Wine and Gourmet

If food is the mirror of a civilization, the many faces of Umbria are well represented by the culinary specialties that abound in this region. Starting from the capital, the journey through the delicacies of Umbrian cuisine proceeds in reverse, starting with dessert: Perugia is world-famous for having created the most “recent” product of the regional culinary art, the Bacio Perugina, invented in 1922 using ingenious traditional techniques. Umbrian cuisine is not above bold combinations of cocoa with other ingredients, such as spaghetti or liqueur in home-made dishes.

The use of the precious truffle is of a much older tradition: white in the Tiber Valley, Orvieto, Gubbio, and the Eugubino-Gualdese area; black in Norcia and Spoleto.
In Norcia itself, pork processing has always been an art, so much so that families of skilled “norcini” founded the famous Preci surgical school, renowned throughout Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries.
In rural Umbria, pork is the meat par excellence, alongside pigeons, geese, ducks, sheep, and lamb, as well as a wealth of game, including the delicious wood pigeon. Flavorful cured meats, eaten with unsalted bread, are enjoyed everywhere, while Valnerina boasts a renowned cured ham, still hand-prepared.
In the mountains of Norcia, puntarelle and sausages are cooked with Castelluccio lentils, the most prized in Italy, so tender they don’t need to be soaked before cooking and grown without the use of pesticides.
Typical products of Colfiorito include red potatoes, ideal for gnocchi, and the now rare grass peas or chickpeas: a “poor man’s” legume that, on Lake Trasimeno, was once cooked with pork rinds.
The origins of farro, prepared in soup with a ham bone throughout Umbria, go back many millennia. The Monteleone di Spoleto variety is of special quality, grown strictly organically and traditionally cooked not as whole grains but crushed with a special stone mill.