may, 28th 2026
Farewell, Carlin. You changed the direction of my life
The world lost a remarkable man last week.
Reading time : 6 min
This week, I want to do something a little different. I usually write to you from Tuscany — about wine, about the land, about the stories behind the glass.
But some news asks you to stop and pay attention to something bigger.
Carlin Petrini passed away recently, and I feel the responsibility to dedicate this issue to him. He was the founder of the Slow Food movement, and — in a way I will explain — the person who changed the direction of my life.
If you don’t recognize the name, let me tell you why it matters: not just to the food world, but to anyone who has ever stopped to think about what is on their plate and where it came from.
Petrini was an Italian activist and writer from Piedmont who, in 1989, founded Slow Food — a global movement born as a direct response to the opening of a McDonald’s near the Spanish Steps in Rome. His idea was simple and radical at the same time: that food is culture, that eating is a political act, and that the pleasure of sitting down to a good meal is something worth defending.
What started as a protest grew into a movement with over 100,000 members in more than 150 countries, changing the way millions of people think about what they eat, how it is produced, and who deserves to be part of that conversation.
I am writing about him this week because he changed the direction of my life in a very personal way. And I want to tell you how.
In 2004, I was a young woman who had studied communication and wasn’t quite sure where to go with it. Then I heard about a new master’s program — the first of its kind in Italy — at a university founded by the Slow Food movement in Pollenzo, a small town in Piedmont. Gastronomic Sciences. The whole idea sounded almost too ambitious to be real. I applied. And somehow, I found myself in the very first class: twenty students, a brand new institution, and a curriculum that nobody had taught before.
Carlin Petrini was the soul behind all of it. I met him many times during that year — we shared dinners, conversations, the particular intimacy that comes from being part of something from the very beginning. What struck me most was not the vision, though the vision was extraordinary. It was the humility. Here was a man who had already changed the way millions of people thought about food, and he was genuinely curious about what we, twenty students, had to say. He listened. He asked questions. He made you feel that what you thought mattered.
Before I finished that program, a winery reached out and offered me a job. That was the door. Everything I have built since — the consulting work, the years spent between vineyards and cellars, this newsletter — started from that one decision to walk into a room full of people who believed that gastronomy was worth taking seriously as a discipline. A room that Carlin Petrini had built.
Two years ago, I went back to Pollenzo for the twentieth anniversary of the university. I wasn’t sure what to expect. But standing there with some of my classmates, watching Petrini look at us — proud, genuinely moved — I felt the full weight of what that year had been. He had started something that none of us could have predicted. And there we were, twenty years later, proof that it had worked.
I am sharing a precious photo with this newsletter: Carlin standing right in the middle of us, some of the original class, twenty years on. Look at his face. That is not the smile of someone going through the motions of an anniversary event. That is someone who is genuinely, deeply happy to see that the people he believed in are still here, still curious, still at the table. Same enthusiasm, two decades later. It says everything.
The world has lost someone who thought in a way that very few people do: with generosity, with courage, and with the unshakeable belief that the small things, like what we eat and how we share it, are never really small at all.
I feel lucky to have known him, even just a little.
And I feel grateful every day for the direction he helped me find.
From Tuscany, with gratitude and a raised glass,
Claudia 🍷
Ready to toast?
