It was the evening of Monday 18 October 2004. I was 23 years old and, together with three friends from the “Suor Orsola Benincasa” University, we met at Naples Central Station to catch a night train that would take us to Turin, where we would wake up the following morning. We were there because Marino Niola had told us he would accept our application to write a thesis in Food Anthropology if we went as volunteers to an event that, for the first time, would bring 5,000 farmers from all over the world to Italy. That event was called Terra Madre.
I remember the biting cold of Corso Vittorio Emanuele in the morning, in a Turin that was still slumbering. I – out of sheer inertia – followed Maurizio (the eldest of the group) who, by asking passersby for directions and showing plenty of initiative, led us to the Palazzo del Lavoro, where the first global meeting of the Food Communities was due to open the following day. 
No one could tell us anything; our names had certainly been passed on, but who knows where. In the evening, we rather by chance boarded a bus with 50 delegates from Eastern Europe, South Africa and South America and arrived in Bra, in the hamlet of Bandito, where we were to spend the night. 
It was there that I met Matjaz, a Slovenian farmer who grew an apple with a history very similar to that of the Annurca from my city. And Francesca, who was from Naples and was a vocalist with Taranta Power. The next day, taking advantage of a minor organisational glitch at the event, we ‘proclaimed ourselves’ volunteers for the presidium office, where there was a figure unknown to me: his name was Carlo Petrini. Shortly afterwards, the Prince of Wales, the current King Charles III, was due to arrive at that office. That evening, back at our accommodation, together with everyone else, who spoke different languages, Francesca played and we sang at the top of our voices “Che sarà”.
It was there that I fell in love with Slow Food. Because only “love” can describe that feeling you cannot explain but which makes you make choices incomprehensible to everyone else, which makes you cover miles and swallow defeats but which makes you feel at home. The world is full of memories like mine, the whole world that today mourns Carlin, the man none of us ever knew how to say no to, the man who sparked a revolution through food, uniting gastronomy and sustainability, the man who said: “He who sows utopia reaps reality.”