In Tuscany, a guide to green food and wine experiences is just a click away
If certain foods and wines are particularly good, it's often because they're born from a choice based on respect for the land they come from. Because excellence always comes from sustainability.
Showcase Tuscany: the best in sustainability
Vetrina Toscana is a project of the Region in collaboration with Unioncamere, which has created a hub of ideas, places, and people to showcase the region's immense cultural heritage. This website allows us to fully understand Tuscany through its food and wine, the stars of slow travel. It showcases its specialties, explains what makes its regions so unique (including those off the beaten track), and also helps us understand why all this beauty is the result of a commitment to the environment, a commitment that is in the DNA of this gracious land. Because in Tuscany, sustainability—social, economic, and environmental—isn't a fad: it's been around forever. It has never taken its beauty for granted: it rightly considers it its greatest asset. And it protects it.
Who can join Vetrina Toscana?
A network that brings together over two thousand businesses: one of the largest agri-food networks in Italy, comprised of restaurants, shops, and producers, as well as agritourism businesses, wine routes, wineries, breweries, oil mills, beach resorts, travel agencies, and hotels, who have chosen to join. Indeed, those who join this network do so by choice, subscribing to a manifesto of values that focuses on regional culinary culture, sustainability, and respect for tradition without sacrificing innovation. This manifesto aims to help us understand where we are through what we eat, and requires those who sign up to it to protect the landscape and nature as a common good.
MeQ - Follonica's quality covered market
A network that never stops growing, with many new additions that, for us Tuscany enthusiasts, are an excellent opportunity for another trip. The next one? To Follonica, the beautiful seaside town in the Grosseto area, where the MeQ, the Covered Quality Market, has just opened: the result of an ambitious redevelopment project that, starting with food and wine, has revitalized a disused area, transforming it into a meeting place and socializing hub. Because the MeQ is a place where you can do many things: you can shop for typical products to take home, you can stay for a meal and while away a few carefree hours, perhaps sitting at the tables in the beautiful, newly revived square in front, and you can have fun, with so many food and wine experiences that are worth not just a visit, but a trip in themselves.
Above all, the traditional fish auction, which at the MeQ you can experience as it once was, by word of mouth. An ancient method used only in a few markets, for a moment generally reserved for insiders. At the MeQ, however, it's open to everyone: you sit down, watch the auctioneer explain the specifications of each fish product, its provenance, and its weight. Then you have two choices: enjoy the show (because a fish auction is truly a spectacle), or buy. You might even happen upon the day of the cooking demonstrations or meetings with the producers, who will tell you in person how to showcase their specialties.
A packed program, as well as a packed lineup of producers at MeQ, which, in keeping with the values of Vetrina Toscana, has made sustainability its guiding principle. Examples? Plastic bottles are not allowed at MeQ: there are water kiosks where you can refill your water. Furthermore, those who bring bottles can dispose of them in an eco-compactor, which, once a certain limit is reached, issues a discount coupon for purchasing products at the market. Another rule is that nothing is thrown away at MeQ: unsold products or whatever is left over at the end of the day are delivered to the Caritas soup kitchen.
Last but not least, it's wonderful to know that all this is experienced surrounded by the beauty of the murals by street artist Dario Vella: images that narrate the contemporary world while recalling the past, with artistic shutters reproducing vintage photos and a graphic texture reminiscent of old floor tiles. A glimpse of Tuscany, in a new place, for a new journey of goodness and sustainability. Or rather, a journey within a journey.