Sunday, August 18, 2019
Fun facts


On the occasion of the new foodiestrip's questionnaire, here are 5 curiosities about the piadina romagnola

Giovanni Pascoli, a famous Italian poet, was really in love with his homeland, the Romagna (the south-eastern area of the Emilia Romagna region). Maybe he was one of those people with the knife (a loyal comrade between the end of the ‘800 and the ‘900), red (he wrote the epitaph for Andrea Costa, the first Italian socialist representative) and fanatics-lovers of the “piada.” So what we can call a real Romagnolo who considered the piadina <<bread, a national food for people from Romagna>>.

On the occasion of the new foodiestrip’s Piadineria questionnaire, here are 5 curiosities about what the Italians also call the “piada” (another name of this dish from Romagna area).

1. The first written trace about the piadina comes from 1371, when the Cardinal Angel de Grimoard for the first time writes down the recipe: “It is made of flour soaked in water and salted. It can be mixed with milk and seasoned with a little bit of lard”. The recipe hasn’t change.
2. The roasting pan is a pottery dish where the piada is cooked. The cooking method is the same used for the hot stone cooking, already used by Romans, and practiced also in the Italian Army (the piada seems to come from the bread eaten by the Byzantine army that occupied the Romagna area in 500 AD and in fact the name has Greek origins).
3. The traditional kiosk have vertical colored stripes. According to the area colors may vary (white and red in Forlì, white and green in Ravenna …)
4. The piadina romagnola has become an IGP product (Protected Designation of Origin) in 2014, and there is a Disciplinary that regulates its dimensions: maximum thickness up to 3mm and the diameter goes from 23 to 30 cm for the piadina from Rimini; while for the piadina from “Terre di Romagna” has been disposed a thickness that goes from 4 to 10 mm and a smaller diameter, 15 to 30 cm.
5. Besides Pascoli who talked about it in a poem (“La Piada”), also Virgilio mentions the piadina in his Eneide when he writes an “exiguam orbem”, a thin disc that once has been roasted and divided into big squares.


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This post is also available in: Italiano (Italian)

Pierluigi Capriotti