University of Gastronomic Sciences

University of Gastronomic Sciences

Università degli Studi di Scienze Gastronomiche
The main campus building, formerly a palatial summer lodge
Type	Private, non-profit
Established	2004
President	Carlo Petrini
Dean	Piercarlo Grimaldi
Location	Bra, Piedmont, Italy
Website	www.unisg.it

The University of Gastronomic Sciences (UNISG) is an international academic institution in northern Italy. The campus is in Pollenzo, near Bra, a city in the north-west region of Piedmont. Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food Movement, established the school as the first university to focus on the organic relationships between food and cultures. More than 1,500 students have taken courses at UNISG since it opened in 2004.

UNISG offers a variety of courses leading to undergraduate and graduate degrees in areas related to gastronomy, food cultures and heritage, food ecologies, and food communications. As part of their curriculum, students go on study tours in European countries and other parts of the world.

Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement, established the international university in 2004 to train students for employment in food and tourism industries, food-related government departments, or food-related journalism. UNISG is the only slow-food university in the world. The school's mission, according to its web site, includes projects that protect biodiversity and build an organic relationship among gastronomy, biological, agricultural and food/nutritional sciences, and social sciences and humanities. It mirrors the mission of the Slow Food movement—which asserts that an understanding of food involves economics, environmental science, history, biology, and anthropology, as well as aesthetics—and is true to the movement's core principles of "good, clean, and fair".

Petrini chose the Agenzia di Pollenzo, a 19th-century neo-Gothic palace, for the school's campus. The Savoy royal family built the original structure in 1833 as a summer lodge.

A second campus, at Colorno, opened in 2005. It offered master's degrees centered on gastronomic sciences, food culture, and communications. Later it merged with the programs at Pollenza. The master's degree possibilities had expanded by 2014 to four: Food, Place and Identity; Human Ecology and Sustainability; High-Quality Products; and Representation, Meaning and Media.

UNISG enrolls 85 students every year in the first year of the BSc program and about 100 in all the Master's programs; since then more than 1,500 have taken courses at the university. In March 2015, 57 students from 16 countries—Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, South Korea, Ethiopia, Germany, Japan, Italy, Mali, Mexico, Ghana, United States, South Africa, Switzerland and Thailand—received diplomas from the school.