МАРКО ПОЛО | Corrado Colombo

Since several years, the Italian presence in Uzbekistan, mainly in the city of Tashkent, is progressively developing a rich mutual exchange between the cultures of the two nations and of the two peoples.

The project concerns the creation of an Italian-Uzbek cultural center focusing on food and cuisine,   where high-standard Italian food and wine reveal their nature of topic elements of the Italian culture,  interlaced with art, music and other cultural expressions. The center will be at the same time a space for meetings and business.

The main architectural idea is to create a place evoking an Italian atmosphere thought the use of space and materials, at the same time sophisticated and genuine. As the project focuses on quality, it deserves to be materialized in something different and more qualified than the usual, often trivial, Italian restaurant with its vernacular atmosphere. The white bricks walls are intended to suggest the memory of the typical Italian country restaurant (the “trattoria”), with its tasty food made with the products of the farms. The wooden floor recalls at the same time the warehouses of the middle-age Italian merchants who first established relations between Italy and central Asia. The ensemble results in a versatile theater for the staging of the new relationships between the two cultures.
The furniture design is expressing, with the use of simple and natural materials, mainly light-colored wood, the value of the Italian design culture, in a contemporary interpretation of the tradition.
The decoration will mainly be constituted by large photographic reproductions of Italian landscapes or traditional icons of Italian food, kitchen or wine.

The main restaurant room (the “Trattoria”) is conceived as a wide, light-flooded and flexible space, where large tables for banquets and convivial meals could be allocated, as well as smaller tables for family or romantic dinners. It will be open to the view of the garden terrace and of the kitchen. The bottom part of the room can be used either for normal uses and as a stage for music, projections or other cultural events. At the entrance corner, it will be hosted the Italian bar, for aperitifs or for the typical after-dinner drinks as well as for bar service during the night cultural events.

In a separated part of the building a different area has been imagined, potentially independent but functionally connected. The “Leonardo Club”, with a separate entrance, it will be at the same time a higher level restaurant, where it will be possible to host theme activities, or to serve “menus à la carte” of a more refined class, or business lunches and dinner, all in a secluded area, and a sort of selected club for social, business or private meetings.

Cooking itself is an art and a show. The kitchen will be open to the main restaurant room through a wide glass-window. Eating in the restaurant will be a global experience of interaction with the Italian gastronomical culture. The project includes a multipurpose hall, in this case imagined at the underground level. The hall will host various activities, as art, design and photography exhibitions; presentations and/or tastings of both food and non-food products; meetings and small conventions.

The bakery is a topic place of the Italian way of life. It is a sort of a meeting point where to chat and exchange impressions about the life of the neighborhood while waiting for the fresh bread or pizza, enjoying the smell from the oven.

The Italian cafeteria will be a place to enjoy the pleasure of Italian coffee and cappuccino for breakfast or for a mid-day break, with fresh pastry from bakery and kitchen. A garden terrace on the front side, with pergolas and sunshades will constitute a pleasant area in the good season and a further element of attraction of the complex from outside.

The direct supplying of Italian products needed by the restaurant could be optimized with the creation of a little Italian market, where people can buy directly the products they have tasted in their meals there, contributing in this way to a larger diffusion of Italian food culture.