and the relationship between th…
Perceptions and Revitalization of Local Ecological Knowledge in Four Schools in Yasin Valley, North Pakistan
Mountains are often recognized as sites of biocultural diversity, and local ecological knowledge (LEK) is an integral part of community life. Rapid cultural standardization and urbanization have threatened biocultural diversity, posing threats to LEK in mountain areas. The current study aimed to gather data on the status of LEK in the Yasin Valley, Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, and discuss options with the local population for revitalizing LEK in f…
Scouting for Food Heritage for Achieving Sustainable Development
Over the last two decades, scholars and organizations across the world have carried out research projects and promoted dissemination tools aimed at promoting food and food-related elements embedded in local and traditional foodways. In this regard, the documentation of food and biocultural heritage has been seen as the starting point of processes directed toward their safeguarding and promotion. Drawing from this premise, the paper presents an or…
Sociology (29 works) · Anthropology (16 works) · Geography (16 works) · Political science (16 works) · Culinary Culture and Tourism (14 works) · Social science (10 works) · Ethnography (9 works) · Ecology (8 works) · Economics (8 works) · Law (8 works)