Food and Cultural Heritage: Practices, Memories, and Identities between Italy, Argentina, and Brazil

As part of the PNRR M4, C1, Investment 3.4 "Transnational Educational Initiatives – TNE", supported by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (ex D.D. MUR no. 167/2023), this project explores the rich intersection of food and cultural heritage across continents.

"Food and Cultural Heritage: Practices, Memories, and Identities between Italy, Argentina, and Brazil"
(Project code: TNE23-00041 – CUP: J31I24000290006)

This international and interdisciplinary training initiative aims to examine how food serves as a vehicle for memory, identity, and cultural exchange between Europe and Latin America. Through language, culinary practices, and oral traditions, participants will investigate the connections between local knowledge, migration, colonial legacies, and ritual dimensions.

The course consists of a three-week programme, combining online learning with in-person workshops, and involves participants and instructors from diverse linguistic and academic backgrounds.

Course Structure

Week 1 – September 22–26, 2025
The course begins with a 10-hour online module focused on intercomprehension among Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese). Participants will develop strategies for reading and understanding texts in a foreign language and strengthen their written and oral comprehension and production skills in a multilingual context.

At the end of this phase, participants will engage in 5 hours of tandem-based oral and written interproduction, to be completed during the following week.

Week 2 – September 29 to October 3, 2025
This self-directed learning phase includes collaborative tasks in pairs or multilingual groups, based on the principles of language tandem learning. Participants are free to schedule the work at their own convenience.

Week 3 – October 6–10, 2025
The course concludes with an intensive, in-person training week held in Buenos Aires (25 hours total). Morning sessions will focus on Anthropology of Food, with lectures and case studies on local food knowledge, colonial legacies, migration processes, rituals, and memory.

Afternoon sessions will be dedicated to multilingual intercomprehension and interproduction workshops. The week will close with collaborative, multilingual final presentations by the participants.

A detailed programme will be shared with selected participants prior to the start of the course.