Slow Food is an idea, a movement, and an international non-profit organization with its roots and headquarters in Bra, Italy. The idea itself was formed in the 1980s by a group of people connected with the left-wing ARCI (Associazione Ricreativa Culturale Italiana). At first, they took the name Arcigola after ARCI and the magazine La Gola, a name that can also mean ‘arch appetite’. A protest against the opening of the second McDonald’s restaurant in Italy, in the Piazza di Spagna in Rome in 1986, inspired the name Slow Food and its symbol, the snail. Three years later delegates from fifteen countries met in Paris to sign the Slow Food Manifesto and the international movement was born.
