The heart failed Bonilli

A heart attack in his house in Rome was fatal, on Sunday night August 3rd for Stefano Bonilli. His name will be permanently linked to Gambero Rosso, first as an 8-page insert to Il Manifesto, debuted in the news stands on December 16th 1986, and then as the publishing house, a winning reality that he had to leave in 2008, excluded by the new owners whom he had taken to court, and was winning.

As Marcello Marchesi said with a piercing joke, “the important thing is for death to find us alive”. And indeed Bonilli had a very alive head. What failed him was his heart, all of a sudden, and the very quick first aid provided did not help. This confirms what when the time comes, you cannot do anything except acknowledging your use by date. We all have one, the good thing is we don’t know when.

The director was born in Bosco Chiesanuova near Verona on February 13th 1945, thus when Italy was still at war. The family then moved to Bologna, where he studied before arriving to Milan and finally Rome. He worked as a journalist at Il Manifesto from 1971 to 1982, with the debut of the insert called Gambero Rosso inside Il Manifesto, on December 1986. The scandal for the left was bigger than the pleasure of facing the world of food with a fresh intelligence. For the hammer and sickle world, the palate was a capital sin, just like for the Catholic church.

That news, however, had sound foundations and robust legs and is still walking today. In 1986 in Bra (Cuneo) Arcigola was born, which in 1989 become Slow Food (the agreement in Paris on December 11th). While Gambero Rosso, as a publishing house, was born in 1987. Three names above all: Stefano Bonilli, Daniele Cernilli and Carlo Petrini that is to say restaurants, wine and the food universe. Three visions that they later poured into the guide to Italy’s restaurants (1990), the one dedicated to wine (1987) and the one dedicated to osterie (1990), and countless other initiatives of all kinds.

Bonilli’s name after Gambero Rosso, a name chosen because it was the emblem of the osteria where the Cat and the Fox took Pinocchio for dinner, but also because of the magical place by Fulvio Pierangelini in San Vincenzo on the coast of Maremma, was linked to a blog, Papero Giallo, and a website, Gazzetta Gastronomica. Plus a great project that was meant to start in mid-September in Bologna, a sort of general states of wine and food critique, that needed to be re-founded because too full of approximation and superficiality.

The great merit of Bonilli and his Gambero was that he removed lots of dust from the world of gastronomic critique and knowledge, looking beyond the ring road surrounding the capital. Gambero on one side and Slow Food on the other have gone out of Italy and the long relationship, both of Bonilli and Petrini, with Ferran Adrià is the concrete proof. There’s no right age to leave this earth. So when it happens all of a sudden it gives an even stronger sense of vertigo and dismay. Stefano was once again making projects for the future, who will now be able to collect his heritage?