Delicious Italy

Maratonarte

Maratonarte is a call to save seven of Italy's lesser known but fascinating archaeological and historical sites from disappearing.

With the support of the 'Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali' and the 'Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri Dipartimento per lo Sviluppo e la Competitività del Turismo', RAI Television ran a video campaign to highlight each at the beginning of October 2007.

Claudia Cardinale and other well known and respected figures presented a project close to their heart.

The one which impacted most on us was the Modica-Ragusa railway line which aired just as we were helping Condé Nast House and Garden magazine with a photo shoot in Ragusa.

They crew didn't take the train, but the RAI video is a spectacular and slick homage to the zone and site.

WATCH THE FULL VIDEO HERE or view the You Tube clip below to get an idea

So far almost 3 million euros have been donated to Maratonart.

When you consider the spending of Ministry of 'Beni Culturali' was just over 2 billion euros in 2005, and the pressure is on to cut public spending, then there's a long way to go.

Olive oil traceability

The Agricultural Ministry here in Rome has created a decree obliging bottles of extra virgin olive oil and virgin olive oil produced in Italy to declare where their olives came from.

A sort of olive oil identity card.

All you have to to is read the label to make sure the olives in your bottle of Italian olive oil don't come from Spain, Greece or Tunisia. 

The website of the Consorzio dell'Olio Toscano is putting online such information regarding Tuscany's 70,000 olive oil producers.

Parmesan or Parmigiano Cheese

In the space of a day we received a couple of bulletins concerning the European Union's take on two of Italy's finest typical products: olive oil and parmigiano-reggiano cheese.   

The good news is that the General Lawyer of the Court of Justice of the European Community has expressed his opinion that by the end of 2007 the word 'parmesan' cannot be used to refer to a cheese that is not the authentic parmigiano-reggiano DOP from the Po Valley.

Straight forward no? Not really because Germany had sustained that 'parmesan' was now a generic term and could be applied to similar cheeses made by them.

The Court of Justice replied that that was just the point. It was generic and therefore could not be used to avoid confusion with the real thing.   

In any case, the Italian producers would probably never utilize the term 'parmesan' for their products and we guess the word will now be locked in the Esperanto vaults at Brussels for further use, or sold on e-bay to the Chinese.

This now brings us to olive oil. DOP extra virgin olive oil is recognised by the EU like parmesan cheese, sorry, parmigiano-reggiano.

But at the same time a new European law on the table this year may cancel the obligation to declare on a bottle of extra virgin olive oil the origin of the olives used in its production, a law passed in 2004.   

So what! Well, it won't stop fine DOP extra virgin olive oil being made in Italy, but it will tempt others to import even more cheaper olives from non EU countries such as Tunisia and Algeria and, to all effects deliver a EU product onto our shelves at a more than competitive price to a consumer who may not know or care about the subtleties of great extra virgin olive oil.

Like wine, there is olive oil and there is olive oil. You get what you pay for and you don't tend to find the best stuff in your local supermarket. 

Journey in the Songlines of Italy

Delicious Italy attended a book presentation at the Archaeological and Art History Library, of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali here in central Rome. 

It was an interactive  introduction to the book 'Carmen Via -  Journey in the Songlines of Italy'  by Bernard Anson Silj.

And also a point of departure for 'Pariaeza', a project which unites cultural tourism and environmental protection.

The aim of both is to stimulate our imagination, to recapture a language and sense of place and time in danger of being lost, but which was very much alive at the time of our ancestors.

Through music, song and verse we can look again at our past, present and future and approach a fast changing world with more perspective and direction.

Anyone with a minimum of sensitivity and interest in culture and history can  certainly feel a certain something when visiting the many historical locations across the Italian regions.

Carmen Via proposes the Grotto of Tiberius in Sperlonga, the Abbey of San Pietro in Valle in Umbria and the Etruscan settlements across Tuscany. But there are many more.

A journey to our past to take us to our future across the many cultures which have formed who were are and how we speak.

Of interest:

The Trinacria in Sicily
Mysterious Creatures of Lombardia
The Liguri

Sustainable Seafood Month

  We have contributed to this event organized by Jacqueline Church of Boston in the US.

The Boston Herald reports:

Give a man to fish, you've fed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you've fed him for life. Teach him to choose sustainable fish and we'll all eat better, longer.

Taking advantage of October's designation as National Seafood Month, Boston blogger, Jacqueline Church is renaming the month as Sustainable Seafood Month. Why?

Some frightening facts:

Atlantic Cod has been so overfished, some populations are listed as threatened or endangered.

Globally, it is estimated that 70% of the world’s major fisheries are already fished to capacity or overfished.

Three pounds of wild fish are used to produce one pound of farmed salmon. Farming salmon therefore actually uses more fish than it produces, which puts more pressure on wild populations.

Waste from salmon farms is released directly into the ocean, untreated. The Pure Salmon Campaign estimates this waste to be equivalent to untreated waste discharged from a city of 65,000 people.

Bluefin tuna in the Atlantic has been so overfished that the population has been reduced by 90% since the 1970's and is under threat of extinction.

As well as partnering with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch Program, Jacqueline Church is calling on chefs, food bloggers and cooks around the world to highlight choices any chef or cook can make to minimize the impact on overfished populations.

For more information: www.leatherdistrictgourmet.blogspot.com

The Apenines or Appennines

How do you spell Apenines? Or is it Apennines?

Many organic search engine tip gurus suggest online content managers mispell a range of some widely used keywords to benefit form typings erors.

Goggle instead or Google etc or Delicious Italy instead of Conde Nast Italy Traveller, or Traveler.

The one guaranteed to come out wrong(ly) every time is, in Italian, Appennini, the central mountains of the Italy peninsular, which have just been red flagged by the Type Pad spell checker.

Wikipedia spells it Apennines, while others spell it Apeninnes, the later 100% incorrect.

A travel journal published in 1835 in the New York Mirror is titled 'to the Apenines'.

So what's the correct version? The Oxford English Dictionary says 'Apennines' but it also says Piedmont.

We like and use Appennines after the Italian original, right or wrong. 

Fresh milk from Italy

The news that the hot weather in Australia has more than doubled the cost of the essential raw material for plastic wrapped cheese slices in China and active yogurt in Europe comes as something of a surprise.

What has Australian milk got to do with my morning muesli? And why is the imported milk from Austria in our local supermarket a whopping 40% cheaper than a litre from the Rome Milk Centrale.

Not only that, the south Austrian milk has been processed in such a modern way that it retains much of the original odour, straight out of the churn if you like.

It's all to do with subsidies and global markets, but there may just be a chance that the little guys are fighting back.

Last year we dropped by a refrigerated milk dispenser near a hypermarket in Tuscany. The device distributes fresh and untouched cows milk to all, and it tastes delicious.

Perhaps inspired, a Roman entrepreneur is allowing the capital's citizens to purchase such milk from a mobile dispenser which visits the morning markets.

A liter costs 1 euro, around 40 euros cents under the average supermarket price.

But here's the rub. Just as our entrepreneur was slowly gaining consensus the Chambers of Commerce seized a number of the dispensers over the summer. 

Not for hygiene or public health reasons, but because the system which delivered the milk at time of purchase did not meet the norms for liquid measurement. 

Something's changing

We heard today that eBay are trying to offload part of their Skype investment. What seemed like a good idea is not bearing fruit in an otherwise successful concept.

A commentator pointed out that the success of the web, and sites like eBay, is that people can do business without having to get to know each other. Or in this case talk to each other, perish the thought.

Affiliate programs seem a bit like this. Do we really know how the mechanics or business models work. Even if they are transparent, can they be considered a real partnership. 

The number of Weblogs, at least in English, has now peaked as everyone has had a go. Time to move on. Let's have a go at video. A beautiful thing, but it's the content that counts.

We have also heard of a new social networking initiative. The site would allow the subscriber to build, in effect, their own television interface and share programs, comment with friends etc. It hits all the buttons, but nobody has yet picked it up.

Its your move.