Italy is a country where cheese is king. So much so, we kind of fight with our cousins, the French, to decide who loves cheese more. Truth is, both countries do. Cheese is more than something you use to add flavor to a main dish, it can be the protagonist of your dinner in itself.

It is more than food, too, as it often stands for centuries of cheese-making tradition and it comes, in many areas of the country, to symbolize its very economy: think about mozzarella and the South, for instance, or Parmigiano Reggiano and Emilia. In the past 20 or 30 years, the whole world embraced our – and the French’s, of course! – love for cheese, so much so it’s not so strange to find cheese connoisseurs in countries where you wouldn’t really expect it.