Don´t be a donkey! Italy´s gastronomic delights prove ever more tempting to second home buyers
While the UK reels from more news of horsemeat posing as beef and ‘unidentifiable’ meat being served by an Indian restaurant, Italy is known around the world for its fabulous cuisine, which places an emphasis on high quality, natural ingredients. The Italian diet is an extremely healthy one. According to the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook, Italy ranks 10th in terms of life expectancy by country, way above the UK (30th), the European Union average (36th) and the US (51st). The World Factbook also reveals that Italy is one of the countries with the lowest level of obesity, coming in at 56th place out of the 70 countries included in the data.
A central reason behind the healthy Italian lifestyle is diet. Food is sourced locally wherever possible and fresh, natural produce is the order of the day. Massive regional diversity exists within the country, as dishes are made from local ingredients and thus vary from place to place.
In a country so devoted to food, Italy’s Le Marche region nonetheless stands out from the crowd for its joyful celebration of all things edible. The area’s dishes have evolved from hearty peasant food, taking ingredients like stale bread (in order to avoid waste) and turning them into spectacular gastronomic feats. Le Marche’s cuisine showcases the wonderful abundance of products available in this region nestled between over 100 km of sandy coastline and the Sibillini Mountains. Truffles are the particular speciality, but mushrooms, game, fish and nuts all feature strongly in the area’s dishes. Local cheeses, olive oils and wines also abound. The food of Le Marche is in fact so acclaimed that it was the subject of a six-part bilingual television series, Cookucina, in 2012.
For Dawn Cavanagh-Hobbs, founder of family-run company Appassionata, Le Marche’s heavenly foodie reputation was a big factor in her decision to settle in that area of Italy.
“Le Marche is alive with festivals and outdoor celebrations from spring through to Christmas. Many of these are gastronomy and wine events, dedicated to a particular product, such as the Festa del Vino Cotto (cooked wine festival), while others celebrate a wide variety of the region’s food, such as La Castagnata at Montemonaco with seemingly endless stalls of local food and wine.”
Over the summer months, Le Marche will hold literally dozens of food festivals. June is the month for the pecorino cheese festival, July celebrates pizza, trout, pasta and stuffed flatbreads, while August features quails, wild boar, chickpeas, rabbit, mussels, veal and much, much more – and this is just a small proportion of the total number of festivals that will be held in the region during 2013.
Dawn was keen to ensure that her properties – Casa Giacomo and Casa Leopardi, on the delightful Estate Giacomo Leopardi – were as committed to gastronomy as the rest of the region. Both properties have been sympathetically restored from rustic farmhouses by interior designer Dawn and her family. Appassionata is now offering them as fractional holiday homes, with the final few shares in Casa Leopardi available for £175,000 for five weeks’ exclusive use and a share in the produce from the estate’s truffle orchard, lavender plantation, olive groves and vineyard large enough to produce 5,000 bottles of wine per year. Dawn continues,
“Everything about the food here is delightfully local. Fruit and vegetables are grown on an allotment at the end of the road from the estate. Fish is available early each morning from the fishermen on Pedaso beach, just 10 minutes away, and handmade pasta, local meat and fresh bread can all be purchased in the neighbouring medieval town of Montefiore dell´Aso.
“It has been horrible watching the unfolding of the UK’s disastrous meat-related news. The contrast with what we have here is just incredible – it makes me very glad to be in Le Marche!”
For more information contact Appassionata on 0039 073 465 8775, visit www.appassionata.com or take a video tour of Casa Leopardi.