When the aglione went to the Venice Film Festival

There are places where you do not expect to find a bulb of aglione. The Lido of Venice, during the Film Festival, is one of them.

And yet it happened: for the 81st Venice International Film Festival, the zero-kilometre products of Azienda Agricola Dante Moretti travelled to Venice, to the Hollywood Celebrities Village set up in the grounds of the Hotel Des Bains. Dante went in person, together with Lorenzo.

What an aglione was doing at a film festival

The short answer is that Italian food, in settings like that, is not a side dish: it is part of how the country tells its own story. Next to the tables where people talk about films there are the tables where people eat, and what goes on them says something.

The long answer is that a product like Aglione della Valdichiana has a recognition problem. People from outside the area do not know it exists; those who see it for the first time think of a giant head of garlic. Taking it somewhere full of people who do not know it is, very plainly, the way to make it known.

The advantage of being odd

A bulb ten centimetres across attracts questions. The shape of the product does half the work: nobody asks for an explanation of an ordinary head of garlic, everybody asks about one weighing half a kilo.

And the explanation, once somebody has asked, is the one we always give: it is not garlic, it is a different plant; it is sweet rather than sharp; it is easy to digest; in the Valdichiana it has been grown for four centuries.

Why it matters to us

A small farm does not have a marketing department. It has a product, a field, and somebody willing to load it into a car and take it where the people are. Trade fairs, farmers' markets, local television and, once, a film festival: they are all versions of the same thing.

The next day you go back to the field, because the aglione does not sow itself.

The product, in any case, is the same one

Nothing that went to Venice is different from what arrives at your door. Aglione della Valdichiana and Aglione Cream are the same — picked by hand, dried slowly, jarred in the Valdichiana.

The difference, if there is one, is only in who tastes them for the first time.