If we still thought of food as the Greeks did — that is, as a gift from the Gods, something that the very will of the deities could bestow or take away from human beings, something sacred and venerable — perhaps we would treat it with greater respect today. Perhaps it would not be considered a dead thing, but a living and sacred one. Perhaps it would not even be considered a thing at all.

This is one of the many reflections that the exhibition Mito e Natura – Dalla Grecia a Pompei can inspire in its visitors, on show at Palazzo Reale in Milan from 31 July until 10 January 2016, organised not solely but also in connection with Expo 2015, as an opportunity to reflect on food and eating in antiquity.

Apulian fish plates. Photo: © Chiara Boracchi

Cultivated nature, however, is only one of the sections that populate the rich display, made up of 180 Greek, Magna Graecian and Roman artefacts from Italian museums (the Vatican Museums, the Archaeological Museum of Naples) and foreign ones (including the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and the Louvre in Paris). Some of the pieces — such as the painting from the Tomb of the Diver at Paestum, the Assteas crater, the frescoes from the House of the Golden Bracelet at Pompeii, and the crowns of golden leaves — are of extraordinary value and are worth a visit to the exhibition in their own right.

Nature is told in all its aspects: it is wild and cultivated, dangerous and indispensable. It is the terrible nature of shipwrecks and the benevolent nature of wheat fields. From a gift of Demeter and Triptolemus it becomes a simple, joyful backdrop to the deeds of deities such as Dionysus; from the personification of elements (Oceanus) it becomes a symbol, an object.

Triptolemus, messenger of Demeter. Photo: © Chiara Boracchi

The exhibition recounts the sacred garden, almost an image of the afterlife, and the Pompeian garden, a refuge of otium that offers an alternative to political life and social engagement. Nature also becomes landscape: first symbolic, then a complement to the real landscape, a domestic and ideal continuation of what can be found visually "outside". Nor is the still life absent (if this term may be used ante litteram) — so dear to the Romans — with Pompeian paintings and the carbonised remains of the very foods immortalised on the walls, left by the eruption of Vesuvius.

Panis quadratus. Photo: © Chiara Boracchi

The exhibition has been realised through a collaboration between Italian and international museums; thanks to a partnership with Orticola di Lombardia, a Viridarium has also been set up — a garden allowing visitors to immerse themselves literally in nature as conceived by the ancients. From September, the Università Statale di Milano will also organise a series of "FuoriMostra" talks to discuss the relationship between humankind and nature as part of the event La Statale per Expo.
The catalogue is published by Electa.