okminty

My wife and I will be in Italy for about two months starting in May. The first week with one of our daughter's family. That's all taken care of. After that week we have 2 or 3 weeks free before the next daughter's family comes in (Cinque Terra and Rome). We have visited Italy several times and now my wife just wants to go somewhere to practice her Italian. She says she is content with anyplace, so I get to choose(Right). I don't speak Italian , but I can eat Italian. Where are some great places to eat some local food. I am not looking for specific restaurants, but more like great villages that make Cheese, or pasta or sausages.
What would be really great if someone knows of a town or city where we could stay and still see alot of these places. I am thinking about Northern regions above Florence. We will have a car so transport is not a problem.

annhig

great question.

so far as the eating is concerned, there is a recent thread about a trip to Turin and the surrounding area which may well fit your bill though I'm sure that you can get excellent food in lots of places so far as you stay away from the main tourist traps.

regarding the speaking italian, again you need to be away from places where there are lots of tourists - in those places it's difficult to persuade the italians you meet that you don't want to be addressed in english, even if you talk to them in italian. [weird, i know]. In smaller places, there will be far fewer people who speak anything other than italian. Even so, there may be limited opportunities for your wife to practice, unless she does a language course. i've done several [going to Venice for my 4th in February] and it's great fun learning in the morning and then going out in the afternoon and practising what I've learnt.

I'll come back with the link to the trip report I'm thinking about when I've found it.

annhig

and here it is:

http://www.fodors.com/community/euro...n-of-italy.cfm

hope this gives you lots of ideas.

otto

i spent time in bolzano, and bormio italy, in the alps in 2013. bolzano is very nice, and might be nice that time of year for biking, walking, etc...heavy austrian influence on food however. bormio is a ski/spa town in the alps, and a few days there (though it's very small) might be interesting and your wife can surely practice her italian there. my cousins wife (their wedding was the reason we were there) is the daughter of a cheese maker there. ;-)

Lexma90

For great food, I would also suggest the Piemonte. We were there during the truffle season, so I assume more tourists, but I as I recall there were plenty of places where there were few other people speaking English. People seemed to be perfectly ok with speaking to me in Italian, which is only a few steps above basic (my Italian, that is). Especially if your wife tells them she wants to practice her Italian.

vincenzo32951

The Piemonte is a good recommendation, but if I were doing your trip, with a car, I think I would start further east and spend the last phase in the Piemonte.

So I would probably start in the Veneto region, north of Venice, stay at some Prosecco wineries and eat at the wineries or the small towns near them, such as Vittorio Veneto. (Alice Relais is a great place to stay in that area.). Then I'd head west, with a stop in Vicenza, and wing it on some side roads and stops in small towns, going past Milan into the Piemonte for stays there.

Your wife might get to practice her Italian in small, family-run restaurants and shops. Typically, the larger, more traveled places in that region have staff fluent in English. However, Italians are pretty easy-going about that, so simply saying, " Possiamo parlare Italiano?" ("Can we speak Italian?") is enough to get them to converse in that language if you like.

bilboburgler

I'd look at the area around Bologna for the one type of food, still they are used to tourists, but maybe in a smaller town like Ferrara you will get to chat to locals.

I'd also look at Lecce down in the heel, yes they get tourists but far fewer foreigners (you and me). If you end up there you might like yltours https://www.facebook.com/pages/YLTOU...906?fref=photo who do cooking and language courses in the countryside.

traveller1959

Food in Bologna and Piemonte is compeletely different.

Bologna is famous for its rustic, heavy food. The signature dish is bollito misto - cooked pieces of pork and sausage with green sauce. Also mortadella and ragu bolognese.

Piemonte has the finest food of all regions in Italy because it is heavily influenced by French cuisine. It is much more than truffles (which are served only when in season - at least by chefs who are proud of their profession).

sandralist

>>Piemonte has the finest food of all regions in Italy because it is heavily influenced by French cuisine. <<

Of course, if you don't think French cuisine is the end-all-be-all of eating, you won't like it, and more than that, no Italian I know would agree that the best Italian food is the food influenced by the French.

There is nothing "rustic" about Bologna's pasta, nor anything heavy about bollito misto, which is boiled meat classically served with either sweet spicy fruit or savory vinegar condiments, none of which are made with fat. Besides, the signature dishes of Bologna and its neighbors are far more numerous than bollito misto. (I really would just ignore everything in traveller1959's post other than the first sentence.)

For someone interested in cheese, sausages and pasta, it is really hard to argue against staying in Emilia Romagna in May, which is not the best time for Piemonte's signature dishes (truffle season is winter).

Bologna is the major city of Emilia Romagna, but if you would like something smaller with no loss in food quality and opportunity, and a better Italian language to English language ratio, then the small neighboring city of Modena, with its glorious historic market, the home to Osteria Francescana, the home of the sausage cotechino, balsamic vinegar, and the next door neighbor to Parma (famed for cheese and cured meats) and Bologna for its enormous range of fresh pasta.

In Modena you will find few tourists and the majority of people speak Italian in all their transactions, but you will find English available when or if you crucially need it. Modena is also the home of Ferrari, if that should interest you, and has excellent train connections to other destinations.

sandralist

PS: I do want to credit traveller1959 for noticing --or revealing -- that one of the biggest reasons a lot of non-Italians rave about Piemonte restaurants is that it reminds of the French food, which they've come to regard as the "best" or most sophisticated food in the world.

One of the most important things to understand about "Italian" food is that it is so local and there has NEVER been an attempt to set a "national" cuisine or enforce a standard. Throughout Itay, local dishes are CRUCIALLY dependent on local climate, local soil, local conditions, and the recipes are based on that. From area to area, valley to valley, mountain to mountain, the meals of Italy are incomparable and one shouldn't credit people who try to compare them. It's meaningless. The part of Italy where people eat pesto is totally different from the ones where people eat horse meat, and even where they have similar ingredients -- both the Venetians and the people of Palermo in Sicily cook with sardines, but the dishes could not be more different.

The rice dishes of Piemonte, the polenta dishes of Bolzano, the pasta dishes of Bologna are all very different -- even the pasta dishes of Parma are different from those of Bologna -- so don't fall for the line that the "best" food is where somebody who likes French food tells you.

DRJ

Modena is also the home of Hosteria Giusti, of which Mario Batali has said (paraphrasing) if you haven't eaten here you haven't been to Italy.

In the back of a salumeria, four tables, lunch only, memorable.

Reservation required.

annhig

lol, DRJ, I read that as Mario Balatelli the first time round.

I was wondering why he was giving a restaurant review!

okminty

Wow great suggestions all. Have booked a small place in Tarzo to be near the Prosecco that my wife so enjoys. After that its either Verona or Parma or both in that order. Thinking about 4 days in each. Seems like I will not go over to the Piedmont just because of the French Influence. I love french food, Just not in Italy. It's like I don't drink Beer in France or Wine in Germany. I know I know There are good ones of each in each country, but that's just the away I am. Have also been trying to find out more about the Strade del Vino in Veneto. Does anyone know of a good site other than here? I will check here in a minute.

sandralist

When you ask for "a good site other than here" do you mean a good site for wine in the Veneto or a good site other than Fodor's?

Whichever, I think this is a good site for wine near Verona:

http://www.veronissima.com/sito_ingl...ry-verona.html

and to work out the small details of your trip, it can be worth to ask on TripAdvisor message forums because you can ask about specific towns or cities and sometimes there are people who actually live there who can help.

You also might find these links interesting:

http://www.theguardian.com/travel/20...ing-tour-italy

http://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5566/

http://www.artcityemiliaromagna.com/...cenza-to-parma

sandralist

try this too

http://www.italiaoutdoors.com/index....-veneto-region

but also just try a google search for "wine road veneto"

annhig

It's like I don't drink Beer in France or Wine in Germany>>

really? they make loads of wine in Germany, and drink most of it themselves. I can't imagine why you wouldn't drink it while you're there.

sandralist

They make beer in France too. Just not very good beer. It has only been very recently (within the past 5 years or so) that German wine held much interest. When I am in Germany, I drink wine, but usually not German wine, since Italian and Spanish wine is usually very reasonably priced. But then again, I don't eat much German food when I am in Germany.

I have no trouble imagining why someone visiting Germany would stick to beer.

annhig

It has only been very recently (within the past 5 years or so) that German wine held much interest>>

for you, perhaps, Sandralist, but the germans have been interested in it for years. They have a great wine-making tradition going back centuries and every year in the autumn, the biggest wine-festival in the world, which has been going for about 600 years, is held in southern Germany.

sandralist

For most of my lifetime (and yours!), Germany has produced its wine for a domestic mass market that came at the expense of quality, which many German winemakers would say quite readily. They are not the only winemaking culture that did this mid-century. Many wine growing areas of Italy and Spain have worked very, very hard to re-establish traditions of fine winemaking in recent years, realizing that mass production had damaged quality.

What the majority of Germans eat and drink isn't of much interest to me, just like what the majority of Americans and Brits eat isn't of much interest to me. It is possible for the majority of people to get used to lesser or poor quality in food.

The OP made a self-effacing, light-hearted comment about sticking to certain food preferences that I happen to largely share because I think there is a lot of reason to avoid most German wine -- I actually don't much care for German beer either compared to beer in other European countries, but at least most of their beer is better than most of their wine. I don't know why you can't imagine people being discriminating about what they eat and drink where, but plenty of people are.

annhig

What the majority of Germans eat and drink isn't of much interest to me, just like what the majority of Americans and Brits eat isn't of much interest to me. It is possible for the majority of people to get used to lesser or poor quality in food.>>

I was trying to suggest to the OP that s/he is missing a lot by avoiding german wines, you disagree. Fine. I wonder why you bother to post at all, given that your tastes are so much superior to the rest of us.