Paninaro

A fast-food burger on sesame bread, the kind of food that was served at Al Panino.

Paninaro is a denomination that identified a group of young people who began meeting in the bar Al Panino in Via Agnello in Milan during the early 1980s. Later they met in Piazza San Babila where was the first restaurant of the chain of fast foods "Burghy". This subculture had no political orientation and was obsessed with American fashion and culture, in marked contrast to the politically engaged generations of the 1960s and 1970s. The paninaro movement developed in tandem with the hedonism of the 1980s, driven by Reagan- nomy, Thatcherism, and deregulated liberalism, and particularly attracted the children of well-to-do professionals who occupied the space between the families of wage earners, and high-income families and wage earners.

It was also reinforced by the television broadcasting of consumer messages and proposing a model of self-affirmation based on the acquisition of status symbols. In particular the Italy 1 network explicitly targeted youth.

The paninaro movement also spread in some European countries, and is immortalized in the 1986 "Paninaro" cult song by the Pet Shop Boys.

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