Granai della Memoria

Piercarlo Grimaldi was a full professor at the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo-Bra, where he taught Cultural Anthropology and Anthropology of Memory. From October 2011 to September 2017 he also held the position of rector of the same university. He taught cultural anthropology, ethnography, ethnology and history of popular traditions at the University of Turin and, subsequently, at the University of Eastern Piedmont. Since 1993 he has been director of the series Documenti e Ricerca di Ethnologia Europea, published by the Omega publishing house of Turin, where he has, among other things, edited the re-edition of classic texts of Piedmontese ethnography such as those by Estella Canziani, Costantino Nigra, Giuseppe Cesare Pola- Falletti Villafalletto and Agostino Barolo.

Together with Carlo Petrini and Davide Porporato he established the "Granai della Memoria", a scientific and educational project for the multimedia archiving of life stories, inspired by his teacher Nuto Revelli. His name appears among the qualified witnesses encountered by Paolo Rumiz during his itinerary along the Po completed in 2012, the results of which are narrated in the travel book Morimondo (Feltrinelli, 2013).

Piercarlo Grimaldi has been involved in ethnographic and anthropological research along the Po river for a long time, as documented by the volume Cibo e rito (2012) and by a vast collection of video testimonies, collected by him in 2007 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Journey along the Po Valley: in search of Mario Soldati's genuine foods. The results of this research were disclosed by the television program Il tempo e la storia during the episode broadcast on 9 October 2015.

On the occasion of his seventieth birthday, in July 2015, a substantial Festschrift (volume of writings prepared to celebrate a still living university professor) was published in his honor entitled Sentieri della memoria, in which various subjects including colleagues, friends and students are compared with the anthropological research work conducted by Piercarlo Grimaldi during his academic career.