Well, this Parma Google Map is technically the same Map we recently published.

Newly released functionalities on Google Maps now allow us to integrate our customized Italian Food Valley Google Maps, gourmet tours and itineraries on Italian Food Lovers, and you will be able to browse the photos and video we posted on Google Maps directly from here!

Check it out! Just click on the placemarks to discover Parma a little bit more!

View Larger Map on Google Maps

Remember also that the best way to visit Parma is discovering its cultural and culinary treasures with Academia Barilla. The Academia Barilla Culinary Center in Parma organizes gourmet tours and culinary learning vacations in Parma and the surrounding Italian Food Valley.

Check out also the Opera Verdi Tours we have largely introduced this summer on the blog - tour dates are approaching fast, and you can find all booking info here.

The Festival Verdi 2007, dedicated by the city of Parma, Italy, to the Italian Opera Maestro Giuseppe Verdi, and celebrated by Academia Barilla with the release of an Italian opera and gourmet cooking 5-days travel package, starts in few weeks on October 1st, to close on October 31.

Remember that Academia Barilla’s tours are limited to the duration of the Verdi Festival and for the month of October 2007 only, so we suggest making today your reservations for this unforgettable Italian gourmet cooking and opera experience.

The tour dates are scheduled upon the following calendar for this year’s Verdi Festival:

- October 6-10
- October 10-14
- October 16-20
- October 21-25

More details on the Italian opera and gourmet cooking tour, including booking info, are available at this link on the Academia Barilla website.

This is the last installment in the saga of The Ultimate Italian Travel Experience, the Italian opera and gourmet cooking virtual tour designed by our Italian Food Lovers blogging team to anticipate the real gourmet travel package, launched by Academia Barilla.

The tour is designed to better experience the lifestyle, the culture and the food of Parma and the Italian Food Valley, while attending the world-famous opera Festival dedicated to Giuseppe Verdi next October 2007.

After discovering the treasures of Parma and attending the first opera concert on the first two days, and exploring the land and history of Maestro Giuseppe Verdi on day three, on day four our guests will head out of town again to re-discover the Italian Food Valley region, this time with a gastronomic tour, hunting for the most hidden production secrets of some of the top gourmet Italian food products.

Day four will start with a visit to a traditional Parmigiano-Reggiano producer that will include of course a Parmigiano tasting session.

Next gourmet production secrets will be unveiled during the visit to an artisan Salumificio that produces, among many different kind of hams and salami, the precious Culatello di Zibello. A tasting session under the guidance of an Italian Culinary Specialist from the Academia Barilla Culinary School will be part of the guided tour in the Salumificio.

More traditional Italian gourmet food is on the agenda, with a lunch in a local restaurant of the Medieval burg of Fontanellato, organized by Academia Barilla after the visit to Rocca Sanvitale, one of the most beautiful castles of Northern Italy, that treasures paintings and frescoes of Parmigianino.

We really love Fontanellato, and we invite you to explore it more in details by checking the customized Google Map we designed and enriched with photos to give you a preview of this magic place, that surely deserves a real visit, not just a virtual one. Click this link or the Google Map image below to interact with places and pictures of Fontanellato.

You can also explore Fontanellato browsing our Flickr.com photo album - click on the image below to see all the pictures we took for you from outside, inside and around the beautiful medieval opera castle.

After the lunch organized by Academia Barilla, the group will return to Parma for a free afternoon. Guests can choose to either relax with some shopping in one of the most exclusive fashion outlets in Italy, or keep discovering on their own the beauties of the City of Parma.

Don’t forget we have plenty of content for you from Parma, such as interactive Google Maps with photo and videos, Flickr.com photo albums, and online picture slideshows. Click the Google Maps, Flickr and Slide images in this post to get to the interactive content.

We invite you to include, link or embed our online content in your blogs and website - just mention Academia Barilla and, if possible, let us know you are linking to us, we’ll be so happy we’ll definitely link you back!
If you don’t know how to include, link or embed videos and other interactive content, feel free to ask as for help, we are learning fast here at Italian Food Lovers, so we can share with you some of our blog tech knowledge!

The evening of day four is dedicated to an opera concert from the Verdi Festival calendar. The Verdi’s opera, either La Traviata or Louise Miller, will be based on the festival calendar and ticket availability.

After the show and before the guests will return to their hotel, Academia Barilla will host a farewell dinner for the group’s guests, with exclusive gourmet menus designed by the Academia Barilla Executive Chefs.

The next day, day 5 of the tour, tour guests will be free to check out from their hotels or choose to stay few more days in Parma (highly recommended strategic location to explore more than 20 castles in the Italian Food Valley region).

Academia Barilla will be running these exclusive Italian opera and gourmet cooking tours for 5 weeks only, some might even want to participate again to the next tour and get more traveling, visiting, cooking and operas!

We hope you enjoyed the blog virtual tour of The Ultimate Italian Travel Experience - you can find all the info for the real October 2007 only tours, plus booking information, at this link on AcademiaBarilla.com.

Stay tuned with Italian Food Lovers!.

This Italian food Lovers virtual tour of the Ultimate Italian Travel Experience proposed by Academia Barilla is really growing our excitement towards what the real tour experience will be, as the dates of the Verdi Festival are approaching (October 2007).

After covering day one and two with the previous ultimate Italian travel experience post we now enter day three, which is dedicated to the history of the Maestro Giuseppe Verdi in Parma and in the surrounding Italian Food Valley region.

Our tour guests will leave their hotels in the morning to visit the Terre Verdiane, starting with Roncole, where we’ll visit the home where Giuseppe Verdi was born (today a Verdi Museum) and the church where he received the first music lessons.

Next stop is the famous Verdi’s Theatre and a visit to the Barezzi’s House & Hall in Busseto, the headquarters of the Busseto Filarmonica, where Verdi emerged as a young composer. A typical lunch based on local and traditional antipasti has been arranged by Academia Barilla in a characteristic restaurant in Busseto where Verdi’s music is constantly played.

One of the highlights of the restaurant, beside its gourmet traditional Italian food, is the famous guest book with signature collections that include those of Giuseppe Verdi and his friends, the singer Teresa Stolz, the publisher Giulio Ricordi, Ottorino Respighi, Arturo Toscanini, Gabriele D’Annunzio and a variety of singers, painters, writers and gourmets from all over the world.

The afternoon will continue with a visit of Orlandi’s Palace, a building that the Maestro bought in the centre of Busseto, and to Villa Sant’Agata where Verdi, already rich and famous, had this beautiful residence built and where he lived for almost half century.

The cultural opera tour in the Italian Food Valley will end back in Parma for a gourmet dinner organized by Academia Barilla in a typical restaurant in the city center.

As we did with the previous post we have also designed the day’s itinerary on Google maps, so you can start looking from above at the beautiful places you will discover during this unforgettable gourmet opera tour.

View Larger Map

Also have a look at the pictures we published on Academia Barilla’s account on Flickr.com, so you can start familiarize with Roncole, Busseto, Fontanellato, and the precious Italian Food Valley. Just click on the image below to see the pictures.

We will cover day 4 of the Ultimate Italian Travel Experience soon, but you can get more details including booking info at this page.

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!