keyitaly.com’s blog

So here’s the big one. You want to by a home in Italy because you love the food … but do you really know what the typical foods of Italy are? Sure, you say – pasta, pizza and er ice cream. And yes, once regional foods such as pizza and pasta are now pretty much universal, as much through the inevitable spread of the supermarkets as to keep the tourists happy. It doesn’t matter to a visitor from London or New York that northern Italy doesn’t really do pasta traditionally as its carb, but instead favours rice dishes, she wants her spaghetti carbonara.

But the big surprise for the first-time visitor to Italy is finding how diverse the regional cuisine is. Having based your idea of typical foods of Italy on a visit to your local Italian restaurant, you find that you have been sampling a much reduced menu. So northern Italian cuisine (the regions of Val d’Aosta, Piedmont, Veneto et al) typically uses far less olive oil and pasta, far more butter and rice. It’s no surprise then that risotto is a northern Italian dish. Head up into Trentino-Alto Adige, which southern and central Italians would dismiss as ‘Germany’ and you’re going to find sauerkraut and dumplings on the menu. Across in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, meanwhile, polenta takes the place of rice and pasta.

Central Italy has a superb cuisine, with Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany, but be prepared again to adjust your idea of typical foods of Italy … no such thing as spaghetti bolognese in Bologna, be prepared to eat stuffed trotters and eels instead. And as we head into the deep south of Puglia, Basilicata and Calabria there are cuisines with influences from Greece, Albania and North Africa. Enjoy the ‘typical foods of Italy’ but keep an open mind … and palate.

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