Food characterizes human societies in a variety of aspects.

In everyday life we are constantly called upon to take it into consideration, not only as an essential source of nourishment but also as an opportunity to meet others, to define our identity or to discover, especially in a globalized world, distant and exotic traditions.

And far beyond the individual experience, food production, processing, transport and trade are all central and characterizing phenomena of economic and civil life.

Even the University, over the centuries, has not failed to deal with food and everything related to it, and this interest has left a tangible sign in the historical libraries and ancient book archives.

From an archival point of view, the complex documentary of the Collegio Pio of la Sapienza Nuova, an institution that from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century has hosted students gathered in Perugia for University studies, is particularly rich in information relating to the history of food.

On a bibliographic level, University libraries, despite not having an origin prior to the nineteenth century, still host incunabula and books derived from legacies, donations or purchases, that deal, in several respects, with nutrition issues.

On the occasion of EXPO 2015 we choose to display a small group of documents taken from the pre-unitary archive and library stores of the University.

These documents testify that our academic institution, apparently so far away from the material human needs, has always been, in the past as in the contemporary era, a part of the pulsating life of the society, being fed by science and wisdom but also from food and beverages.