Has anyone had any experience in Italy with the Home Food organization (www.homefood.it) and the Cesarine. Apparently once you join the organization you can arrange to eat in the homes of Italian who are the Cesarine and one learns the history of the food as well as how it is prepared. Looks to be very reasonably priced.
Barb,
If you try this I would love to hear back on your experience. The PBS show, "Diary of a Foodie" did an episode on the home food movement. If you haven't seen it here is the link to the show.
http://www.gourmet.com/diaryofafoodie/video/2008/01/103_italy_fullep
It looked really interesting; I looked into this last year when I was in Italy for a short time, but couldn't fit it in my schedule. I'm hoping to try it out on a future trip.
Without knowing more about it, I would recommend joining. My wife and I have belonged to 3 different hosting organizations and stayed with over 20 families in 12 different countries. Members host us and feed us free.
Eating food in a national's home has no comparison. You really see how the people live. You learn more about their culture than you will ever see in a dozen hotels.
Do it and report to us; we want to know about it.
I think I might have gone to one of these as a guest, but it wasn't called "home food" or "Cesarine" outright. It was a dinner party, small, organized at the home of an Italian woman who was extremely knowledgeable of local recipes. It sounds like the same thing....? But it was very random how we ended up going to it. If there were a way to find more of these events, that would be so great!
As for this particular Home food movement and website, it sounds VERY interesting. I still feel like I'm missing some vital piece of information about how all of this works though!
If anyone figures this out any further, like the actual logistics of how the invites work, please message me! I'll be sending them an email as well, once I finish reading through everything.
Great post, thanks!
Thank you for your replies. I will probably be in Italy within a year and I'm planning on trying this out so I'll let everyone know about my experiences! I do wish I had know about this several years ago as I've spent quite a bit of time in Italy over the past 5 years - could have eaten alot of really good food in that time, and learned a lot about local customs at the same time!