Turin's Terra Madre marks 40 years of Slow Food Italy

Terra Madre Salone del Gusto returns to Turin's historic piazzas from 24 to 27 September, its 16th edition timed to the 40th anniversary of Slow Food Italy.

The City of Turin, the Piedmont Region and Slow Food organise the event jointly, and this year's programme leans harder than usual into the anniversary: four decades since Slow Food formed in nearby Bra as a reaction to fast food's spread through Italy, and turned that reaction into a global network of small producers, seed savers and cooks.

A biodiversity network turns forty

Forty years on, defending small producers from homogenisation is a mainstream argument, not a fringe one.

Slow Food's core mission runs through the event: protecting and promoting biodiversity in food, in the knowledge that grows it and in the cultures that cook it. That takes concrete form in the Ark of Taste catalogue and the Presidia projects, which back small producers keeping specific breeds, seeds and techniques alive rather than letting them disappear under industrial-scale alternatives. This edition gives dedicated space to Slow Food's coalitions for coffee, cacao, wine and cider, four commodities where the same industrial-versus-artisan tension shapes prices and supply chains far beyond Turin, from Ivory Coast cocoa farms to Piedmont's own Alba white truffle fair.

The programme spreads across the city's grand piazzas rather than a single trade-fair hall: conferences on food policy sit alongside taste workshops, shared meals that put chefs at the same table as the producers who grow their ingredients, and sensory sessions developed with local cultural institutions.

What forty years of Slow Food changed

Turin has hosted the event since its first edition, and the city's own food identity, from its chocolate houses to nearby vineyards, overlaps with Slow Food's founding arguments about regional specificity. Visitors following the food beyond the fair grounds can find the same logic at work in Bologna's food-hall culture, a two-hour train ride east. Four decades on, the anniversary edition arrives at a moment when the movement's original argument, that food tied to place and small producers is worth defending against homogenisation, has become mainstream enough to need reasserting rather than introducing.