Emilia-Romagna - Italy's Culinary Capital

Image via Wikipedia

By John Giebler


By a stroke of luck I ended up in Emilia-Romagna, an Eden of fine cooking and savory ingredients. I'd been living in France for nearly a decade and, while the food captivated me, each trip to Italy begged another. Growing up in the U.S, I had an idea of Italy as a European state, but now I was discovering its infinite provincial diversity. The nation has millennia of history, but it's only been a unified country since 1861. Twenty individual regions weave a multicolored patchwork of provinces, cities, and villages: bygone kingdoms and feudal states.
In 2000 I landed a job as a tour guide with a company based in Forlì. No idea where that was. I hefted my world atlas onto the kitchen table and thumbed through the index: F... For... Forlì. Italy sculpts more of a leg than a boot on the map. Forlì lies in Emilia-Romagna: a broad expanse spreading across her thigh like a garter. The region takes its name from the Via Aemilia - the 160-mile ancient Roman road stretching east, straight as a tightrope from Piacenza to the Adriatic Sea.

Italian Street Food

Image by Nicoze via Flickr
By: Michele de Capitani


Italian gastronomic tradition does not only include restaurant dishes, or dishes that need a complex preparation and are to be eaten while sitting at a table, but also many kinds of street food, which are different in each region. Street food is very appreciated both by Italians, who like its traditional and intense flavour, its authenticity, its cheapness, and the possibility that it gives to eat quickly, and by those tourists that wish to discover every aspect of the places they are visiting, gastronomic culture included, and who prefer to shorten the time dedicated to eat in order to immerse themselves in visiting the city.