Food and gastronomic heritage: Telling a story of eyes and hands

A multimedia application (termed Di Piazza in Piazza) has been designed and developed that allows people to enjoy a narrative experience based on food and culinary traditions. Several kinds of digital content narrating the gastronomic culture of the Emilia Romagna region has been made available through a gestural interface within an installation to be exhibited in public spaces. The idea of using hands to access content came after the consideration that hands play a primary role in the relationship between humans and food. Our multimedia installation has gone on tour through several cities in Italy allowing to gather a huge amount of data whose analysis provides some important results. Among those: (a) the use of hands was mostly appreciated by visitors and (b) regional products and gastronomic traditions raised interest in visitors, thus confirming that a strong cultural relationship exists among people and food, in cultural terms.