Here in Italy we are at the height of summer and the hot temperatures have us reaching for something cold!  We take a look at three of Italy's best iced drinks and the stories behind these cooling treats.

Bologna may lag slightly behind Florence and Rome when it comes to art treasures, but if we're talking food, the city is in a class of its own, rapidly gaining ground as the country’s gastronomic capital.

Jackie's latest guest article for US online magazine Sixty & Me explores nine gastronomic reasons to holiday in Italy. From cured meats to gelato, discovering Italy's food culture will be a huge part of your trip, and it can be as educational as it is delicious! 

The Italians have not historically been huge consumers of honey, "miele" in Italian, but it was widely used as a remedy. Whether you like the classic millefiori, acacia, chestnut, eucalyptus, lavender or honeydew, Italy is nowadays making quality honey with special characteristics.

We are lucky to work in Italy when it comes to rustling up picnic lunches because the selection of ingredients is extensive, high quality and delicious. Anyone who has hiked with us will remember the joy of coming to a pretty spot along the trail to find a table laden with lunchtime goodies and a couple of bottles of local wine to wash it all down.

Autumn is the season when we start to see pumpkins appearing in Italy's shops and markets. They are loved here for being a fabulously versatile ingredient which can be used in both savoury and sweet dishes.

Pecorino is the generic name for all 100% ewe's milk cheeses in Italy. They are largely made in the central and southern parts of the country, as well as the Mediterranean islands, and are named after the word for a sheep which is una pecora.

Jackie's latest guest article for Sixty & Me looks at some the best gastronomic adventures you can have in Italy and highlights some of her personal favourites.  Whether it's joining locals at a seasonal food festival, taking a cooking class or dining in a celebrated starred restaurant, all travel experiences are enhanced by our connections to the country's food.

On the final evening of our Tuscan Harvest tour we dine in one of very few restaurants in Italy to have 2 Michelin stars. The restaurant is called Arnolfo and is in the centre of Colle di Val d'Elsa.

One of Italy's most popular confections is known as Gianduia and is a mouth-watering blend of chocolate and hazelnuts. Turin is a centre of chocolate production and August and September in Piedmont herald the start of the hazelnut harvest ...

As the summer in Italy beckons, restaurant menus everywhere will start to list the ever popular "Semifreddo" dessert.  This light, textured, frozen mousse is popular right across the country.

This amazing cheese comes from a small alpine area in the northern part of Lombardy, known as the Valtellina valley, close to the border with Switzerland, and its name is Bitto Storico.

The art of truffle hunting and extraction in Italy has been recently added to UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list, which aims to celebrate and preserve important cultural practices.

A recent trip to London enabled us to visit the first Eataly store in the UK,  situated in Broadgate just close to Liverpool Street Station, which opened in April last year.

Living in Italy as we normally do for much of each year we take for granted how easily available delicious food is at any time of the day, from the local panificio to street-stalls, bars to pizzerias, gelaterias to pasticcerias. In an attempt to feed our hunger for a taste of Italy, we have shared recipes for three of our favourite street snacks...

Most people of course associate the Italian kitchen with pasta but what you learn as you travel around Italy is that each region has a very different approach, making the most of traditionally available ingredients and keeping to time-honoured recipes handed down through the generations.  There are myriad variations of flours, techniques and sauces which reflect the unique character of the individual landscapes.

Torta Pasqualina has become a tradition at Easter time across the whole of Italy, although it is believed to have originated in the coastal region of Liguria. The inclusion of the eggs symbolises life and rebirth and it makes a delicious savoury tart for picnics or light lunches.

It's the time of year when the woods around our home in Tuscany would be full of locals foraging for chestnuts and, in normal times, many of the surrounding villages would be celebrating annual chestnut festivals.

2020 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of Italy's pioneers of food writing, Pellegrino Artusi, the first author to include recipes from all the different regions of Italy in a single cookbook.

Looking for your next chocolate fix? While your inner sweet tooth may instinctively point you in the direction of Switzerland and Belgium, head a little further south and you’ll find yourself in the gloriously chocolatey region of Piedmont!

Podere Patrignone is an ‘agriturismo’ in the heart of Chianti Classico country – a mix of holiday rental villas and their organic olive oil. Is it owned by close friends of Hedonistic Hiking, Simon Zimbler and Verity Jones.

Discover some of the best food and wine in Italy as you embark on food trails that traverse vineyards and olive groves, mountain pastures, woodland tracks and coastal paths. Read on to learn more about five of our favourite food trails and culinary tours in Italy.

This month I finally had the chance to visit FICO Eataly World just outside the city of Bologna. Billed as "The World's Largest Agri-Food Park" the site has 22 hectares of fields and stables, 40 farming factories, 45 restaurants or eating stations and a market space.

The real secret to a good risotto is the stock and I recommend making your own, depending on the flavour of the risotto you have chosen.

If you have not travelled in Piedmont, in north west Italy, you might not be aware of one of its greatest culinary treasures: the prized white truffle of Alba.

The people of Italy, along with many of their European neighbours, have long enjoyed a pre-dinner drink known as the "aperitivo". Typically these drinks are low in alcohol and more often than not have a dry and bitter or spicy flavour.

These tiny pasta parcels are a traditional dish from Piemonte and something which we learnt to make in our cooking class in Cuneo, as part of our brand new France & Italy tour. Cuneo is a wonderfully elegant city lying to the south of Turin and here we met up with the Fontanta sisters who run a fabulous cookery school above their beautiful kitchen shop in Via Roma.

Whenever we are hiking on our Abruzzo tour, we spend an evening with the chef from the wonderful Locanda Sotto Gli Archi in the Sextantio hotel to learn how to make traditional Abruzzese dishes.

The first stop on our new Southern Italy tour is a visit to the Barlotti cheesemaker, famous for producing buffalo mozzarella in the shadow of the ancient Greek temple at Paestum.  It is well known that the most highly prized artisanal buffalo mozzarella is still found south of Naples, near Battipaglia and Caserta, where small factories continue the centuries-old tradition of making fresh buffalo mozzarella every day for their local customers.

The Australian passion for coffee must be almost equal to the Italian, but we often notice on our tours that the differences in terminology can catch a visitor out, and lots of great coffee-drinking moments are getting lost in translation!  We have designed this simple guide to ordering, to ensure you get what you came for!

Nestled in the stunning peaks of the Majella National Park is the charming town of Sulmona, one of the prettiest in all of Abruzzo.  Framed by dramatic mountain scenery Sulmona has a population of around 25,000 but has a reputation across all of Italy and beyond for the production of the country's finest sugared almonds, known in Italian as "confetti".

On the final day of our Slovenian tour in June we walked through the land between the Italian and Slovenian borders which is known as Brda. The region is an agricultural paradise and many fruit trees prosper in these fertile hills. But the most highly-prized of all is the Brda cherry, famous across all of Slovenia and beyond. In early spring cherry blossoms cover the hills and then in May mature into delicious juicy ruby-red fruits. Later in the season peaches, figs, apples, pears and plums also grow abundantly in this area.