There is a moment when a territory decides whether to remain an image or become a process.
And often that moment passes through an apparently simple object: a bread, an oil, a tarallo.
From March 6 to 8, 2026, I will be in Palo del Colle for Tarallo Lab – Identity, Supply Chain, Community, an open and free urban co-design workshop promoted by Consorzio Mestieri Puglia and the Municipality of Palo del Colle, which will take place at the Laboratorio Urbano Rigenera.
But those who know Rural Hack know that for us it is never just an event.
With our entire human circus – researchers, agronomists, communicators, designers, students, Italian and international alumni – we will take part in Tarallo Lab as one enters a real laboratory: with respect, with listening, with the willingness to let ourselves be crossed by the tensions that inhabit territories.
The tarallo as a cultural device
The tarallo of Palo del Colle is not just a product. It is a cultural device.
It is an agri-food supply chain, of course. It is economy – businesses, employment, market. But it is also gesture, preserved knowledge, manual work, skills sedimented over time. It is the difference between small and large producers, between craftsmanship and industrialization, between market and memory. It is a field of forces.
Tarallo Lab was created to systematize culture, economy and the narrative of the territory. The three thematic strands on which work will be carried out make this clear:
- enhancement of the agri-food supply chain;
- identity and contemporary languages;
- territorial alliances and models of light governance.
It is not about creating folklore. It is about understanding how to tell the story of the tarallo without reducing it to a postcard, how to strengthen its quality and recognizability without flattening it into a purely commercial logic, how to build community networks capable of lasting.
Hyperlocal communities and communities of intention
We are within a tension that runs through the entire contemporary Mediterranean: that between hyperlocal communities and communities of intention.
Hyperlocal communities are rooted, embodied, made of faces, relationships, real economies, concrete conflicts. Communities of intention are those that choose to recognize themselves around a horizon of meaning, even beyond geographical boundaries.
Rural Hack has always been a community of intention that dialogues with hyperlocal communities. It moves through them, attempting to co-evolve with them.
Tarallo Lab will be a space in which these two dimensions will meet: the real territory of Palo del Colle and a broader network of people who believe in an idea of territorial development that is non-extractive, not competitively destructive, but cooperative and situated.
Tradition or betrayal?
Every tradition is a successful betrayal.
If it remains immobile, it becomes a museum. If it transforms without awareness, it becomes just another commodity. The point is not to choose between preserving or innovating. The point is to understand which transformations can be practiced without dissolving what makes a collective experience recognizable.
The tarallo, in this sense, is a perfect laboratory. It is territorial identity and a product that travels in markets. It is manual knowledge and (perhaps) machine. It is memory and possibility.
During Tarallo Lab we will try to work on this tension in order to define practicable trajectories together: evolutionary paths that do not necessarily contemplate winners and losers, but that hold together differences, responsibilities and visions.
Southern Thought and territorial development
Perhaps it is because for me it is impossible to return to Puglia without thinking of one of the thinkers who has influenced me the most (and not only me, in truth), namely the immense Franco Cassano, but for me this means practicing a Southern Thought that is neither nostalgia nor victimhood, but the ability to inhabit the limit as a generative condition.
The South not as a periphery chasing a center, but as a place that develops its own forms of development, cooperation, and civil economy. A South capable of remaining attuned to what is happening on the planet without losing its authenticity.
Every time I return to Puglia I am happy. It is the place where I have collected some of the most beautiful satisfactions of my journey. It is the place where there is still a wide group of young people (and former young people) capable of holding together rootedness and openness, concreteness and vision, without retreating into nostalgia. But for these young people, how important is “tarallità”?
The program and guests of Tarallo Lab
During the three days, moments of collective activation, dialogue with local producers, thematic collaborative work sessions and public presentation of the results are planned.
Renowned professionals and scholars in the field of food culture and territorial communication will take part, including the dear and highly esteemed Nick Difino, Fiorella Perrone, Roberta Bruno, Roberto Covolo and many other protagonists of the regional food community, such as institutions of the caliber of the Consorzio Pane Altamura, the Slow Food Presidium Biscotto di Ceglie and the OP Mandorla Toritto.
Participation is free and open to everyone, with a particular invitation to young people under 35, operators in the agri-food supply chain, local businesses and artisans, designers, economists, sociologists, communicators, representatives of cultural associations and public administrators.
A rite of cohesion
Tarallo Lab is not just an event. It is a rite of cohesion.
Not a celebratory rite, but a space in which to transform differences into alliances, tensions into possibilities, conflicts into dialogue.
I invite all readers of Rural Hack, our Italian and international alumni, our Apulian friends and anyone who feels the need to work within this fertile tension, to take part from March 6 to 8, 2026 in Palo del Colle.
If you believe that the future of territories is shaped by communities that get to work, then this laboratory is yours as well.
I look forward to seeing you in Palo del Colle.