The whole trip honestly started on the wrong foot. Our faculty advisor stressed that we needed to be there at "5:00 am on the dot, the bus will leave without you!" turns out that was not the case. We ended up leaving around 6:00 so essentially we woke up an hour early to sit at an empty bus stop, fun. After that litte bump in the road we headed to Parma to see an actual parmegiano regiano farm, which was pretty incredible. It was family owned and they work 7 days a week. Thats right, 365 days a year, no exception. It allows them to turn out about 6-8 wheels of cheese per day and they all love it. The whole process is a little lengthy(and maybe boring to most of you), but I'll explain it later if you really want to know.
After the parm farm we headed to a prosciutto farm which was equally as impressive. We learned the entire curing process and got to see halls of meat that had been aging for anywhere between 4 months to a year. We also got to eat lunch there, a huge plate of, you guessed it, cured meats. It was all delicious and I ended up buying a nice chunk of salame de Felino for myself.
After the prosciutto we headed to Modena to see an actual old school balsamico farm. This was probably the most interesting as we got to tour the barrel rooms where balsamic vinegar had been aging for anywhere between 6 months and 50 years. We also got to taste some of the 1, 6, 12, and 25 year vinegars, as well as a variety of other flavors which were spectacular. It was very interesting, pretty incredible to think that a person would be setting up a batch of vinegar to age 50 years and most likely never get to see the end result.
After Modena we headed back to Firenze. It strange that Firenze is kind of taking place as a makeshift "home" while were here. Anyways, this post may be a little boring, but I'm heading to Bologna this weekend which should be a nice trip. I also got to plan my post study trip and I can assure that the best has definitely yet to come.
FLickr Flickr Flcikr http://www.flickr.com/photos/50233644@N03/sets/72157624040555889/
Forgot to mention there are a bunch of pictures of our dinner at the Osteria Triperia, which was a tripery. Everything was made of tripe, which is cow intestine if you didn't know. Not bad, but me and my buddy decided that stomachs are probably not designed to digest stomachs as we both got pretty bad sleep the next night.
