Gualtiero Marchesi Foundation

Milan, March 19th, 2010.
“Every birthday is a beginning and today, for Gualtiero Marchesi eightieth, we announce the birth of hisfoundation. A term that gives the
immediate perception of something that will last and join the effort of a lifetime – Enrico Dandolo the vice-president underlines – Gualtiero Marchesi foundation will nurture the teaching of what is refined and the attention to what is beautiful, in other words the diffusion of the arts through taste, the only tool available to anyone who may be educated. “And it is with a similar intention that after the opening of great Milanese exhibition at the Castello Sforzesco for Gualtiero Marchesi’s eightieth birthday we have decided to newly suggest the exhibition in an itinerant form. Gualtiero Marchesi and the Great Italian Cuisine tells the story of a chef who has renewed Italian cuisine
starting from his origins in Lombardy and looking at the world. Marchesi has been a good teacher and also an artist. I am convinced that this testimony will continue to travel far and wide visiting other cities and other cultures. The personal history and the career of
Gualtiero Marchesi have always been interweaved with a love towards painting, sculpture, literature and most of all music. There is even,
regarding the latter, a vocation, but one may rightly say a family karma. Today the Marchesi family gathers three generations of musicians who play for themselves and for others renewing a tradition that dates back to the eighteen hundreds, to the Sicilian great-grandmother, a piano teacher of the Florio family. For the chef who considers cuisine an art and not simply craftsmanship, one is fed in the same measure by the tasteful and by the beautiful. If what is beautiful is good then virtue and necessity, ambition and concreteness become one, as is stated in a recent book written in six hands by Marchesi together with Nicola Salvatore and Aldo Spoldi both professor at the Brera academy of fine arts; then the risk of becoming aesthetes or opportunists lessens and becomes acceptable.

Which is the object and playground of the Gualtiero Marchesi foundation?

To start from children and prepare them to beauty.

To cultivate a taste for all the arts through courses in music, painting, sculpture, drama and culinary workshops.

To discover the truth of a flavour requires the same attention and yielding that listening to music does or does the knowledge of an instrument, the use of drawing and the abandonment to theatrical gesture. Together with this sort of art breeding ground the Gualtiero Marchesi foundation will take care of adults and in particular those chefs who have already started their own work path or even those who have just left Alma, the International School of Italian cuisine. To them who have perhaps already learnt to cook we foresee the next step, one for which the presence of a guide is crucial, i.e. the opening to a creative vision. Creativeness and mastery are two different things.
There are very skilled people who don’t and will never create anything. “Capable executors can interpret according to their sensibility the great repertoires –Gualtiero Marchesi, president of the foundation underlines - while creative cooks as much as artists manage to create something that can last, becoming a benchmark and a model for others”.