Bologna: Why Italy's 'Fat City' Has the Richest Food Vocabulary

Bologna has three nicknames. La Rossa (the Red) for its terracotta rooftops and its left-wing political tradition. La Dotta (the Learned) for its university, the oldest in the Western world, founded in 1088. And La Grassa — the Fat One — for its food, which is so extraordinarily good that the rest of Italy simultaneously envies and celebrates it. If you want to understand Italian food culture at its richest, you have to understand Bologna.

Bologna sits in the heart of Emilia-Romagna, Italy's most food-productive region. To the north, the Po Valley produces Italy's finest wheat for pasta. To the south, the Apennines provide chestnuts, mushrooms, and the cold air needed to cure the prized Prosciutto di Parma. The city itself is famous for mortadella, for its slow-cooked ragù (the real Bolognese sauce), and for its handmade egg pasta — tagliatelle, tortellini, lasagne — made daily by 'sfogline', women who have elevated fresh pasta to a performing art.

The Emilia-Romagna region is technically two historic regions merged: Emilia (the western half, from Piacenza to Bologna) and Romagna (the eastern half, from Faenza to Rimini). They have distinct culinary identities. Emilia is the land of egg pasta, cured pork, and aged cheese: prosciutto di Parma, culatello di Zibello, coppa piacentina, Parmigiano Reggiano. Romagna is the land of piadina (flatbread), seafood from the Adriatic, and Sangiovese wine. Bologna, at the border between the two, absorbs the best of both traditions. The result is a city where eating is taken with the seriousness of an art form and the pleasure of a religion.

The Chamber of Commerce of Bologna has an officially registered recipe for tagliatelle al ragù, deposited in 1972. It specifies that tagliatelle, when cooked, must be 8mm wide — exactly 1/12,270th of the height of Bologna's Asinelli tower. A golden model of the correct tagliatelle is kept at the Bologna Chamber of Commerce. This is not a joke. This is Bologna taking its pasta as seriously as its legal system, and that is the most Bolognese thing imaginable.

Mortadella deserves special attention. It is the original Bologna sausage — the source of the English word 'baloney' (a corruption of 'Bologna'). True mortadella is made from finely ground pork, seasoned with pepper and myrtle berries, studded with cubes of white pork fat (lardelli) and sometimes pistachios, encased in a natural casing, and cooked by steam at precise temperatures. It must be sliced paper-thin on a machine to be eaten correctly — thick-cut mortadella has none of the delicacy and silkiness that makes it extraordinary. Mortadella di Bologna IGP is now a Protected Geographical Indication product: only mortadella produced in certain parts of Italy with specific ingredients can use the Bologna name.