Welcome to our Emilia-Romagna and Bologna tour diary, giving you a taste of this entertaining adventure.

October 9th

Emilia-Romagna and Bologna, a New Adventure!

Today, we started our Emilia Romagna tour in the beautiful city of Ravenna. If you haven’t heard of this central Italian region, it is hiding in plain sight, stretched like a band between Florence and Milan. Some of the best food comes from this region, and we will get to that eventually, but today was about Byzantine history.

Ravenna, while small and quiet today, was the western capital of the Roman Empire after it had moved east. The churches of the city date to the 5 and 600s, what many consider the “Dark Ages.” Dark those ages were not, once you enter the churches you’ll be delighted by glittering mosaics, some of the best in the world.

We toured mosaics and wandered the city, stopping for a lunch of local specialties. Later in the day, our group got to try their hands at making their own mosaic with the same materials and tools used 1400 years ago.

A few pictures by tour guest Sandy Baldwin:

October 10th

En route to Bologna, we stopped in the small town of Brisighella that recently became a world UNESCO site. Loved this town with all its history. Thank you, Sandy, for these cool photos!

October 12th

Today on our Emilia-Romagna and Bologna tour, we visited Italy’s unique food theme park, Fico/Eataly World

October 13th

You may not know this about me, but I’m a secret gear head and drive like a Sicilian, so I had a special request for our newest tour itinerary. Today’s events on the Emilia-Romagna and Bologna tour included a visit to the Ferrari museum where I got to drive a formula one Ferrari…sort of! We saw a lot of cool cars and I hopped into a simulator and only crashed three…maybe four times.

Have you ever wanted to drive a Ferrari?

The Ferrari Museum in Maranello, Italy has a fascinating collection that chronicles the evolution of, arguably, the most famous sports car. The tour is interesting even if you aren’t into cars, but the best part is the chance to drive a Ferrari at the end. Ok, it’s not an actual Ferrari but for me, it was close enough! Andiamo!

October 14th

Have you ever sampled Lambrusco?

I know, I know, for many of you, Lambrusco wine is not a name associated with quality. Fizzy red wine? Yuck!

My association comes from when I was a kid, I remember my mom’s women’s club drinking Lambrusco, it was super popular in the 80’s.

Here in Reggio Emilia, I found out why I have that strong association. Back in the 1970’s and 80’s, the decision was made to produce this local wine by consortium, meaning that grapes would be picked from many different farms, regardless of quality, and a uniform product would emerge—a sweet, fizzy red wine. It was called “Italian Coke” back then, and it sold like crazy. Americans LOVED IT. You probably know of it from this time when it was a ubiquitous Italian wine, along with Chianti in a basket-bottomed bottle. It was cheap and eventually became a tacky drink to serve.

These days, Lambrusco producers are trying to rehabilitate the image of this wine. Smaller producers are making estate-bottled vintages that are dry, and nothing like Coke. The result is a fresh, bright, and very fun wine that can pair easily with cheeses for aperitivo, meats with dinner, and works even with a pizza.

Lambrusco isn’t aged, as one of its main qualities is freshness. Due to its quick production (and also because of the bad reputation lingering from the 80’s) it is an embarrassingly cheap wine- about $4-7 per bottle here in Italy.

Our Emilia-Romagna and Bologna tour visited Erimiti Medici, which proudly takes on the mission of changing the perception of Lambrusco, and let me tell you, I’m sold. Fizzy red wine is a revelation, perfect for warm days and lazy lunches.

Have a look for Lambrusco at your local wine shop, you won’t believe how it’s changed.

October 15th

If you’re going to Emilia Romagna, there are a few food products you really must try. For me, the top of the list is Parmigiano.

If you grew up like I did, you knew Parmesan, that crumbly cheese that came in the green shaker. I had no idea what parmigiano was until I came to Italy in the 90’s, and what I found has nothing to do with that green can. Instead, it is a salty, aged, hard cheese that is not just for grating over the top of pasta, it is also good just eaten in chunks.

We visited a factory that makes a special kind of Parmigiano, called Vacche Rosse. These special heirloom cows were almost on the brink of extinction after WWII as the cheese makers swapped them out for more productive cows. Nowadays, cheese makers are finding that the old fashioned cows were better all along, producing a more flavorful cheese.

After seeing the production process, it’s no wonder that real Parmigiano cheese is so expensive, and also a protected product, or a “DOP”. It’s very labor intensive, and one wheel takes about 500 liters of milk! These precious wheels are marked with special bands and each wheel is registered, to avoid counterfeits. No other cheese is allowed to be called Parmigiano or even Parmesan because it devalues the real thing.

We tried several different ages—24 to 40 months ago or more, and personally, the aged stuff is my jam.

October 16th

One of the lessons of our tour in Emilia Romagna has been that not all vinegar is created equal. You may have had Balsamic vinegar on a salad or a sauce, but have you had the real deal?

We visited an “acetaia” this week to learn about how traditional vinegar is made, and, despite so many years of guiding here in Italy, I didn’t really understand the differences between products.

Traditional balsamic is a laborious process, one that can take 25 or more years. It is produced using a series of wooden casks, called a “batteria” with a large mamma cask and four increasingly smaller casks of different kinds of wood.

At the end of grape harvest, grape juice is boiled and this new must is added to the mamma. The casks are in hot attics where they can freely evaporate, and as they do so, a couple of times per year, vinegar is moved from the mamma to the next cask, then that cask to the next and so on. The last cask is where the final product is, and 10% per year can be taken and aged further, used as is, or blended to make different qualities of completed balsamic. The real story is that this is a patience game—it takes at least a decade to make a quality product. When a new baby arrives in a family that has an acetaia, the baby gets its own batteria which will develop along with them, and becomes a lifelong gift. Some batterie are over 100 years old!

We sampled different qualities of balsamic and this tastes nothing like the stuff you buy at Safeway. The real thing is sweet and intensely flavorful, but not really vinegary. There is no sugar or color added to the real thing, so reading labels carefully is smart. The cost will also tip you off to a good vinegar, as a small bottle of the top quality will cost about $100.

Is it worth $100 for vinegar? Depends. I’m not enough of a connoisseur to see the difference in the top grades (red, silver, gold) but the difference between what you probably know of grocery store balsamic and the “tradizionale” is incredible. The flavor is so big, you need just a drop or two, making your $100 go a very long way. You wouldn’t want to cook with the top quality stuff, but most producers also make an affordable blended, everyday balsamic.

A few more photos from Sandy, of Langhirano

Parma is the hometown of Verdi, and they have a festival in his honor. Every day of the festival, at 1pm, they do a mini concert so everyone can sample the current opera. This is a tradition here, where cheap tickets (meal included) were always available from the initiation of the opera house, to let every citizen appreciate music.