Last week we started our virtual Italian gourmet cooking and opera tour, on the path of the Ultimate Italian Travel Experience, the original travel package proposed by Academia Barilla to enjoy the Opera Festival dedicated to Giuseppe Verdi, while discovering the food culture of Parma and the Italian Food Valley.

Here is part two - after the arrival of our tour guest on day one, day two starts with a guided cultural walking tour of the city centre. Now you will learn more about the places you explored the previous day, and will get immediately into the opera mood visiting the Farnese Theatre, the first theater in the world supplied with movable scenery entirely made of wood.

The group will explore then another pearl of the opera tradition of Parma, the precious Teatro Regio, a true temple of the lyric music with one of the best acoustics in the world. Teatro Regio has been home to Arturo Toscanini, the famed Italian and Parma-born orchestra leader from the 1950’s, when he directed the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Teatro Regio will also be one of the official concert venues of the Verdi Opera Festival.

Following the opera trail, the next visit is to the Arrigo Boito Conservatory, where it’s still possible to view Niccolò Paganini and Toscanini’s studios. The morning cultural guided tour will be concluded at lunchtime, when the group will be treated to a full lunch in a in a delightful local restaurant in the most historic part of the city.

The group will later head to an afternoon at the Academia Barilla Culinary School, the world’s premier Italian culinary facility, where tour guests will engage in a hands-on cooking class based on the traditional recipes of the time and territory of Giuseppe Verdi. The gourmet cooking class will be conducted by one of the Academia Barilla Executive Chefs Group, who will also organize the group dinner based on the yummy recipes the group prepared.

Such intensive day two of the Academia Barilla’s ultimate Italian travel experience meets a perfect ending in a theater, with the first of the two opera concerts at the Festival Verdi 2007 – the show will be based on the Festival calendar and ticket availability, and will include Verdi’s classic operas such as Luisa Miller and La Traviata.

After the show, our guests are free to return to their 4/5 star hotel or to have a night walk in the magic Parma, while possibly whistling opera’s arias.

The next day, which we’ll cover soon with another post, will be a very exciting gourmet tour in the land of Giuseppe Verdi, in the heart of the Italian Food Valley. If you can’t wait to discover what’s in the agenda on day 3, or want to know more details about the tour and its booking, just follow this link.

Explore Parma and all the featured locations of the guided tours from above, with the help of interactive Google Maps and the Academia Barilla blogging team, who spent weeks enriching Google Maps with photo, videos, descriptions and links of interest, to offer you the best Parma virtual guided tour experience.

Click on the image below to interact with the tour destination in Parma, and stand by for more Google Maps for all the other locations touched by the Academia Barilla gourmet opera tour.

Also check out our Parma photo album on Flickr.com to explore all the places you will visit during the Parma guided tour, and to discover new ones.

Remember also we provided a couple of online slideshows of these pictures at Big Huge Labs and Slide.com. Enjoy our Parma slideshow and remember you can download it as free screensaver from Slide.com, just click on the slideshow below!

Choose the slideshow you like, and import/embed it in your blog, website, of social networking web page.

And don’t forget to stay tuned with Italian Food Lovers for more virtual tours in the heart of the Italian Food Valley!

As we anticipated at the beginning of this week, and as you can see from the banner on the side of our blog, we finally launched the Academia Barilla gourmet trivia game we have been working on for the last weeks.

This really has been a big project for us, specially because we have also been pretty busy with a number of tasting events over the last two months, so we apologize to all Italian food lovers and beloved blog readers for not posting too much recently - we hope you will appreciate our efforts in producing this Italian gastronomic trivia game that will help us get closer to your italian gourmet experience, and will help you test your Italian gastronomy and culinary skills!

We are so proud of our gourmet trivia game that we even released a press release at the beginning of this week to officially announce it to the media and the world out there. As you already know, I always republish the Academia Barilla press releases on our blog, but let me spend a final word before posting the press release: play the game!

It’s free, it’s fun, it takes only a few minutes to go through it, and you will also be able to download a free cookbook in pdf format at the end of it! Spread the buzz, invite your friends and challenge them on their Italian culinary skills, and also let us know what do you think of it by leaving a comment on this blog!

Here we go with the press release -

Academia Barilla Educates Web Users with a Gourmet Trivia Game and Offers Free Gourmet Culinary Gift

Gourmet Italian Food Ambassador Academia Barilla launches ambitious gourmet trivia online campaign to raise awareness for products and to promote gourmet Italian food and culture. Innovative How Deep Is Your Love gourmet trivia campaign entices and educates users while expanding knowledge of Italian gastronomy.

PARMA, ITALY (PRWEB) April 16, 2007 – Italian gourmet food Ambassador Academia Barilla launches a creative online campaign today with the aim of educating an extensive Internet user base about the finer points of gourmet Italian food and culture.

Academia Barilla kicked off the engaging “How Deep is Your Love” gourmet trivia campaign with a promise of lots of knowledge and a free digital copy of a gourmand’s dream cookbook for Italian food lovers.

The Italian gourmet food company is publicizing its products and its rich library of Italian gastronomy, gourmet recipes and culinary information with the innovative How Deep is Your Love campaign.

Web users are asked a series of ten questions that test user knowledge in the following areas: gourmet Italian food production, basic Italian language and geography, and Academia Barilla brand and products.

Each of the questions posed to web users in the campaign is taken directly from the rich sources of material that Academia Barilla offers online, from its gourmet food blog Italian Food Lovers, to the product-laden Academia Barilla online store to its information-filled website. User will be able to invite their friends via email to test their Italian culinary skills, as well.

Academia Barilla is offering each user who engages in the short and fun gourmet trivia game a downloadable copy of an Italian Gourmet Cookbook which features recipes, photos and other treasures gleaned from the famous Academia Barilla Gastronomic Library in Parma, Italy.

The digital pamphlet features exclusive recipes and gourmet treats that cannot be found elsewhere, introducing a time travel in Italian gastronomy, from the Etruscans and Roman eras to the more sophisticated recipes of Medieval and 19th century recipes.

Ilaria Rossi, Director of Marketing of Academia Barilla, shares that “The real goal of this campaign is to excite the wide base of Italian food lovers into learning more about gourmet food production and how much of a role Academia Barilla takes in protecting traditional Italian Gastronomy.”

Massimo Mercanti, Academia Barilla chef and blogger on the popular Italian Food Lovers blog, says, “Creating some of the material for this innovative campaign was really a lot of fun. That’s what we do so well around here – in addition to knowing the ins and outs of gourmet Italian food, we have a great time. I hope that we can pass along a lot of this fun, as well as the knowledge and learning, of course, to our lucky web site visitors.”

The How Deep is Your Love gourmet trivia campaign is running now through June 2007, and can be found online at http://howdeepisyourlove.academiabarilla.com/gourmet-italian/.

For more information about Academia Barilla, please visit www.AcademiaBarilla.com or the Italian Food Lovers blog at www.italian-food-lovers.com.

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About Academia Barilla:

Academia Barilla, part of the Barilla Group, is a premier center dedicated to the art of Italian gastronomic culture. Academia Barilla’s primary mission is to preserve, develop and promote the art of Italian cuisine and gastronomic culture around the world.

Academia Barilla preserves traditional Italian food products and their artisan producers, protecting them from imitation; develops and supports Italian culinary arts through Academia Barilla Culinary Center’s courses and education; promotes and raises worldwide awareness about the Italian gastronomic culture through events and publications.

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More information on Academia Barilla:

Academia Barilla USA: Stephanie Sette: +1 847-405-7564
Academia Barilla Italy: Ilaria Rossi: +39 0521-263-826
Academia Barilla website: www.AcademiaBarilla.com

We can finally announce the project we have been working on in the last weeks, to the point that we didn’t had much time to blog: a gourmet trivia game for all Italian food lovers!

Academia Barilla wants to get closer and closer to you Italian food lovers, and try to understand what does “italian gourmet” really means to you. Also, we want to understand what is your degree of knowledge about traditional Italian gastronomy culture, so that we can eventually fill the holes by means of this blog.

So do not exitate! Click on the image above to play our gourmet trivia game - it will take only a minute or two to go throught 10 random questions, and you will be able to download a cookbook at the end of the gourmet trivia game.

We browsed the treasures of the Academia Barilla’s Gastronomic Library to put together a cookbook that maps the history of Italian culinary culture across centuries, a gourmet time travel starting from the ancian Etruscans and Romans’ cooking, exploring the Medioval and Reinassance cuisine, and ending with the more recent Italian gastronomic traditions of the 19th century.

Enjoy the gourmet trivia game and the downloadable cookbook!

Let us know what do you think of our gourmet trivia, write a comment to this post!