Disappointed by football, after the flop of the Azzurri at Euro 2024, having shelved cultural trips or those in search of new love, Italians are now thinking about holidays. The watchwords are less fun and more relaxation, no desire to make friends but only gastronomic experiences: Italians think of summer as a period of oblivion useful for recharging their batteries for autumn. And how much emerges from the research of the Nestlé Observatoryfocused on eating habits while traveling, conducted on a sample of 1,200 people representative of the Italian population.
Research – a note reports – also aims to investigate our favorite destinations and how much, on vacation, we are willing to control our instincts at the expense of a healthy diet, a trend detected in the last year that saw us as virtuous consumers with an increase in the consumption of fruit, vegetables and legumes oscillating between +30 and +40%. At the top of the wishlist for the 2024 holidays, for more than 57% of Italians, there is the search for pure relaxation, followed by fun for 24% and the desire for new gastronomic experiences for 13%. But, in search of relaxation or fun, we all agree that eating well is always very or quite important for 78%, while 20% have shamelessly declared that this summer they will eat everything, without paying the slightest attention to a healthy and balanced diet.
Everything that involves our emotional and intimate sphere seems to have taken a back seat. Making new friends, in fact, is seen as optional and not necessary, voted for only 2% of those interviewed. The era of searching for new emotions or more or less lasting flirtations also seems to have set – we read – only 0.3% still travel hoping to meet the ‘great story’ while only two years ago, in 2022, 10% dreamed of a romantic holiday. A percentage in free fall that marks an epochal transition in a country that until yesterday lived in the wake of romanticism and great love films. And home, among other things, of the so-called ‘parrots’ searching, on the Italian coasts, for tourists ready to fall in love. Figures now obsolete that the tsunami produced by the new customs dictated by new generations and social media has finally swept away definitively, decreeing their end.
So, one of two things: between love or sex and food – spheres that are somehow related because they also involve sociality, exchange and sharing – Italians on vacation prefer food. “In fact, things are changing – comments psychologist and psychotherapist Marzia Benvenuti – If on the one hand there is a frantic search for relaxation and then maintaining good and healthy eating habits, only a miserable percentage on vacation is interested in meeting new people and creating classic flirtations of this period. This trend tells us a lot about how much is based on what is good for you and what is truly gratifying. Be careful though, all this gives security but at the same time takes away lightness and freedom of being. The point is to have self-discipline not just rigor, and to know what and how we want to feed ourselves every single day by choosing consciously so as not to lose ourselves”.
So – longing for boredom after so much toiling between public and private, without new friends and without the slightest desire to tire ourselves out with a flirt, but moved by the sole emotion of procuring gastronomic experiences – in this situation, where will we bring our restlessness and desire for ‘invisibility’? Those who have chosen to remain in Italy – the note reports – will satisfy the pleasure of good food in these five Regions decreed the queens of summer 2024, in order: Sicily, Puglia, Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany and Campania. While the last two places are classified as Friuli Venezia-Giulia and Molise.
For those who decide to take a vacation outside their homeland, it is good to know that they will find themselves in large company in the restaurants and inns of, in order: Greece, France, Portugal, Turkey and Germany. Those who want to experience the thrill of a vacation in the less frequented countries and especially the least voted because they are considered unattractive from a gastronomic point of view, can opt for the last two in the ranking of the interviewees: Poland and Liechtenstein. The only constant that emerged from the research is that it is the countries with (more or less) Mediterranean diets that are the favorite destinations for Italians, perhaps because they do not reserve surprises and allow us not to deviate completely from our eating habits.
“The Mediterranean diet, which is the one favored in the preferred countries, represents a universal value as a lifestyle based not so much on the specificity and nutritional values of the foods attributable to it, but on their balanced combination – underlines Giuseppe Fatati, Scientific Director of the Nestlé Observatory – The risks of losing the benefits of a healthy and balanced diet, for that 20% of Italians who have declared that they will not pay attention to food and that they will probably eat in a disorderly way also by exceeding in portions and dishes that are too ‘rich’, are just around the corner. A critical reflection is prompted by the fact that only 13% are intrigued by new gastronomic experiences and that the majority do not want to make new friends. The main characteristic of the Mediterranean diet is precisely conviviality, the discovery and sharing of the act of eating”.
And “observing what happens in the restaurant with diners engaged – he adds – more in interacting with their cell phones than with their neighbors, I am led to believe that technology itself is distancing us from the Mediterranean lifestyle”.
For that 0.3% who still believe in love on holiday, it is good to know that, as emerged from the Nestlé Observatory research – concludes the note – the right dish to conquer someone on the first date must be simple and popular for 35% of Italians, for 19% a pizza is enough, while for 16.4% something more refined is needed.
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