The Chinotto |
|
Collection title
Cose dell'altro Geo
First broadcast date
05/19/2008
Abstract
Documentary about the culture and history of the fruit "Chinotto" on the Ligurian coast. The industrial exploitation of Chinotto begins in the town of Savona in the late nineteenth century. The Chinotto is then marketed worldwide in the form of candied fruit. It symbolizes the years of the opulence of the Belle Epoque and the splendor of the Riviera.
After a period of crisis in the inter-war period, the operation of Chinotto found a new impetus with the creation of an eponymous drink, a symbol of years of post-war.
There is a strong competition from soft drinks such as "Coca Cola", but the Chinotto, a typical Italian beverage, is back in fashion today.
Broadcaster
RAI - RAI Tre
Audiovisual form
Documentary
Primary theme
Agriculture, breeding
Credits / Cast
- Romano Gianni - Author of original work
Map locations
- Italy - Western North - Liguria
Original language
Italian
Additional information
Extracts from the advertisement of "Chinotto Neri" (1960).
Context
The Chinotto
Mayalen Zubillaga
The chinotto (chinotti in the plural) is a small citrus fruit which grows on a tree (Citrus myrtifolia) from China (chinotto meaning Chinese). The tree was introduced to Italy via the town of Savona in Liguria around 1500. Today it is grown mainly in the Savona region but also in Sicily and Calabria. The fruit is harvested between September and October.
Since it is naturally bitter, the chinotto was very quickly transformed into candied or crystallized fruit. The variety which grows in Liguria, with its small size, thick skin and intense perfume, is particularly good for crystallizing. In 1800 a cooperative of chinotto producers was created and in 1877 the first workshop to receive national and foreign recognition set up in Savona (called Silvestre-Allemand, the company belonged to a Frenchman from Apt, world capital of candied fruit). Production of candied chinotto peaked between the end of the 19th and early 20th century, and after a series of very cold winters, the 1920's saw the start of a lasting crisis.
Today much less is produced, and with it has gone the whole tradition of crystallizing fruit. A few firms still make products based on chinotti (jams, mustards), but the name chinotto travels round the world mainly as a drink: it's a bitter-sweet carbonated drink consumed in Italy and wherever there are Italian communities, and a competitor to Coca-Cola. It is made industrially, but also by small, local-based concerns.
The extract shown here shows the passion in Italy for local products and any recipe that claims to be traditional, as oppose to industrially-made products (even if the best known chinotto-based drink is made by the huge San Pellegrino company, which has made it since the 1930's – although anthropologists tell us we fall for marketing symbols as much as for the food itself). Nostalgia for a lost rural way of life is quite recent in Italy: until the 1950's rural populations were relatively badly fed, with a frugality that was imposed, not chosen. In the context of pervasive industrialisation, food products thought to be "authentic" re-assure us and form a rampart against the supposed uniformity of globalisation, crowned by a fiction of a happy rurality offering consumers products which are good for the taste-buds, the body and the soul.
It's in this context that the Slow Food movement was born. Since the 1980's it has fought to "combine pleasure with a deep sense of responsibility about the environment and the world of agricultural production". In 1996 Slow Food launched the "Ark of Taste", a major project to safeguard and encourage food products threatened with extinction by industrial standardisation. Among all the various products listed, those named "sentinels" are the object of particular encouragement. In 2004 the chinotto di Savona became a sentinel, to safeguard the production of the fruit and also relaunch the tradition of crystallizing fruit.
The success of the chinotto is a good example of the Italians' liking for bitter tastes. Lettuces (rocket, treviso, chicory and puntarello) vegetables (violet artichoke, aubergine) fruits (chinotto, bitter (Seville) oranges, almonds), drinks (Campari, Chinotto), coffee, olive oil, black olives, all typically Italian products which are more or less markedly bitter. For while the human being naturally goes for sweet tastes, bitter taste provokes an immediate rejection for in nature many bitter plants are poisonous. The dislike of bitter things is thus innate, but its appreciation is cultural.
Bibliography
DICKIE John, Delizia ! Une histoire culinaire de l'Italie, Buchet Chastel, 2007.
GIRAUD Alexandre, L'amer, Éditions Argol, 2011.
PETRINI Carlo et PITTE André « Comment retrouver l'art de bien manger ? », La pensée de midi n° 13, 2004.
