Where to stay

Azienda Agricola San Polo This agriturismo is a producer of organic, traditional lambrusco, including wines fermented in terracotta amphorae. Its cosy apartments are furnished simply and elegantly. Doubles from £60. Via San Polo 5, Castelvetro, 00 39 348 073 8343, http://agrisanpolo.it

Central Park Hotel Located off Via Emilia, close to Modena’s historic centre, with 44 comfortable rooms and three suites. Doubles from £138. Viale Vittorio Veneto 10, 00 39 059 225 858, http://centralparkmodena.com

Hotel Milano Palace One of the oldest hotels in the city has been renovated to four-star standard and offers stylish, modern accommodation in a central location. Doubles from £118. Corso Vittorio Emanuele II 68, 00 39 059 223 011, http://milanopalacehotel.it

Opera 02 di Cà Montanari Perhaps the best place to stay outside of Modena is this super-cool winery and acetaia (balsamic vinegar producer) in the midst of lambrusco country. The ultra-modern junior suites run alongside the acetaia, separated by a glass partition, so you can see the barrels of ageing traditional balsamic and smell their pleasing sweet aroma. Dine on a terrace overlooking the wine hills. Doubles from £124. Via Medusia 32, Levizzano di Castelvetro, 00 39 059 741 019, http://opera02.it

Quartopiano Two stylishly appointed double bedrooms overlooking the tiled rooftops of Modena. Lovingly decorated using furniture and objects from street markets in Provence and travels around Italy, they feel like a home from home. Breakfast is served in a delightful, airy kitchen. Doubles from £108. Via Bonacorsa 27, 00 39 059 875 5487, http://bbquartopiano.it

Vittorio Veneto 25 This small, discreet restored villa is located at the beginning of the historical city centre of Modena next to the old city walls and not far from Osteria Francescana. The contemporary decor is cool and comfortable. Doubles from £70. Via Vittorio Veneto 25, 00 39 059 221 745, http://vittorioveneto25.it

Travel Information

Modena is located in northern Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region, and is close to Bologna and Parma airports. Time is one hour ahead of the UK, currency is the euro and the average high temperature in May is 22C.

GETTING THERE
British Airways flies daily from Heathrow direct to Bologna. http://ba.com Ryanair operates a route direct from London Stansted to Parma
on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. http://ryanair.com

RESOURCES
Emilia-Romagna Tourism has a website providing valuable tips and advice for seeing Modena and the wider area, including events, transport and itineraries. http://emiliaromagnaturismo.co...

FURTHER READING
Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef by Massimo Bottura (Phaidon, £39.95) includes 50 never-before-published recipes charting the evolution of the culinary genius behind Osteria Francescana.

CARBON COUNTING
To offset your emissions, visit climatecare.org where donations go towards supporting environmental projects around the world. Return flights from London produce 0.27 tonnes CO2, meaning a cost to offset of £2.02.

Where to eat

Antica Corte Pallavicina Massimo Spigaroli is one of the great food ambassadors for the region and his Michelin-star cooking is not to be missed. On the river Po in countryside close to Cremona, it relies heavily on its own produce. £63. Strada del Palazzo Due Torri 3, Polesine Parmense, 00 39 052 493 6539, http://acpallavicina.com

Antica Locanda La Canonica Escape into the high, cooler hills above Modena to this rustic locanda to enjoy authentic, traditional food and drink. Sensational homemade pasta. £23. Via Borgo Antico 168c, Montalbano di Zocca, 00 39 059 986 796, http://allacanonica.it

Osteria Francescana This three-Michelin-star restaurant is rightly considered one of the temples of modern Italian gastronomy. In a city steeped in tradition, Massimo Bottura delights in offering a provocative cuisine that challenges diners with every mouthful. ‘Food is not only the quality of the ingredients, it is also the quality of the ideas,’ he says. £150. Via Stella 22, 00 39 059 223 912, http://osteriafrancescana.it

Osteria Stallo del Pomodoro In a city where the pig is king, chef Max Telloli offers creative vegetarian dishes alongside meaty ones. They make full use of the seasonal bounty on show at the Mercato Albinelli. There’s a great wine list, with many examples of natural wines from local, little-known grapes such as the delightful malbo gentile. £27. Largo Hannover 63, 00 39 059 214664, http://stallodelpomodoro.it

Pane Vino e Maialino Come here to enjoy, at the source (next to a prosciutto factory), 24-month-old Prosciutto di Modena served with freshly fried gnocco fritto and tigella, Modena’s typical flatbread. The latter is excellent spread with lard and chopped herbs, and washed down with fresh and lightly foaming lambrusco wine. £20. Piazzale Ca’ Dante 76, Trentino di Fanano, 00 39 0536 67601, http://panevinoemaialino.it

Ristorante Antica Moka At this popular, first-class roadside eating house, on the Via Emilia just outside Modena, Anna Maria Barbieri prepares the classic and traditional dishes of Modena and Emilia while son Sandro oversees the dining room. The roots of the family business go back to a shop in Modena where Barbieri prepared gnocco fritto. Enjoy this with Culatello di Zibello and Prosciutto di Modena, followed by Barbieri’s handmade tortellini en brodo or tagliatelle al ragù. Sandro will advise on suitable local wines to accompany your feast. £47. Via Emilia Est, 1496, 00 39 059 284 008, http://anticamoka.it

Ristorante da Danilo Signor Danilo began working as a waiter in this hugely popular city centre restaurant when he was just 14 years old. Now he owns it. Over that long period, he tells me, little has changed: today as then the restaurant serves faithfully the classics of Modena such as antipasti della casa, tortellini en brodo, tortelloni, and the carrello di bollito misto (trolley of boiled meats) even in summer. £35. Via Coltellini 31, 00 39 059 225 498, http://ristorantedadanilomoden...

Trattoria La Buca On a road that leads to nowhere, this hostelry has been in Signora Miriam’s (another formidable rezdora) family since the 19th century. There’s no menu: she will advise on what to eat, depending on the season. The house Culatello is obligatory, then homemade tortelloni, followed perhaps by Cotechino with a zabaione made from lambrusco. A richly satisfying rustic dining experience. £39. Via Ghizzi 6, Zibello, 00 39 0524 99214, http://trattorialabuca.com

Food Glossary

Food and Travel Review

It was the birthplace of Ferrari though paradoxically the living in Modena is anything but fast. Indeed, of all Italy’s great gastronomic centres, this city can count itself among the most unhurried. Ristorante Antica Moka sits on its outskirts on Via Emilia, the ancient Roman road that runs along the Po Valley from Piacenza to Rimini. Signora Anna Maria Barbieri has been at the stoves here for more than 40 years, faithfully producing the classic dishes of Modena and the historic region of Emilia. A famed rezdora, a word in Emilian dialect that signifies the formidable lady of the house, today she continues her practice of making pasta by hand, expertly bringing together no more than lour and eggs, then kneading the dough with her powerful forearms. Using a long wooden rolling pin, she rolls it out into sfoglia, a huge sheet of pasta – deep yellow from the farm-fresh eggs, glisteningly silken, elastic and thin.

‘For us, cooking is everything: it is our culture, our history, our land, our identity,’ she says, proudly. ‘To make pasta every day is a beautiful thing.’ Sfoglia can be transformed into myriad shapes. For the Modenese, this undoubtedly means tortellini: navel-sized parcels filled with an exquisite mix of pork, cured meats, nutmeg and the famous local Parmigiano Reggiano. To finish, Barbieri twists their mini-bonnets around her forefinger. We enjoy a bowlful, the delicious stuffed pasta swimming in a richly flavoured broth of boiled capon and other meats, the steaming mix sprinkled liberally with more freshly grated cheese. It’s heavenly. ‘Around here, tortellini are a religion. Any inhabitant of Modena who doesn’t believe in God believes in tortellini,’ writes Massimo Bottura, of Modena’s three-Michelin-star Osteria Francescana, in his book Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef. And everyone’s grandmother always makes the best, of course.

Modena province and neighbouring Bologna, Reggio Emilia and Parma together contain so much of what we know today as quality Italian food. Parmigiano Reggiano is joined by outstanding cured meats such as Prosciutto di Modena, Prosciutto di Parma and Culatello di Zibello; notable wines include dark, sparkling lambrusco; while its balsamic vinegar has permeated kitchens and dining rooms the world over.
Making the vinegar is considered by many families to be part of their very patrimony. For centuries, it has been produced on a household scale, as a means of transforming surplus grape must into a few barrels of precious liquid. All is revealed on a visit to Aceto Balsamico del Duca, a company whose own roots stretch back to a 19th-century delicatessen.

Freshly pressed juice from the local trebbiano and lambrusco grapes is cooked in open copper cauldrons over a direct fire, reducing volume and concentrating flavour. The mosto cotto (cooked grape must) is then placed into wooden barrels that contain a madre or vinegar ‘mother’. There it is left to age slowly in attics, enduring the hellish heat of summer and the damp, penetrating cold of winter. Over the course of years and decades, the slowly ageing balsamic is transferred through a battery of ever-smaller barrels, each made from a different wood: cherry, oak, juniper, chestnut and more. The elixir that emerges after a minimum of 12 (and often many more) years must be approved by an expert tasting panel. Only then can it rightly be called Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Modena, to be sold in its distinctive squat bottle bearing the Denominazione d’Origine Protetta (DOP) logo.

Chefs would rightly agree that it’s one of the world’s greatest gastronomic gifts, so it is confusing to say the least that Aceto Balsamico di Modena (minus the magic word ‘Tradizionale’) is an ingredient that can be produced on an industrial scale and sold in supermarkets. Perhaps, it’s a testament to Modena’s, and the region’s, genius that it can not only produce magnificent artisan foods but also reproduce them for the masses to enjoy. Late Modenese tenor Luciano Pavarotti knew that trick well. He was able to popularise opera to fans around the world, including those who had never followed classical music. So have the region’s agri-entrepreneurs struck gold in a similar way, by taking their native products to a lucrative global audience?

Witness the empire building not only of balsamic vinegar but also the local wine lambrusco. In the Sixties and Seventies, it was among the first Italian wines to be produced on a grand scale. The invariably sweet, fizzy red wines that were exported around the world in truth bore no more relation to the true wines of Modena and Reggio-Emilia than industrial-scale balsamic vinegar does to the ‘traditional’ version. So tasting the real thing is a must. We first pay a visit to Cleto Chiarli estate. Award-winning Vecchia Modena Lambrusco di Sorbara is pale-violet, freshly effervescent, full of persistent and charming fruit yet with a piercing acidity. ‘Lambrusco came to be known as a cheap wine but that is changing,’ says Anselmo Chiarli. ‘Our family has been making lambrusco wines since 1860 and this Vecchia Modena won a Mention Honorable at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900. Today we combine tradition and modern technology to produce the best lambrusco that we can and this is recognised by our customers as well as the wine critics.’

Next it’s on to Azienda Agricola San Polo, where we sample Lambrusco Grasparossa di Castelvetro, an organic wine fermented in earthenware amphorae, returning to a method used by the Romans. Later at Pane Vino e Maialino, a roadside eating house beside a prosciutto factory, we discover that this deep red, wildly foaming and raspingly dry lambrusco, served cave-cool, is the perfect accompaniment to the region’s array of cured meats. We drink it with Prosciutto di Modena, served with gnocco fritto, a small rectangle of piping hot, deep-fried pasta dough. The technique is simple: pick up a hot gnocco, add a slice of prosciutto, fold over and eat with the fingers, washing down with a gulp of the wine.
Son of a local baker, Pavarotti achieved great fame but his heart – and stomach – remained squarely in Modena. ‘One of the very nicest things about life,’ the maestro once said, ‘is the way that we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.’ One senses that food, the daily enjoyment of it, remains of the utmost importance to people in Modena. Just off Piazza Grande is the covered market, Mercato Albinelli, where shoppers peruse the piles of fresh fruit and vegetables, popping cherries or plums from Vignola into their baskets.

Restaurateurs still come daily to choose the finest specimens for their menus. Handmade pasta takes pride of place, especially tortellini and tortelloni (the larger version). Tortellini en brodo is the ubiquitous meaty broth everyone should try. Zampone Modena and Cotechino Modena are symbols of Modenese gastronomy. These raw salamis, the former encased in a pig’s trotter, are sometimes served with a zabaione custard made with lambrusco and fruit mustard. At the cured meat stalls, you will also find cured cousins like Salame Felino, Mortadella Bologna and Coppa Piacentina. There are stalls selling Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Modena and other balsamics. There are whole wheels and vacuum-packed wedges of Parmigiano Reggiano on display, a showcase for one of the true glories of the national table. Shavings can be used to top the local flatbread, tigella, made in a special pan and often layered with pesto modenese (lard mixed with chopped herbs).

Making the cheese is backbreaking labour that takes place every day of the year. Despite its popularity Parmigiano Reggiano remains essentially a handmade product linked to the land from which it comes. We rise early to visit Caseificio Baganzolino, where the casaro (head cheesemaker) transforms 1,100 litres of milk from each copper vat into two 40kg wheels of cheese, by heating and coagulating the milk, cutting the curds and draining the whey. Massimo Spigaroli’s Michelin-starred cuisine is an equally vivid lesson in slow food, based almost entirely around products from the family’s own land on the banks of the river Po. Vegetables come from the kitchen garden, white Modenese cattle and the black Parma pig are raised on the farm, while fish comes directly from the waterway itself. They make their own lambrusco; even the flour for the pasta and bread is ground from their own wheat. The chef-owner of Antica Corte Pallavicina in Polesine Parmense explains that his 19th-century ancestors were tenant farmers on the estate of Emilian composer Giuseppe Verdi, growing vegetables, making wine, raising livestock and producing their own cured meat. This remains the philosophy today.

Ours is a cucina di terra,’ he says. ‘The raw materials come from where we live and work. Though we transform these ingredients to produce creative dishes, one thing I will never do is modify classic recipes. They have been tested and codified over decades, their excellence proven. We cannot change this. I believe that in looking to the past, we best ensure the future.’ But is traditional always best? Osteria Francescana’s Bottura argues, ‘We must look at our gastronomic heritage critically not nostalgically. Not everyone’s grandmother’s tortellini can always be “the best”!’ Naturally, it was Bottura who caused a scandal in 1998, when he playfully introduced a dish called Tortellini Walking on Broth, a meagre six tortellini arranged in a line on a thin layer of capon broth thickened with agar agar. The recipe was in essence traditional; what was innovative was the way he made people look afresh at the familiar, to revalue their food.

Ever since, Bottura and his team have delighted in creating cuisine that is provocative and among the most exciting anywhere. One of his classic desserts is called ‘Oops, I dropped the lemon tart’, a homage to the intensity of flavours from the south – Amalfi lemons, bergamot, capers, oregano, even chilli peppers. The dessert is broken, as if splattered on the plate, but beautiful like southern Italy itself. A new dish, Mediterraneo, was inspired by the film of the same name, an Italian evocation of Greece at a moment when she was in need of solidarity and support. The fragile flavours of a Greek salad – cucumber water, tzatziki, micro-herbs, lemon – combine with more robust Sicilian bottarga (cured fish roe) and eel from the Po, evoking memory through scent and taste. Tradition may be rooted firmly in a region, yet it is the very solidity of Modena’s gastronomic heritage that allows Bottura’s imaginative cuisine to soar and transcend time and place.