Cured Meats, the King of Cheeses and Black Gold: A Food Tour Through Italy’s Emilia-Romagna

Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region, extending from the Apennine Mountains to the Po River in the north, is widely known as the country’s food bowl. Its capital, Bologna, is even nicknamed La Grassa (The Fat) for its rich cuisine and famous production of cured meats, cheese and stuffed pastas. Additionally, the region is also home to balsamic vinegar, so prized it’s referred to as black gold.

Our Intrepid tour group has only been in Bologna for a couple of hours, but we’ve wasted no time embracing The Fat, specifically, mortadella, pork sausage and salami on puffy-edged pizzas. This is all before our local leader, Matteo, begins guiding us through the historic city – beneath its weather-shielding porticoes, which earned Unesco World Heritage status in 2021 – to find gelato.

As we scan the cabinet of flavours, our small group of 10 travellers, aged between 30 and 60, revert to being wide-eyed children. I instantly devour my salted Sicilian pistachio and creamy semifreddo zabaglione, and Matteo patiently waits for the rest of us to finish our gelato (“Italians don’t eat and walk,” he informs us). We move through the city centre, past the leaning medieval towers and Renaissance palaces of Piazza Maggiore to the “whispering walls”. The acoustic phenomenon under the Palazzo del Podesta lets visitors speak to each other from opposite corners of the archway. It was used to communicate during the plague, and again during Covid, Matteo tells our group.

The gothic, gritty city is also home to the world’s oldest university, hence Bologna’s other nickname, The Learned (not to forget its other other nickname, The Red, for its terracotta-hued buildings and left-wing leanings). A steady presence of graffitied laneways, vintage stores, craft beer bars and uni students in band tees remind me this is a college town. But we’re here to eat – as part of Intrepid Travel’s Italy Real Food Adventure – and we’re heading to a pasta cooking class beyond the city’s medieval walls.

We arrive at our cooking lesson at Il Salotto di Penelope (Penelope's living room) in a quiet, residential neighbourhood. A group of kids and their parents are milling about out the front after attending a 10th birthday party there. “Well we should be fine,” one of our group jokes, while sounding a little bit relieved. Inside we meet Michelle, an American chef who moved to Bologna 12 years ago. She greets us each with a glass of red wine and tells us we’ll be making Bolognese classics from scratch: handmade tagliatelle ribbons and plump tortelloni stuffed with ricotta, Parmigiano-Reggiano and parsley. For the tagliatelle, there’s already a pot of bolognaise sauce simmering on the stove, though it’s simply called ragu here (and you’d never serve it with spaghetti).

We mix our dough – with egg, semolina and 00 flour – and knead it into a ball. Mine’s looking a little rough (I’m working my dough too hard and ripping the gluten, Michelle tells me) and I’m ashamed my Italian instincts haven’t kicked in. But it’s my time to shine later when we fold our pasta into delicate ring-shaped parcels and I decide I’m a natural.

As we hand cut our noodles, Michelle shares a few golden rules: “Tagliatelle is 6.5 millimetres uncooked, 7.5 millimetres cooked, and that’s written in law,” she says, not joking. “[Wider] pappardelle is for game only, and they don’t consider rabbit to be game. Boar is a thing – boar with pappardelle for sure.”

Italians take their food seriously, especially the region of Emilia-Romagna. Of Italy’s 138 food products with a geographical indication – designated as DOP (Denominazione Origine Protetta) or IGP (Indicazione Geografica Protetta) – 44 of them are in Emilia-Romagna, more than any region in the world.

Michelle boils the tortelloni, then tosses them into a butter and sage sauce and serves them showered in parmesan. Next up: the tagliatelle, tossed through the ragu and served with more parmesan. We sit down to enjoy the fruits of our labour, devouring our dinner amid satisfied groans before every member of the Intrepid group goes back for seconds.

The next morning, we file onto a shuttle bus to Modena, about an hour’s drive north of Bologna, maybe best known outside Italy as the home of chef Massimo Bottura’s Osteria Francescana, former number one on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. But we’re not going there. We’re heading to a small village on the outskirts of town to a Parmigiano-Reggiano dairy that produces four million wheels of the stuff every year, following strict regulations set forth by the Consortium of Parmigiano Reggiano. Regularly cited as the king of cheeses, this god-tier parmesan has achieved DOP status, and must be made in the Emilia-Romagna region – specifically Bologna, Reggio Emilia, Mantua, Modena, or Parma – with specific ingredients and processes.

The first thing you’ll notice here is the smell. It’s pungent, like sour milk. But it somehow also smells fresh. We’re guided through the factory, observing the different stages of the cheese-making process through giant windows. “The recipe was developed by Benedictine monks in the 12th century,” our guide tells us. And this cheese is treated like a holy product or, maybe more accurately, like a child. Baby curds are lifted to the top of the vats with a “stalk” (paddle) before the fresh cheese is wrapped in linen and sent to a “nursery” (side note: the leftover whey is used to make ricotta, and to clean the vats and tools instead of using chemicals). After a month-long preparation, the “young wheels” are aged for a minimum of 12 months, some up to 36 months.

Our final stop is the aging room, where an awe-inspiring 33,000 wheels of cheese, each weighing 42 kilograms, are being stored. The shelves are incredibly high; I have to crane my neck to see the top levels. It feels more like a museum than a storage facility, and our group is told the collection of cheese is so valuable, the dairy cites it as collateral for bank loans. An outside inspector will check each wheel before it gets the stamp of approval – literally, using hot iron branding – to be sold. Finally, we get to sample the cheese: one aged for 12 months and another for 24. I prefer the matured one – it’s a little saltier, crumblier, and full of umami – but the sweeter, creamier 12-month-aged cheese is the crowd favourite.

It’s a shame nobody in the group brings a wedge of crumbly cheese to our next stop, because it would be a perfect pairing. The charming family-run Acetaia di Giorgio is housed in the attic of a dusty-pink 19th century villa, where the Barbieri family has been producing traditional balsamic vinegar of Modena for generations. The thick, syrupy liquid known as “black gold” is made from 100 per cent grape must (from lambrusco grapes grown on the family’s vineyard) aged in barrels to produce flavours more varied and complex than I knew balsamic vinegar could be. Some of the barrels have been around since the 1860s. “They’re like members of the family,” says Marcello, son-in-law of owner Giorgio.

Where industrial producers might add sugar, caramel and colours, and age the vinegar for a few days or weeks, proper balsamic vinegar of Modena is aged for a minimum of 12 years. Unlike champagne and Parmigiano-Reggiano, the name isn’t legally protected, Marcello tells us, so there are a lot of imitators. One way to tell the real deal apart? The unique glass bottle, which we’re told was designed by the same guy who designed cars for Lamborghini and Maserati. If it all sounds fancy, it is. These products are priced between 55 and 190 euro, and have been praised by the likes of the Obamas.

We begin a vertical tasting, sampling rich, jet-black drops of blends and special reserves that have a sweeter, deeper flavour than any balsamic I’ve tasted before. One that’s been aged for 12 years in juniper wood has a distinctly gin-like peppery flavour. Another, aged for 25 years in cherry wood, is sweet and fruity – best suited for drizzling over vanilla gelato and fresh strawberries.

Matteo leads us to Trattoria Via Ferrari, where he takes the liberty of ordering us a few specialties of the region. We start on prosciutto di Parma with pillowy gnocco fritto and a glass of lambrusco. Then, we move on to potato with parmesan cream, gnocchi with pancetta and balsamic vinegar, and a red risotto made with lambrusco and cream. The spread is a compilation of all the culinary hits we’ve been hearing about for the past 24 hours, really lending weight to the nickname The Fat.

Everyone in the group agrees we’re stuffed. We crawl onto the bus to head back to Bologna and are dropped off just outside the city at Santuario di San Luca, a palatial 18th-century church on a hilltop, with panoramic views of Bologna and the surrounding countryside. It’s also the start of Portico di San Luca, apparently the longest portico in the world, at 3.8 kilometres. So, in an ideal finish for a food tour of Emilia-Romagna, we end with a necessary 90-minute walk back to town.

*This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Intrepid Travel. Intrepid’s Italy Real Food Adventure tour is a fully guided eight-day trip that includes all transport and accommodation. Starting in Venice and finishing in Rome, it includes a stay in a traditional Tuscan farmhouse, a cooking class in Bologna and a visit to a Parmigiano Reggiano cheese factory.