From the Expo, a contradictory setting for a theme that could have been played out with grit by Italy. The lack of relationship between representation and content, between the ability to attract on interesting topics and the behaviour induced in visitors, generates a feeling of waste and regret for a beautiful missed opportunity.

Walking along the Expo Decumanus, one has a feeling of unease, slight and hard to define but persistent.

One wonders: perhaps it is the disgust for the leitmotif of the traditional market stalls displaying quarters of ox, fennel and swordfish, grains and jams, all made of the purest of Dante Ferretti-designed cinematographic plastic? Or perhaps it is the astonishment of seeing orderly and patient flocks waiting for four or five hours to enter a fair stand, lights and colours, great photos and videos, loud sounds and throngs, and then leave and get back in line for another round at another fair? One is stunned because the people in line are the ones honking their horns a second after the green light, asking why you don’t answer your text message two minutes after sending it, not holding up a written page and asking for 140-character summaries. Those impatient people perhaps consider 300 minutes in a queue a kind of secondary annoyance compared to the boast of being able to say ‘I was there’ and take a selfie with the chaser in an oriental costume. Perhaps for them, queues are unusual occasions for reflection on the transience of life, or a place for Zen illuminations and we didn’t notice.

There are not many other explanations, also because the Expo queues wind through depressing places: you stand for hours in the corridors, in the infinite (and unfinished) residual spaces that result from the allotment of stands more or less lined up along the great ally, then you go to a theatrical non-place, where you are taken in a little show, banal or exciting but always of disorienting images, as in any self-respecting funfair, and then outside, to see the queues again.

However, it is not enough to explain the feeling of discomfort by the tiredness of the visit to the mega-event, the self-centred clamour of the school groups, the penitential uncomfortableness of the queues, the overall low quality of the place.

It is something deeper. You realise this on the way home, when you are asked: did you see the Expo? How is Feeding the Planet?

You remain salty: ah yes, the theme of that arch-gastronomic staging was Feeding the Planet… an ethical imperative, a messianic incipit luxuriously ended in pizza and figs.

And to say that the theme was launched with an interesting rhetorical dressing.

It was argued: what country but Italy could tackle such a powerful theme, as fascinating as an Indiana Jones adventure, dramatic and festive at the same time?

And it was not said because we know how to make beautiful trade fair pavilions, but because everyone realises that Italy is founded on a pact with the earth, which gives an unparalleled climatic, alimentary and sensual well-being to its inhabitants, in exchange for a treatment of beauty that over the centuries we have developed a dozen ad hoc versions of, producing landscapes of excellence.

It is the pact with the land that has traditionally made us world-famous, fuelling a rhetoric that is still enduring, even if belied by 50 years of nefariousness and betrayals.

From the cultivated countryside to the piazzas with their tables, to the steaming dishes, the most well-known connotations of the Italian landscape are about what we eat, unlike the vast wild horizons of the landscape boasted by the north or the fascinating uninhabitability of the deserts and forests of the south.

There are over 1,000 events at Expo, with people from Calabria and Treviso, from Salento and Cuneo recounting how in their parts people eat well, cultivate better and every day follow without even knowing it that Mediterranean diet which seems to be the healthiest way to feed the planet.

Not only that, but they tell us, in the hidden, crowd-free halls of the Expo, how the work of eating well, from the farmer to the cook, from the winemaker to the bagger, is a continuous search for balance, sustainability, circular economies, synergic constructions with social, cultural and landscape contexts. They tell us, recounting their experiences, that food is slow, that small is beautiful, that millions of mouths have traditionally fed on millions of different production actions. They tell us that resisting the foreign push to set up one gigantic apparatus and provide standardised food, ever closer to the pills of the futuristic jokes of the last millennium, is not only a matter of resilience, but represents a serious political and economic alternative to the prevailing trends, dense with crises and disgusting fallout.

The rural peripheries of Italy, which are our real pride, tell us of these resistances, these conquests, and they come quietly to tell us so at the Expo, in a place where the builders and managers have not even bothered to make physically evident the search for balance, sustainability and socio-cultural or landscape synergies, that is, the front of both tradition and innovation in Italy.

The result is a sort of alienation of the speakers, a sense of unbridgeable distance that you feel every time you come out of a seminar or conference where they have spoken (among a few, a very few) about quality oil producers or the role of females in Asian and African agriculture, about ways not to waste water or to protect the wisdom of traditional cuisines, and you find yourself in the main street of insignificant glass and wood facades and groups taking selfies.

Now, this is a plausible explanation for the unease one feels thinking back to Expo.

But the challenge remains: even if Rho fails to set a new front in the long battle to make peace with the earth, to become active Italians again.

Even if, after years of promises to make Expo a territorially widespread event, visitors to the magnificent rural and landscape experiences prepared within 200 km of Milan are at a ratio of 1:1000 compared to those walking along the Decumanus.

Perhaps there will be some result: perhaps the figure of the evangelical sower, strong in the dissipation of his gesture, has inspired the communicative style of Expo.

So perhaps we should be content with the fact that 20 million people, standing in line, may have read a few significant phrases placed on the theme of the various pavilions, even if the unfolding inside often confused ideas, or were off-topic. So someone will have gone home with a few phrases floating in the overall confusion: from Harmonious Diversity (Japan) to Let’s Share and Enrich the Legacy (Haiti), from Sowing Sustainability (Qatar) to Seeds for a New World: Food, Diversity and Legacy (Mexico), from Cultivating the Future (Spain) to Not of Bread Alone… (Vatican, of course).

Maybe.

Let’s hope.