Italia: Day Thirteen

We got to sleep in today, so I went for a run around town this morning. I got sort of lost and ended up running in a lot of circles because it seems like every road runs into the town center of Novellara. It’s kind of weird.

When I got back we took a bus to the cheese consortium, which is an official office where they determine whether or not the cheese that is presented to them is of accurate quality and production methods for certification. The presentation was really boring, but it was nice to be in a high quality, air-conditioned building for once. I feel like Europe is kind of behind on the air conditioning, but I guess that’s because so many of their buildings are so old. I made sure to take some of the cheese and chocolate they had out as souveneirs before we left the consortium.

Outside the cheese consortium

We went for pizza at sort of a high class place afterward, but the food wasn’t very good. It was supposed to be a “pizza tasting” so they brought out many different kinds for us, but the ham here is kind of strange in a lot of places and they also put weird bologna-like meat on pizza, so we didn’t eat a lot of it. Then we rushed over to a local education center where they specialize in teaching teachers how to use different methods in their classrooms to approach learning with a new attitude. The woman who gave us a tour around the facilities couldn’t speak English, so I found it really boring. I’ve learned that I need someone to speak English to me without translations for me to be able to pay attention otherwise I lose interest.

Pam, Chelsea, and I entertaining ourselves at the education center

I was relieved when the tour was over, even though it meant that we had to walk around in the city to kill time before dinner. None of the places were open, for some reason, so after we bought gelato, we were forced to walk around in the heat until we found a place to sit. We couldn’t even find a bathroom to use because everything was closed! It was kind of annoying because Pam, Beckie, Chelsea, and I, “the quad”, had decided to wear dresses today in honor of the floral prints three of us bought in Florence. It was a good idea, it was just too hot to be happy in any sort of clothes.

The "Quad"

For dinner, we went out to a newly opened ranch on the top of a mountain where they produce and bottle Lambrusco wine. We received information about how the wine is bottled and chilled for sale before indulging in a short dinner, compared to the others we have experienced in Italy. There was only three courses with an appetizer, main course of lasagna, and desert of rum cake. I didn’t really like the meal or the red wine, but the ranch was beautiful.

On the mountainside before dinner

Italia: Day Twelve

This morning we got up at seven so that we could make it to the local cheese production site and watch them produce the cheese. There isn’t much that they do differently between types of cheese, so it was similar to the production we saw previously. Today we saw parmesan regano, specifically, which I don’t even like because it’s a little bit too sharp for me.

Metal canisters allow the cheese to harden to the traditional shape

The cheese then soaks in saltwater

We were able to taste the cheese straight from the vat - it was very soupy

We also tasted some of the aged cheese from the warehouse

We got done with the tour early, so we walked around the town of Novellara for a little bit.We poked around inside one of the grocery stores, but they didn't have anything very interesting to buy, so we joined the rest of the group and got back on the bus. We went to Andrea's for a lecture on balsamic vinegar. The production site has been in his family for generations. He walked us through the buildings and explained how balsamic vinegar is produced. Afterword, the group tasted varying kinds of vinegar that differed by the amount of time they were aged.

Lecture on the production before tasting the vinegar

The vinegar ages on site

It was a full morning packed with lectures, and even though I wasn’t hungry, I was happy to go sit for lunch at a restaurant in town. However, this lunch turned out to be very similar to the dinner we had yesterday where there didn’t seem to actually be a main course, but instead involved a lot of passing of plates. I didn’t particularly like the food, but at least it was less complicated. I was able to gorge on ham and bread while avoiding the melon and desert foods.

We came back to the hotel to nap after we ate. I did my journal entry when I woke up and then it was time to leave and go back to Andrea's house. After everyone had made their purchases from his in-house store, we settled into the dining room and listened to a guy tell us about how you can tell if cheese is correctly produced. He is part of the group that assigns certification labels to cheese products within Italy.

It was really boring and I was starving by the time it was over, so I was glad when the bus picked us up to go to a local restaurant for pumpkin stuffed pasta, rissota, and ham sandwiches with a desert of chocolate cake shaped like salami. It was actually a pretty good meal even though none of it is something I would typically eat.