Just How Good Can Italy Get? -2-
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Photo by Dino Fracchia for New York Times |
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For Emilia-Romagna, it has long been thus. In a paperback edition of "The Food of Italy," which was first published in 1971, Waverley Root devotes 111 pages to this region. Piedmont gets 38. In "Italy for the Gourmet Traveler," published in 1996, Fred Plotkin flatly declares Emilia-Romagna "the most outstanding region in Italy" for eating. The shout-out for Piedmont is almost silent in comparison.
But acclaim for it has gotten louder in recent years, for several reasons, including the expanding ranks and intensifying zeal of wine lovers. In droves they make pilgrimages to Piedmont, whose steep slopes and chalky soil are a favorite nursery for Nebbiolo, the noble grape in Barolos and Barbarescos, Italy’s best wines.
Piedmont responds with canny marketing. Everywhere you go you find glossy pamphlets about its cuisine, and in the center of Alba, on October and November weekends, you find a crush of visitors swarming an array of vendors selling Piedmont breads, cheeses and sausages. What was once a more focused white truffle market, which coincides with white truffle season, is now a broader food fair.
There’s another factor in Piedmont’s heightened profile, and it came up when I asked a hotel clerk in Bra to recommend an informal restaurant for an unceremonious bite. He wrongly took the question to mean I was in a hurry, and the sigh he let out was long and disapproving.
"In this town, food is a sort of religion," he said, noting that the worldwide organization Slow Food was born in Bra — two decades ago — and has its headquarters there. Slow Food convenes international conferences in Piedmont and sponsors a two-year-old university near Bra, in Pollenzo, that focuses exclusively on the appreciation of food. The university has one additional campus — in Emilia-Romagna, near Parma, of course.
| Source: Originally published by New York Time – ©2006 New York Times |
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