When KFC arrives at the mountain: Italy's identity wars move to the peaks

According to the Guardian, KFC has opened at two prestigious ski resorts in the Dolomites, Italy's first fast-food outlets at such altitudes, and the move has provoked threats of legal action from food and mountain purists. The story touches a nerve that runs deeper than menu choices. It is really about whether a landscape can remain itself when the world's appetite arrives at its door.

Italy's relationship with its own image has always been complicated. The country is famous for what it makes and grows—wine, cheese, cured meat, pasta—and for the places where those things are made. The Dolomites are not merely a ski destination; they are part of Italy's claim to a particular way of living, one that moves slowly, that values craft and locality, that resists the homogenising force of global consumer culture. A fried-chicken franchise at 2,000 metres feels like a puncture in that claim.

Yet we should ask what the objection really protects. The purists who threaten legal action are defending an idea of Italy that may never have existed as uniformly as they imagine. Mountain huts have always fed skiers quickly; tourists have always wanted convenience alongside beauty. The question is not whether the Alps will change—they already have—but whether Italy can absorb change without losing the thread of what makes it distinct. A KFC at a ski resort is not the end of Italian food culture. But it is a sign that the world's appetite is reshaping even the places Italians thought were theirs alone.

The real work lies not in keeping the mountains frozen in time, but in asking why Italy's own young people might prefer a bucket of chicken to what the valley below produces. That answer lies not in the Dolomites, but in the cities, in wages, in how a country values its own inheritance. The legal fight over KFC is easier than that reckoning.