Italian Food Lovers

Parma, the capital of Italy’s Food Valley and home to Academia Barilla has been celebrating these days not only the love for Italian food but also the love for opera, with a full month of celebrations and events dedicated to the Italian opera Maestro Giuseppe Verdi with the Opera Verdi Festival 2008.

As our readership probably remember, last year we dedicated several blog posts to the Opera Verdi Festival 2007, blogging about the Maestro as well as about the Opera Festival and the gourmet opera tours organized by Academia Barilla to allow the Italian food and opera lovers to enjoy the event at its best.

This year the Opera Verdi Festival 2008 presented an even more structured program, with plenty of opera shows at several historic theaters and locations; a full digital booklet with program and info in English is downloadable at this link from the Teatro Regio website.

Academia Barilla offered luxury gourmet and opera travel packages to enjoy the experience of discovering Verdi’s opera, the city of Parma and the Italian Food Valley in full style.

In addition to the gourmet cultural tours organized in conjunction with the Festival Verdi, Academia Barilla provides more gourmet and cultural tours to Parma and Italy’s Food Valley, that we love to call Italian Culinary Learning Vacations, as they allow tour guests to learn a lot about Italian culinary culture while enjoying a luxury vacation.

For more info, details and booking for Academia Barilla’s cultural, culinary and gastronomic tours, please get in touch with Academia Barilla in Parma at +39 0521 264060 (toll-free number from Italy 800 376-116), or in the United States at the US toll-free number 1-866-772-2233.

We have been blogging a lot in the past about Academia Barilla’s gourmet and gastronomy tours in Parma and Emilia-Romagna, as well as the several initiatives from the Academia Barilla Culinary Center such as the culinary learning vacations that conjugate the pleasure of discovering Italian culture and food tradition with the ultimate experience of learning how to cook with top Italian Chefs.

We also blogged several times about other Academia Barilla initiatives that put together Italian food and culture - and no, we don’t mean “just” Italian food culture, but actually gourmet food plus Italian culture, such as in the gourmet cultural tours proposed by Academia Barilla to discover historic and artistic landmarks, contemporary art or classic opera.

Talking about which, we can anticipate that also for this year Academia Barilla will offer gourmet luxury packages to enjoy the Festival Verdi 2008, dedicated to the Italian Opera Maestro Giuseppe Verdi. We’ll blog about it soon, stay tuned!

We are not the only one blogging about the Academia Barilla gourmet, cultural and culinary tours to Italy. The Academia Barilla Culinary Center in Parma, Italy, is listed as a top culinary destination by several Italian food websites and directories, such as ChicagoTribune.com, Cooking In Italy, Alta Cucina and GreatEveryDayWines.com, among others. Not to mention of course Gourmet Magazine, who recently ranked the Academia Barilla Culinary Center among the world’s best cooking schools, among the top 5 in the world in the Luxury category. 

If you want to get more info and details about the cultural, culinary and gastronomic tours of Academia Barilla please get in touch with Academia Barilla in Parma at +39 0521 264060 (toll-free number from Italy 800 376-116), or in the United States at the US toll-free number 1-866-772-2233.

We also already talked about our VIP tours, too, as in the recent case of Lynn Novo’s VIP gourmet tour to Parma, organized by Chef and food entrepreneur Lynn Novo from Atlanta, Georgia.

The Academia Barilla VIP tours are luxury guided cultural and culinary tours designed by Academia Barilla and managed by Academia Barilla Culinary School Alumni such as Lynn Novo or Frank DiMaria, who is organizing a new VIP tour from Chicago, Illinois.

Over the next few weeks we will publish a series of blog posts that will help recreate the experience, albeit in a virtual way, proposed by the Academia Barilla VIP tour organized and guided by Frank DiMaria. For the moment, we anticipate that there will be a lot of cooking, but also visits to local artisan food producers, Medieval castles, the Ferrari Museum, and guided tours to the historic and monument beauties of the cities of Parma and Bologna.

Stay tuned for the next blog posts. If you want to book or get more info on this specific Academia Barilla VIP tour, please call Frank DiMaria at all +1 847-965-0672 or email frankdimaria@comcast.net to reserve your space!

In the mid 1980’s, long before the release of the blockbuster film Sideways, GreatEveryDayItalianWines.com’s founder and wine expert Gary Grunner was part of a small group of wine representatives and educators traveling all over New York State by car, train, bus and plane — selling, doing staff seminars, hosting wine dinners, fund raisers, teaching classes and talking wine all along the way.

It all started in 1982 when Gary fell in love with Italy while on a college exchange student program. As he recalls “It truly was a life changing experience. Not only did I develop a love for Italian wines, food and soccer from the contagious passion of my professors, but I also met a young Italian girl who later became my wife“.

Twenty-six years later Gary has homes both in New York and Italy and spends 10 hours a day immersed in the food and wine scene. He loves to share his passion of food and wine with people and he’s the first to talk about a new wine find, a new wine gadget, a chefs new restaurant and a great wine vacation.

Gary’s websites GreatEveryDayItalianWines.com and GreatEveryDayWines.com reach out and engage people on both sides of the wine world: the eager buyer and the enthusiastic seller.
Both websites provide innovative wine cards and other exciting tools to learn about wines, while Gary’s wine articles appear in a local New York restaurant magazine or on dishdujourmagazine.com. Gary is also in the midst of completing two books on wine and one on food that should be in print in 2009. We all look forward to it!

In the meanwhile, we invite you to explore GreatEveryDayItalianWines.com, where you can also find a wide range of information not only on Italian wines, but also on wineries, wine shops and restaurants, wine books, and more.

A special section of the website is dedicated to “Turismo del Vino in Italy” (Wine Tourism in Italy) and this month features Academia Barilla’s Culinary School as a must-do for those how plan to travel to Italy to learn about Italian food, engage in culinary and gastronomy classes and, of course, to learn also about Italian wines and wine and food pairing!

A full list of culinary and gastronomy courses, complete with cooking classes and gourmet tours of the Italian Food Valley, are listed at the Academia Barilla page on GreatEverydayItalianWines, and we will be soon blogging more in details about it.

For more information about the Academia Barilla Culinary School and this year’s calendar of culinary tours, cooking classes and culinary learning vacations, please contact Academia Barilla by phone in the US at +1 866 772.2233, in Italy at +39 0521 264060, or by email at academiabarillaculinary@barilla-usa.com.

Our Academia Barilla Culinary School has been recently included in the Alta Cucina directory of Italian Culinary Courses at www.altacucinasociety.com, and we would like to thank our new Italian culinary friends by blogging about them.

Alta Cucina is a Manhattan-based epicurean society founded to explore, share and celebrate premium-quality Italian food and wine products. Created by a group of Italian cuisine connoisseurs who value the company of others “at table” as a way of sharing the experiences of life, Alta Cucina started proposing in New York interesting experiments in dining and food experience.

Alta Cucina recognizes that the enjoyment of fine food is an art form in which every ingredient plays an important role and must be carefully chosen, and each event or product they select is of certified excellence and tied closely to local Italian craft traditions.

As they report on they website,

Product and recipe selections are always made with deference to natural seasonal rhythms, because to know the essence of Italian cuisine in its purest form also means to understand that each dish or ingredient is the product of precise climactic and territorial conditions. Therefore, there are foods whose true flavor can only be enjoyed a few times during the year.

Here at Italian Food Lovers we definitely like this attitude towards Italian food, so let us tell you also about their events such as the upcoming Day of Slowness promoted by Alta Cucina in New York last February 25, or The Aperitivo Series, introducing in busy NY the traditional Italian experience of “aperitivo“, meant for chilling out with friends after work pairing wines, beers and cocktails to a wide range of finger food made from original Italian gourmet products.

In The Aperitivo Series Alta Cucina throws in also a friendly expert or Chef who introduces dishes and wines, talks about their traditional origins and about the differences with similar, non-Italian food products. Well done, it sounds like the series of Academia Barilla gourmet events, where our guests can always count on the presence of an Academia Barilla Italian Culinary Specialist to ask questions to, and get precious Chef and Tasting Tips too.

Alta Cucina Inc’s CEO Amedeo Angiolillo, who has been interviewed for this blog post, invites also discovering the newly launched series of events Alta Cucina Dinners, featuring themed dinners prepared by Italian visiting Chefs in several restaurants of the US East Coast. The next Alta Cucina Dinners will be held in March at the Barbetta Restaurant (New York) and at the Cafe Oggi Restaurant (Washington, DC).

For more details and full schedule of events visit the Alta Cucina website.

Did you like our coverage of the Fontanellato Castle? The castle and the medieval small town around it are part of the Academia Barilla tour to experience two big Italian passions: opera and food.

Our readership is already very familiar with the Opera Verdi Festival 2007, and The Ultimate Italian Travel Experience proposed by Academia Barilla, for which we created a virtual tour rich of photos on Flickr.com, images and videos on Google Maps, and other interactive online goodies.

We love Fontanellato to the point that we created another slideshow on Slide.com, as the one we already published for Parma. You can enjoy it here on the blog, or click on it to watch a fullscreen slideshow on Slide.com or, even better, download it as screensaver for your computer!

Enjoy our interactive content, and do not forget that the Italian cooking and opera tours are available for the month of October only. You can find all booking information at this link on the Academia Barilla website.