In the nineteenth-century, the so-called "pallonisti" earned higher wages than any other type of sportsman; and their game "bracciale", in all its various forms, filled the sporting pages of the newspapers of the time. We’re talking about something that goes back centuries, compared to which soccer seems like an upstart younger cousin. Crowds would flock to see the teams go head-to-head in a game whose scoring system most closely resembled that of tennis, and which similarly stirred the passions and wild vortices of ...

If you come down into Tuscany from Reggio Emilia and ask for "lo" gnocco fritto, everyone will immediately know that you’re not Tuscan. No one in Reggio Emilia goes anywhere near the much more common article "il" gnocco fritto. If you pair “lo” with a gnocco fritto outside of the confines of the Reggio Emilia, out come the pens of the pedants, ready to strike through the ‘error’. But in truth, there’s hardly any consensus anywhere else.

For the moment, ...

November 2021. We are on the Po valley floodplain. It’s dank and foggy, with a steel-grey sky; the horizons are lost in the mist. A clump of cloud will often slide up the hills and then dissolve into nothingness. The spectacle is already breathtaking. The Val d’Enza is one of the hundred valleys in Emilia-Romagna that run parallel with the old Via Emilia, which in this part of the world has always been the way, the truth and the life. After all, no other region in Italy takes its name from a road.

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The calendar tells us that autumn starts on 21 September, but in the Tuscan countryside it really kicks off a few weeks later, when the last grapes have been picked and the vines, like the trees and foliage in general, become mantled in reds, yellows and auburns, before shedding all colour in preparation for the winter cold. This is a season of competing urges: to stay in the house and prepare for hibernation, or to enjoy the sweet, ripe fruits of the last days of warmth. When the weather allows, autumn is probably the ...

When you cut a wheel of Strachítunt, the round stracchino cheese from the Val Taleggio, near Bergamo, you find more than mere cheese. Strachítunt is the child of handmade production, practised in a place where people still value manual craftsmanship. And the rediscovery of this cheese is no less personal than its creation. The mountain-dwellers, the connoisseurs, the merchants, the cooks, the businessmen and women, the dreamers: all believed in the Strachítunt renaissance.

We say ...