UNESCO has recognised Italian cuisine as Intangible Cultural Heritage. This recognition is best reflected in Italy’s extraordinary food biodiversity, including its Traditional Agri-Food Products (PAT), many of which are meat-based.

The UNESCO recognition granted to Italian cuisine concerns intangible cultural heritage, not dishes, recipes, or foods. In this respect, the recognition aligns with what the Organisation itself has already stated by including the Mediterranean Diet in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. As the official MASAF dossier clearly states, this category includes “practices, representations, knowledge, and skills that communities recognise as part of their cultural heritage,” a dynamic corpus of gestures, knowledge, rituals, and forms of conviviality that span generations and territories.

Italian cuisine, in fact, is not a simple repertoire of products. Still, a living kaleidoscope, a constantly evolving cultural structure composed of techniques, familiar languages, memories, and the ability to transform raw materials while respecting the variety of territories. It is this cultural model, not the list of foods and preparations, that has been inscribed in the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.

Meat preparations and PAT, material testimonies of the intangible heritage

Precisely for this reason, it is possible to highlight something that has received little attention in recent media coverage: that is, if protected heritage is intangible (and it couldn’t be otherwise), traditional products are its concrete manifestation. They are the living evidence of those practices, of their historical roots, of their intergenerational transmission.

MASAF catalogues these tangible expressions of intangible heritage in the Traditional Agri-Food Products (PAT) list, which currently includes 5,761 registered items, of which around 900 are meat products.

It should be noted that the PAT system, established in 1998, records foods whose production or processing techniques have remained consistent for at least twenty-five years. It is not a gastronomic archive, but rather an indicator of the material continuity of that intangible knowledge that UNESCO recognises. And it is precisely in meat and meat preparations that one of the country’s richest and most widespread repertoires is found.

Italian Cuisine: “Tradition in Constant Motion“

With specific reference to meat products and meat preparations, and limiting ourselves to the category “Fresh meat (and offal) and their preparation“, according to official data updated to 2025, the approximately 900 PATs are distributed throughout the national territory, with numbers varying significantly from region to region: Abruzzo has 25, Basilicata 28, Calabria 28, Campania 66, Emilia-Romagna 48, Friuli Venezia Giulia 45, Lazio 65, Liguria 27, Lombardy 78, Marche 34, Molise 32, Piedmont 69, the Province of Bolzano 16, the Province of Trento 35, Puglia 25, Sardinia 20, Sicily 7, Tuscany 81, Umbria 13, Valle d’Aosta 7 and Veneto 103.

Every region has products in this category, and this documents a heritage of techniques, breeds, environments, rural economies, and community rituals that no other country can boast in this form. Salting, smoking, curing, grinding, casing, preserving: each technique tells an ecological story, a solution adapted to local climates, a shared agricultural memory.

Italian cuisine was defined in the dossier as a “tradition in constant movement” and a “puzzle” composed of diverse yet complementary pieces. Traditional Italian meats are among these pieces, those most closely linked to the rural landscape, native breeds, and the economies of inland areas. They are therefore an integral part of the biocultural diversity cited by UNESCO in expressing its positive opinion and transforming a candidacy into official recognition.