Emilia-Romagna

The hyphen in the name holds two histories together. Emilia is the strip along the Roman road from Piacenza to Bologna: flat, foggy, agriculturally rich, with the Apennines behind it. Romagna starts past Imola and faces the Adriatic. In Emilia, pasta is rolled by hand with a metre-long pin and measured in eggs per kilo of flour; the fat is butter and lard, the animals are dairy cows and pigs. In Romagna everything gets leaner: flatbread cooked on a griddle, hand-rolled strozzapreti, oily fish, Sangiovese, olive oil instead of butter.

The Parmigiano Reggiano system explains much of the landscape. It can be made only in Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, part of Bologna and part of Mantua; the cows eat local forage, the evening milk is skimmed by gravity overnight, and 40-kilo wheels age at least twelve months before an inspector taps every one with a hammer. The leftover whey feeds pigs, and the pigs become ham: a closed loop, centuries old. At Langhirano in the hills above Parma, dry air cures prosciutto; down in the damp river flats at Zibello, the same humidity that would ruin a ham instead makes culatello, the region's most expensive cured meat.

Every city defends a dish. Bologna has tortellini in capon broth, tagliatelle al ragù (never spaghetti, never bolognese sauce as the world knows it) and mortadella. Modena has traditional balsamic vinegar, aged twelve or twenty-five years in a battery of barrels of different woods, not to be confused with the industrial Aceto Balsamico di Modena IGP sold everywhere. Parma lives on ham, cheese and anolini; Piacenza has three DOP cured meats and a half-Lombard kitchen. Ferrara, once a Renaissance court city, keeps the strangest dishes: pumpkin cappellacci, a sweet-crusted pasta pie, and salama da sugo, a sausage simmered suspended in water for five hours.

Romagna runs on other codes. Piadina is everyday bread, not street food, and it changes every twenty kilometres: thin and wide at Rimini, thick and small at Forlì. Filled with soft squacquerone cheese and rocket, it is the regional plate. On the coast from Cesenatico to Cattolica the catch is mantis shrimp, clams and small Adriatic fish; in the hills behind, Sangiovese di Romagna and Albana, the first Italian white wine granted DOCG status.