Some learned their craft in Gualtiero Marchesi's kitchens, others on a balcony in Rome, camping stove and phone in hand. Some captivate audiences live, while others demonstrate a technique to hundreds of thousands of people via a screen. On Saturday, November 7th and Sunday, November 8th, these four paths will intersect in Iglesias, centered on a single ingredient: mushrooms.

FUN_GO – Cooking, Art & More returns for its fourth edition, bringing Carlo Cracco, Andrea Mainardi, Ruben Bondì, and Francesca Gambacorta to the city. Piazza Sella and the historic center will host cooking demonstrations, meetings, and experiences dedicated to mushrooms and the raw materials of the Iglesiente region, featuring local chefs and professionals. Fine dining, TV cooking, and digital entertainment all come together on the same stage: the audience will be able to watch the guests work up close, observe their techniques, and understand the choices that transform an ingredient into a dish. The themes that unite the entire event are the following: local area, biodiversity, creativity, and sustainability. The full program will be revealed on Thursday, October 22nd, at 12:00 p.m., at the Town Hall.

The most anticipated name is that of Carlo Cracco . Today his restaurant is in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, and the general public remembers him at the judges' table on " MasterChef Italia," then on " Hell's Kitchen Italia" and " Dinner Club." But his is first and foremost a story of cuisine. Born in Creazzo, in the Vicenza province, in 1965, after hotel school he trained under Gualtiero Marchesi, before leaving for France to work with Alain Ducasse and Alain Senderens. Upon returning to Italy, he led Enoteca Pinchiorri in Florence and opened Le Clivie in Piedmont. Then back to Milan, where, with the owners of the historic Peck restaurant, he created Cracco-Peck, which later became his restaurant: it was there that he earned his consecration, Michelin stars. He will bring his approach, based on technique and research, to Iglesias, serving an ingredient that demands knowledge and respect.

Andrea Mainardi is the energy of the stage. The title of his book, " How Much Butter?", is enough to understand his personality, along with the generous recipes that have made him a popular face on social media. Behind the showman, however, lies a first-rate education. Born in Bergamo in 1983, after attending hotel management school in San Pellegrino Terme, he joined Gualtiero Marchesi's team at L'Albereta in Erbusco, where he worked for three years under the guidance of Andrea Berton. In 2010, he took a gamble at Officina Cucina in Brescia: a restaurant that became known for its single table. Then came television, with " La prova del cuoco" alongside Antonella Clerici and " Ci pensa Mainardi" on Fox Life. On the FUN_GO stage, he will bring what sets him apart: his immediate storytelling and ability to engage the audience.

For Ruben Bondì , born in Rome in 1997, everything changed on a balcony. During lockdown, he began cooking outdoors with a camping stove, filming himself on his phone. Those videos spawned programs on Food Network, such as " Cooking on the Balcony with Ruben," " Cooking at the Market with Ruben," and " Cooking by the Sea with Ruben," and books like " Cooking with Ruben" and " Come on, it's ready!". But before the balcony, he already had a profession. As a boy, he dreamed of drawing and poetry; at fifteen, he introduced himself to the chef who worked downstairs to learn the trade. Then came hotel management school, an internship at the Michelin-starred restaurant Il Pagliaccio, a stint in London at The Ned, and years as a private chef in Rome and Milan. His cuisine speaks the language of Roman and Roman-Jewish traditions and is committed to sustainability: his commitment to combating food waste has even earned him a role with the FAO. And it is precisely the recovery and valorization of ingredients that he will be speaking about in Iglesias.

The quartet is rounded out by Francesca Gambacorta , known online as Frafoodlove. Her story begins on a stool: as a child, she climbed onto it to see what was being prepared for dinner, as she recounts in her book " Complex Simplicity. Gourmet for Everyone." In those pages, she doesn't even hide the moments when she doubted her dream, and accompanies her story with fifty recipes. Today, she is a personal chef and creative cuisine teacher, with over 700,000 followers on Instagram, and in 2021, Forbes Italia listed her among the twenty most followed food influencers in the country. Her method has a clear goal: to explain techniques and steps to make chef cuisine accessible. Last February, she led an Italian cooking residency at a resort in the Maldives. At FUN_GO, meanwhile, the flavors of the Iglesiente region await her.

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