Bonilli Day

I would like to make a modest proposal to all those who had worked with Stefano Bonilli, who thanks to him found their professional direction or who just had him be a part of their own working career. Why don’t we dedicate a day to him with debates, study groups and tastings?

Every year since 2014, since that sad August 3, I write an article on Stefano Bonilli who passed away suddenly on that day. I remember him this way because we were friends, we worked together for 22 years, he founded and I contributed to what became our Gambero Rosso. And I do this also because we had a falling out, we did not speak to each other for six years but then, two months before he died, we reunited. This was lucky for me because otherwise I would have been ever fuller of regrets.

Bonilli was first of all a journalist, then a visionary and he literally trained a host of collaborators during those years, from the end of 1986 to September 2008, when he was fired by the new owners of Gambero Rosso, in a way that the courts later ruled was illegitimate. Today, many of those who he trained have achieved important roles in journalism and the wine and food media. I refer in particular to Marco Bolasco and Federico De Cesare Viola, who for years now are no longer part of Gambero Rosso. Then there are his friends like Maurizio Cortese and collaborators who today have different occupations like Annalisa and Cristina Barbagli, Raffaella Prandi and Fabio Parasecoli, all of whom were part of that fantastic editorial brigade so full of talent and dreams.

And last but not least Carlo Petrini and the historic group that was first Arcigola and then Slow Food.

It is to all these people that I make my modest proposal. Why don’t we dedicate a day to remember him, seeing how fewer and fewer people do? Why don’t we do this day every year, a day dedicated to debates, study groups and tastings to recall who he was and what he did to those who never met him? This is just an idea, I do not wish to be the only one who supports it, but I believe that we all owe it to him. No one really talks about him anymore and yet he was the one who reinvented wine and food journalism in Italy. He created one of the very first publications dedicated to this world and changed the language to express it, bringing it into the limelight.

I look forward to their reactions and I hope they will come soon, even if I’m totally convinced they will arrive but at least I tried. And so what do you readers think about my idea?