UNESCO has designated Italian cuisine as an intangible cultural heritage, the first time an entire national cuisine has received such recognition. After manual bell ringing, opera singing, truffle hunting, and pizza making, Italy’s gastronomic heritage is now protected in the same way as amateur theater in the Czech Republic and a handful of dying musical instruments in Pakistan.

The award made Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, very proud of “our identity” and elicited countless Stanley Tucci-style clichés about nonna making tagliatelle while sipping cappuccino. The government lobbied intensely to secure the award and now hopes the designation will provide new tools to curb the fake Italian product industry. This €62.2 billion thrives on dubious delicacies, from Parmesan cheese produced in Wisconsin to Prosecco made in Brazil.

The problem with all of this is that there’s no such thing as “Italian” cuisine. Indeed, reducing such a young country to a single label is overly simplistic. Italy is, in reality, a mosaic of local food cultures — interconnected yet largely distinct — each serving as a potent marker of regional identity.

Even a distracted visitor can see that every region has its own culinary traditions and habits, ranging from the sauerkraut of the Alpine north, shaped by Germanic culture, to the Sicilian desserts infused with Arab influence. Consider the gulf between delicate Ligurian basil pesto and the fiery Calabrian ‘nduja, between the buckwheat pizzoccheri of Valtellina and the raw fish traditions of Puglia. Half the country was shaped by the Mediterranean culture of olive oil, the other half in the Central European tradition of animal fats. Every town nurtures micro-cultures that proudly set it apart from the nearest village or neighboring region.

This extremely varied composition is the legacy of millennia of invasions, exchanges, influences, wars and separations, which created a dense web of local cultures that still forms a fundamental part of Italian identity. If the Italian language had been the unifying element, food was the dividing one. In its cuisine, one can still taste Italy as it existed before unification in 1861, a period long shaped by centuries of mingling and cross-pollination that created a rich network of local identities now overlaid by a more artificial national framework.

That diversity is precisely what makes Italian food — and Italy itself — so compelling. The project of unifying a culturally divided nation through food was the aim of generations of critics and political leaders starting in the 19th century. The writer Pellegrino Artusi, considered the inventor of Italian cuisine, wrote in 1891 a famous guide meant to stitch all local traditions into a single national narrative. The monthly magazine, La Cucina Italiana, was founded in 1929 and, in line with the fascist project of the time, was tasked with cementing a national gastronomic identity in a largely rural country that maintained local allegiances.

Over the decades we’ve also witnessed the consecration of supposedly typical dishes in the name of ancestral traditions that never actually existed. Delicacies now passed off as centuries-old such as Tiramisù or Spaghetti alla Puttanesca, were in fact invented recently, assembled from elements that have little to do with any unified Italian tradition. The widely held idea that Italy’s gastronomic culture rests on a canon of ancient recipes handed down intact through the centuries has long been dismantled by culinary myth-busters.

The deeper question is why such a homogenizing label feels necessary at all today. In a globalized world where culture circulates and changes at high speed, there is a growing temptation to package complexity into market-ready narratives, often sprinkled with nostalgia for a golden age that never really existed. UNESCO labels cater to this impulse. They offer the comforting illusion that something precious is being safeguarded, even when that “something” is too subtle and locally rooted to be protected from hyper-transient modernity.

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Mattia Ferraresi is the managing editor of the Italian daily Domani and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard ’19. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, and other media outlets.

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