Food
If today’s food culture is obsessed with burgers, credit also goes to paninari, who were the first to turn this street food into something glamorous and desirable. If at first, they flocked to the Al Panino bar in Piazza Liberty, Milan, for its sandwiches, the advent in 1982 of Burghy, the first Italian fast-food chain, was a true game-changer. Run by the GS supermarket chain, Burghy embodied the American consumerism that animated the Italian paninari. Of course, the calories of the burgers somehow contradicted their sporty, hedonistic and healthy lifestyle. Between lamps and fitness, of the paninari, fast food becomes its secular religion.
The chain, acquired by Italian food firm Cremonini in 1985, expanded to the point of counting 96 restaurants across the Belpaese by 1995. Other smaller brands tried to jump on to feeding the ever-growing company of paninari. This is the case, for example, of Mellow in Turin or Bunny in Savona. At the same time, however, the success of fast food brought the colossus McDonald's to invest in Italy, progressively going to take over all the Burghy restaurants in the boot, until the last one that definitively changed sign in 2006.
