The Italian Food You Don't Expect: Motel Agip Restaurants and the Idea of Fighting Modernity with Modernity. (original) (raw)

The 1st Biannual Conference on Food and Communication, Centre for Communication, Culture and Media Studies, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, 2018

Abstract

This paper historically analyses promotional items of communication regarding the restaurants of the Italian chain Motel Agip from 1954 to 1980. These motels were created by the public oil company ENI and by its president Enrico Mattei. Agip motels and restaurants were based on the idea of ‘modernity’, presenting new and stylish forms of design such as steel home-furnishings and aluminum doors, and self-service dishes composed of ‘new’ industrial food. Motels and restaurants were built along important motorways, and aimed to give relaxation to the travelers. They were first projected for lorry drivers but were later adapted to the needs of the ‘new’ massive modern tourism based on the car, which in Italy was promoted by the governments in order to favour the big private car company FIAT. The research is based on the visual and textual analysis of advertisements, commercials and other promotional materials produced or commissioned by ENI. The results show that ENI constructed the Agip restaurants as a nest where tourists could escape the stress of modernity. The analysed items continually underlined the stressing character of the modern lifestyle and the necessity for people to escape it. However, the cure to all of this was modernity. Stylish dishes, male professional chefs, new architectures, etc. were the new panaceas put forward by ENI, sometimes in clear contrast to tradition, which was only seen as an unimportant element of the past. In conclusion, the Motel Agip restaurants represent an unusual perspective in Italian food culture, which frequently see tradition as the sole solution to the problems of modernity. Agip motels and restaurants, instead, were an attempt to present modernity as the only weapon to fight modernity, before the rise of the Slow Food movement’s model, where tradition is the only way to defeat the many problems of modern life.

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