• Vinviaggiando •

BITES OF HISTORY

Wine is as old as man. Seemingly men used to make wine since the very beginning, firstly using wild grapes then cultivated ones.

A Roman mosaic with
Bacchus, the god of wine

It is very difficult to find out exactly when this change happened, but historians think it must have occurred between 5000 and 8000 B.C.

The first cultivated production areas where found in the Caucasian region where the ancestors
of all our modern white grapes were born, and around the river Nile, where the ancestors
of our red grapes were first planted.

Detail of the
standard of Ur 3000 bC-

The first illustration of people drinking wine is the Standard of Ur, preserved in the British Museum in London. It dates back to around the year 3000 BC
and it was found in the Sumerian town of Ur, where wine used to arrive, after passing through Armenia by the river Euphrates…

The name “mozzarella” comes from “mozza” that means “cutting” and refers to the act of hand breaking and shaping
the hot cheese dough.

It is hard to exactly find out when the first buffalo milk mozzarellas were produced. Records go back to the XIII century but probably in the dairy farms of the Salerno and
Caserta areas they started making them much earlier. Water buffaloes, indeed, have always found marshland their perfect habitat…

The Mozza-hand making mozzarella cheese

Gragnano 1900,
pasta drying process

Some people say that the name of the pasta noodle “paccaro”, meaning “smack”,
refers to the strong slap received by a pasta company worker for wrongly shaping a maccarone that ended being bigger than it was meant to.
In the streets of Gragnano, up to the beginning of last century, people used to dry their spaghetti in the middle of the street, taking advantage of the warm breeze coming from the surrounding mountains in the hottest hours of the day. Young helpers were paid to move a fan in the attempt to keep flies away…

The Greek Goddess Athena, who became Minerva for the Romans, was considered the inventor of the olive plant. That is why she is usually represented wearing a crown made with olive leaves. The olive oil produced along all the coasts of the Mediterranean was used like a liquid gold and was exchanged with any kind of goods in trading…

These are just bites of produce history. Come and join one of our tours and you will find out much more…

A representation of
the Goddess Athena with
olive leaves crown