Easter lunch, Christmas lunch or Italy's mid-August holiday lunch. But the one
that really everybody enjoys – black and white people, believers and
apostates, the young and the elderly – is the Sunday lunch. A legacy of what
Italy was and the changes it is capable of: places, dishes and companies.
Each to their own, as long as you sit around a table or its simulacra—new
connectors of communities. Bare-chested or all dressed-up, under a statue of
the Virgin Mary or on the beach, on a boat or in the park, on vacation or at
workplaces—old and new Italians break their bread and pour their wine every
Sunday, again and always together in the moment of communion. A
communion that is not biblical or liturgical, but literal. From Northern to
Southern Italy, indoors or outdoors, with the poor and the rich—photographer
Niccolò Rastrelli dusted off the collective imagination about the value of the
most enduring of Italian rituals, to put it back into a multifaceted reality. The
1960s day trip driving a FIAT 500 has been replaced by a gondola ride; the
family lunch with a meal with friends. Grandparents no longer serve lasagne,
and now they have no choice but to be served (much worse food) by nurses
in a retirement home—another sign of the passage of time. His pictures are a
light-hearted, multidimensional journey exploring how dynamics and
relationships in family and society changed, but also how traditional Italy
adjusted and enlarged in the past decades—every Sunday, you will find
communities of Filipino immigrants sitting on the grass in the park; Ethiopians
sharing a meat dish in the restaurants where they once were clients and are
now owners; friars welcoming curious onlookers and needy people to their
soup kitchen. Around lavishly set or simply prepared tables, the Sunday lunch
celebrates a value that still endures, even when it is not so clear to its own,
unconscious bearers—the sense of community
