It's worth recalling Napoleone Bonaparte's celebrated statement 'Une armée marche à son estomac/An army marches on its stomach’ as he was well-aware of the crucial importance of the supplies facilities for an army on campaign. Between 1915 and 1918 Italy mobilized about five million soldiers, who were to be supplied with all the needs for the war: from daily-use objects to arms, from uniforms to shoes, and so on. Among these needs, meals were definitely the main elements within the files of the military commissariats designated to the troops' provisioning.

Yet, it was inevitable that, in the framework of a long and 'total' war involving every part of the society, such as World War One, not only the army's needs could be taken into accounts, but also the civil population's who strove to reach the final victory.
During the Great War a large number of publications, often in flyer-format, were printed and unconventionally disseminated, beyond or alongside the ordinary publishing diffusion. It was about minor publications of fighters' biographies, of fighters' or veterans' associations, charitable and assistance institutions, organizations of both civil and religious communities supporting the soldiers' families, women communities, war cook books, mutual aid societies, and so on. The exhibit offers a report including many documents about wartime nutrition in its several implications: from the war vegetable gardens to food production and food supplies, from mess in the trenches to food preservation; to use a general term, referring to either the soldiers in the trenches or the civil society, that could be called 'cooking and food consumption'.

The exhibit sections offer varied itineraries devoted to both great contents and materials' typologies.
The concept of nutrition intends to render a collective image of the Italian memory as well as of its identity within the Great War, considering that both the trenches and the eating habits have been one of the first great unifying factors of the whole country since the Unity of Italy.
Italy, war and food (1915-1918) furthermore develops the research carried out within the European project 'Europeana Collections 1914-1918', which, through the Europeana free access portal, already made available an important collection including more than 400.000 documents in digital format, coming from ten European National Libraries, among which the BNCF.