Vacation Highlight Reel: Parma
Recap and recipes from my trip to the culinary heart of Italy
Greetings! As promised, today’s dispatch is all about my trip to Parma, a city in the famed Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy, just about midway between Milan and Bologna, where a dozen Dinner: A Love Story readers and I spent a week on a Via Rosa tour observing the farmers and the makers, exploring medieval castles and Romanesque cathedrals, and learning from the producers who give us the foods we revere around the world: Prosciutto di Parma, Balsamico di Modena, and of course Parmigiano-Reggiano, to name only a few. We were based in the historic center of Parma (above) for the entire week so we really had a chance to settle in, which is my favorite way to see a city I’m visiting for the first time.
Parma is a thriving university city (its population and size are comparable to Charleston, South Carolina) and even though it has everything we tend to romanticize about Italy — a large historic center, a grand Romanesque cathedral, maze-like cobblestone streets that are lined with modern boutiques and old-world cafes, piazzas framed by pink and rose-colored centuries-old buildings — it is somehow not crowded or overrun with tourists like, um, us. And apparently, this is the case all year long, not only in March when we were there.
The tour was curated by Via Rosa’s Elizabeth Minchilli and her daughter, Sophie Minchilli, and officially guided by the energetic, all-knowing Alice Rossi who has lived in Parma her entire life. I’m not permitted to divulge certain specifics of the itinerary which are proprietary to Via Rosa, but I wanted to share a few highlights from the week, including the recipe for a ridiculous Lasagna Bolognese that was memorably true to the region that invented the dish. Andiamo!
The Recap: Tastings
Usually, when I write up these highlight reels, I divide the content into two sections, Where We Ate and What We Did — but for this trip, there was a lot of overlap between the two. That’s because Emilia-Romagna has the highest concentration of DOP* products of any region in the world. So as we tasted our way through iconic foods and observed how they were produced, it was sometimes hard to figure out where the learning ended and the eating began.