Carlo Petrini

Carlo Petrini — known to friends and colleagues the world over as "Carlin" — was born on June 22, 1949, in Bra, a town nestled in the Cuneo province of Piedmont, northern Italy. Raised in a rural household where the rhythms of small farms and traditional food production were the texture of daily life, he was the son of Giuseppe, an electrician, and Maria, a teacher who directed the local nursery school. It was a childhood shaped by the land, by honest labor, and by a deep connection to place — values that would anchor his life's work. In the late 1960s, Petrini enrolled to study sociology at the University of Trento, where student activism and social ferment drew him into politics and journalism. Though he left four exams short of his degree, the experience forged his conviction that food was not merely sustenance but a profoundly political act. Beginning in 1977, he brought that conviction to the pages of il manifesto and L'Unità, writing about food and wine with an ideological sharpness rarely seen in gastronomy. The spark that lit a global movement came in 1986, when Petrini organized a playful but pointed protest against the opening of a McDonald's near Rome's Spanish Steps, distributing plates of pasta to passersby while declaring: "We don't want fast food." Out of that defiance grew Arcigola, which in 1989 became Slow Food — formalized at a congress in Paris where delegations from more than 20 countries signed its founding manifesto, with Petrini elected president. Over the following decades, he guided the movement to a presence in over 160 countries, building a philosophy around food that is "good, clean, and fair." His vision never stopped expanding. In 2004, he founded both Terra Madre — an international network uniting farmers, fishermen, artisans, cooks, and academics around biodiversity and food sovereignty — and the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, the world's first institution dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of food, which has trained nearly 4,000 professionals from 100 countries. In 2017, he co-founded the Laudato Si' Communities alongside Bishop Domenico Pompili, weaving together ecological spirituality and food justice. A self-declared agnostic who nonetheless corresponded warmly with Pope Francis — sending him tajarin pasta each Christmas — Petrini embodied a rare gift: the ability to bridge the sacred and the secular, the local and the global, the personal and the political. He never married, but said simply, "I feel part of a bigger family." His guiding principle was equally simple and boundless: "Those who sow utopia reap reality." Carlo Petrini died on May 21, 2026, in his home in Bra, at the age of 76, after a diagnosis of prostate cancer. He leaves behind not a résumé but a revolution — a world that eats, and thinks about eating, differently because of him.