«Sono riputati fra i migliori d’Italia». Il Tartufo bianco d’Alba dalle statistiche napoleoniche all’Inchiesta Jacini

[Machine translation] Gianpaolo Fassino's contribution (“They are reputed to be among the best in Italy.” The Alba White Truffle (from Napoleonic statistics to the Jacini Inquiry) analyzes the presence of truffles in some important agrarian surveys relating to the Piedmontese territory. The proposed reading starts from the Jacini Inquiry, conducted for Piedmont by the honorable Francesco Meardi, with his important study on the territory of the Langa offered by Lorenzo Fantino, and then proceeds backwards to the statistics of the Napoleonic age compiled by Gian Secondo De Canis and Gilbert Chabrol de Volvic. These precious ethnographic sources are the tool — in the reading proposed by Fassino — through which it is possible to anthropologically understand how the Tuber magnatum Pico has gradually become over time more and more a food of otherness and distinction. The truffle is thus interpreted as “good to think” but, for the farmer-gatherer, “bad to eat”, while vice versa in the canteen of the rich it appears as a refined voluptuary food, with scarce nutritional properties but with a strong symbolic value.