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MAGAZINE Februar y/March 2025 is more than just physiologically medicinal if it is also nutritionally balanced? After all, luxury is what we aspire to and makes us feel good. It is an intangible emotion. And nothing makes us feel better than luxury and care. Including breakfast. And for this and a thousand other reasons I embarked on a journey that led me to sit at the best tables of great hotels for the first meal of the day. Up and down Italy, to the beloved Lake Como, the industrious Milan that never denies itself moments of leisure because rest and relaxation are necessary for business ideas to grow fertile, beautiful Tuscany with the gastronomic tradition of a thousand villages, the Aeolian sea where you can find thalassa and kolpos, pelagos, hals and pontos, and where on Vulcano, ‘caput mundi’ for the author who loves a restless land of fire that knows how to rest, the cuisine from breakfast onwards has its dose of tasty and colourful Sicilian flavour. On this journey we talk about it with Cesare Murzilli Pastry Chef at Lungarno Collection Portrait Milano; Giuseppe Mancino , executi- ve Chef of the two-Michelin-starred restaurant Il Piccolo Principe at the Principe di Piemonte in Viareggio; Claudio Di Bernardo , Chef and Food & Beverage Manager at the Grand Hotel in Rimini; Gianluca Colucci , Pastry Chef at the Therasia Resort Sea and Spa on Vulcano; Luca Speroni , Restaurant Manager at Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni Bellagio; Luca Mazzanica , Exe- cutive Chef of the Amandus restaurant at Villa Lario Resort in Mandello Lario; Stefano Piz- zasegale , Executive Chef of the Gastronomic Restaurant at Palazzo Parigi Hotel and Grand Spa, Milan; Osvaldo Presazzi , Executive Chef at the Grand Hotel Tremezzo. Sunday morning. It's the most important meal of the day and should never be skipped if we want to kick-start our metabolism and face the day with energy. For hoteliers it's one of the key moments for generating customer quality. Although brunch seems to be going out of fa- shion, breakfast today has become a ritual that goes beyond the service a hotel has to offer its guests. It is increasingly replacing aperitifs and dinners out, becoming a moment of meeting, business or socialising, depending on whether we gather around a table to talk business or relax with friends or family. An experiential moment of leisure that draws on the culinary narrative for our desire to listen, that allows for unexpected multisensory experiences (of taste, of sound, of sight) that play on our desire to listen, with a nod to sustainability and thanks to which we make the territory our own with all its anthropological and cultural values so as not to feel guilty about the somewhat ple- asurable excesses of pastry in an increasingly health-conscious society, and which makes a show of the aesthetics of the act of preparing food at the table and the sublime locations whe- re we spend time consuming it. Time. Having time allows us to choose, and the possibility of choice is the true modern luxury. In today's frenetic society it's a wonderful gift we can give ourselves. We are human beings and as such we are incomplete and vulnerable. This is why we need care, as Luigina Mortari, professor of Phenomenology of Care at the De- partment of Human Sciences at the University of Verona, reminds us. So why not get out and spend some time around a table for the first meal of the day, for a therapeutic breakfast that printed page, struggling with the constraints of lines and spaces, and I often regret the freedom of verse. In the same way, Raschi's cuisine is not a losing act, a chef who becomes a creator of images that acquire movement in the seafood cuisine of Guido 1946 without experiencing an existential crisis similar to that of Mastroian- ni-Guido Anselmi, a film director devoid of art in the Fellinian sense. Raschi's cuisine avoids being suffocated by words, images and sounds that have no reason to live, that come from emp- tiness and return to emptiness in an attempt to create when one has nothing more to say. He doesn't pile up elements in a confusing ‘suite of completely gratuitous episodes, which may even be amusing’ course after course. We don't have a blank page syndrome. We have no memory lapses, we have no lights that no longer come on because of an existential crisis that drains and takes away strength. Because Raschi's creative streak is far from exhausted and his relationship with his staff is far from strained. Educating one- self to an act of silence would therefore not be an act of loyalty on the part of the chef towards his customers, thanks to a cuisine in which the ingredients dance from beginning to end in a relentless carousel that mixes reality, dream and that right amount of amazement that genera- tes wonder, as and more than the actors in the never-ending dance on the catwalk of 8½ by maestro Fellini knew how to do. To tell the truth. The truth that I know, that I seek, that I have not yet found. Only in this way do I feel alive. I imagine it is these lines by Mastroianni, spoken in the finale of Fellini's 8 ½, that accompany Raschi as he gets up and leaves into the now dark night that rises from the distant sea ----------------------------------------------------------- AT PAGE 32 DID YOU KNOW? The luxurious experience of breakfast in a hotel THE FIRST MEAL OF THE DAY IS TURNING INTO AN EXCLUSIVE EXPERIENCE, FAR FROM THE CAFÉ TRADITION. WE DISCOVER HOW LUXURY HOTELS ARE TRANSFORMING THIS MOMENT INTO A MULTI-SENSORY EXPERIENCE by Gianluca Donadini Breakfast. Sweet or savoury. Buffet or à la carte. Continental or American. Quickly because we have work to do, or comfortably relaxed on a IX