A one-of-a-kind project in Italy that opens the doors of a prison and offers inmates an opportunity for reintegration — along with a menu well worth trying.
There are four inmates who wait tables, while five work behind the stoves, guided by a professional chef and a maître d' from outside the prison environment. This is the team behind Italy's first restaurant located inside a prison. InGalera opened its doors on 26 October at the II Casa di Reclusione di Milano Bollate, with a single goal: to accompany inmates along a rehabilitative path towards social inclusion.
Open at lunchtime for a quick meal as well as in the evening, the restaurant was strongly championed by the social cooperative Abc La Sapienza in Tavola and by PwC, a multinational company operating in the field of business consulting, which made the project possible both organisationally and financially.
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"This is an out-of-the-box idea, born thanks to the collaboration with Abc. The cooperative was already working in the catering sector, but had never gone so far as to open a restaurant," says Francesco Ferrara, partner at PwC. "Thanks to the willingness of the Bollate detention facility, we managed to integrate three worlds that were previously separate: the prison world, the business world and the world of education." In this case, PwC took care of the entire bureaucratic side and the business plan, as well as involving the inmates in studying hospitality practices.
It is not merely a business venture, then, one that will need to be economically sustainable. InGalera is a genuine social experiment: for the first time, a prison opens its doors to the city to allow citizens to discover a reality that is often ignored and far removed from everyday life. And to allow inmates a gradual inclusion into society, as has been embedded in the prison's DNA since 2000, when it launched its first "attenuated custody" projects.
"I want InGalera to become a strong and credible brand and to represent an important entry on the CV of every inmate who passes through it; let us not forget that the one who stamps 'never-ending sentence' on those who have been in prison is society itself. I want to help remove this stigma," declared Silvia Polleri, president of the Cooperativa Abc La Sapienza in Tavola.
52 seats, at lunch and dinner, six days out of seven. "We would like this project to become replicable, because the idea behind it has an enormous social benefit," concludes Ferrara. "Indeed, we hope it can be a success in other prisons."