How To Experience Local Family Life On Your Trip In Italy

Today on vacations in Italy, travelers want to experience real, local life in a meaningful ways with families, to visit their homes, share pieces of their lives, learn new things and even make new friends. Four ways to get to know locals are cooking with families in their homes, taking a course and renting a room in a local home, staying at a farm B & B, and dining with families in their homes through Home Food.

1. Take a cooking class or cooking school tour with a family in their home kitchen

Here's an example of a delicious cooking school in Bologna, Italy's gastronomic capital.

For your cooking week you live in an independent apartment in the medieval centre, next door to your host family's home, so you live like a local and have local friends nearby. With the mother and daughter, both excellent home cooks, you cook full menu dinners hands on for about three hours in three lessons in their kitchen. Then you gather around the dining table to eat your creations with the father, sons and your two cooking teachers, sharing laughter and good conversation. You soon feel part of the family!

Your cooking teacher tours you around Bologna's food market, telling you about local food treasures like parmesan cheese and buying ingredients for your lesson. Your week also includes a Bologna city tour and a day trip to Florence or Venice where a local guide shows you the sights. You can also enjoy a one day experience with market visit, cooking class and lunch.

2. Take a course and ask for home stay accommodation

In 1996 I took a month long Italian language course in Rome and asked the language school to get me a room with a family where nobody spoke English. They matched me up with Lucia, a 45 year old high school art teacher, architect and single mother of two kids, aged 8 and 16 in their apartment near the Vatican. At first Lucia was surprised to see a woman her age arrive, not the usual 22 year old student. We discovered we had a lot in common, had many long conversations in her kitchen and became friends. For 12 years, I've visited Lucia, shared many meals around tables with her friends and taken trips to Naples and her country home in Le Marche with them. Take a course, stay with a local family in your favourite Italian city! You never know what lovely surprises may come out of the experience!

3. Stay on at a farm B & B or apartment where the owners live on the property

If you're renting a car to explore the Italian countryside, stay in agriturismos (farm B&Bs or apartments). Many agriturismo owners make wine and olive oil. You may want to help pick grapes or olives at harvest time! To make sure you meet the owners, confirm they live on the property so you'll get to know them.

For example, in southern Tuscany about nine km south of Montalcino, Agriturismo Podere La Fonte offers two small suites in the country with marvelous views of Val d'Orcia. The organic property full of exotic plants and trees, birds and a chemical free swimming pool, has many olive trees. Owner Alberto makes olive oil the traditional way using the big granite wheel. Friendly, joyful Alberto and his wife make your breakfast and can make dinner for you. Alberto is a fantastic cook and gives cooking lessons too.

4. Eat traditional dishes with families in homes all over Italy through Home Food

Imagine yourself arriving at 8:30 p.m. at a family's home in Venice. The mother, Mercedes, whom you don't know, welcomes you warmly to share a dinner of traditional Venetian dishes she's just cooked for you. You join her and up to five food loving tourists you may not know around her table through the Home Food organization. You savour dry cod with polenta (a dish from the 1500s), risotto with radicchio from Treviso, sardines with saor (fried onions, wine, vinegar, pine nuts, raisins) that fishermen in the 14th century made, vegetables in oil and pincia, a soft cake of bread soaked in milk with raisins and apple.

As you eat and drink local wines, you learn about Venetian culinary traditions and history and get to know a local family as well as fellow food lovers. Home Food started in Bologna in 2004 and spread to 14 regions in Italy. Its mission is to preserve traditional recipes and food traditions handed down from mothers to daughters and to share these dishes and local food culture with food lovers.

About 100 women throughout Italy, all excellent home cooks with a wealth of food knowledge, enthusiastically open their homes for scheduled dinners for small groups. Visit the Home Food website to know more and register for dinners. Have fun cooking, speaking Italian, picking grapes or olives and dining with Italian families at their homes! You'll experience genuine Italian life as an insider friend and soon feel Italian!

Buon Appetito! Dining Italian Style

Years before Italy developed into the nation we now perceive, such country was divided among warring states, which shared no common spoken language and little cultural or social traditions. It was only in 1861 that the Italy we now know came into being. Do you know that the Italian language that we hear today was virtually non-existent up until the cessation of the World War II?

Regionalism

Regionalism runs fiercely among the veins of the locals. The landscape and terrain of the boot-shaped land mass fortifies regional integrity. From the mountains to the waterways and every natural element in between, only strengthens the sense of regionalism. Now, add to the mix powerful conquerors, political alliances and intermarriages. What you will have is a melting pot of customs, including culinary flavors. Regardless of regional differences, two distinct traits have often been used in an attempt to define Italian food: Flexible and Innovative. There is always a pattern on how to cook the base of certain cuisines that need be followed, after that you can add your own flavor and make the dish your own. With that said, no risotto or pasta dish would bear the same taste coming from any two kitchen.

Seasonal Ingredients

Each area proudly possesses its own specialities and delicacies, and these vary from season to season. It is a fact that Italians have a knack for freshness. When one goes to Italy in the last quarter of the year, do not expect to be served fried zucchini flowers. Why? Because it is not in season. In addition, regional or even provincial dishes have been developed due to the availability of the ingredients. The produce is at its best if it is in season. If artichokes are in season, why not use it as antipasti together with slices of sausages and marinated olives? Of course, if your trip takes you in a city near the sea, be prepared for a lot of fish-based dishes as well as other seafood delicacies.

North versus South

Many a diner has raised the north versus south cooking. Actually, there is no style of cooking that is strictly north or strictly south. Both regions use butter; however, the north folks tend to use more (they like their sauces creamy). On the other hand, their southern counterparts, almost always, use tomato in their dishes.

Dining In Italy

Now, when in Italy, one may be confused as what the locals eat and the time they eat. Normally, breakfast consists of cappuccino or espresso, or any coffee for that matter, with a croissant or a slice of toast. Breakfast is virtually irrelevant to locals. You will see no cereals, no pancakes, and no sunny-side ups either. The term ‘heavy breakfast’ is not included in the Italian vocabulary. Today, yogurts are becoming the breakfast substitute. Lunch is not eaten at twelve noon, it starts at one and it usually lasts for two hours, even three. Dinner is also served late, around eight in the evening (and that still is early).

The Menu

Generally, Italian menus have sections, each representing a part of a full meal. First out is the antipasti (appetizer), followed by the primo (first course) and the secondo (second course), which is usually accompanied by contorni (side dish). And last but not the least is the dolce, or the dessert. With this enumerated, one may wonder why Italians are so healthy with this amount of food at their disposal.

How Italians Eat

Well, their food intake is controlled and balanced. Plus shortly after their evening meal, locals would take a passeggiata (stroll). Another way that Italians burn off calories is through shopping. (Yes, shopping!) Fresh food connotes that you purchase the produce on the day or a couple of hours before the meal will be served. Running back and forth to the marketplace to get the freshest ingredient possible not only guarantees good food, it doubles as exercise as well.

Truly, chi mangia bene, mangia Italiano! (Who eats well, eats Italian!)