Lunch Break
It’s lunch time: off we go to the Pirelli Foundation to see how the Italians used to eat – and how they eat today.
In September 2015 came the exhibition Lunch Break: A Hundred Years of Italy at Table, which retraced the history of company canteens and refectories back to the early years of the twentieth century.
Starting with documents from the Historical Archive, the exhibition told the story of the first refectory, which opened in the Bicocca factory in 1915, through to the first canteen at the factory in Via Ponte Seveso in 1924, and on to the gem of a modern automated canteen that opened in 1956.
Visitors to Lunch Break were greeted by a real table set with curios, anecdotes, and stories about the evolution of the food, music, cinema, and leisure-time customs of Italians over the course of a century.
