Sali e Tabacchi is a journal that investigates the connection between the creative arts and Italy's undiscovered rituals, habits, and traditions. The name — which translates roughly as "salt and tobacco," referencing the state-licensed shops that once sold these essential commodities in every Italian village — evokes a particular kind of Italian institution: humble, ubiquitous, deeply embedded in daily life, and slowly disappearing.
The magazine applies this same attention to the rituals and traditions that define Italian culture at its most local and its most authentic: the practices that are not documented in guidebooks, the habits that are passed down through families rather than institutions, the creative expressions that exist because someone has been doing the same thing, in the same place, for generations. Sali e Tabacchi finds these traditions and connects them to the contemporary creative arts, asking what they mean today and what would be lost if they vanished.
In a country where tradition is both a treasure and a burden, Sali e Tabacchi navigates that tension with intelligence and affection — celebrating what deserves to be preserved while acknowledging that not everything old is worth keeping. The magazine understands that the most interesting traditions are the living ones — the ones that are still being practised, still being argued about, and still being reinvented.