Today on Food on Fridays we take a look the Le Piazze dei Sapori, “the plazas of flavors” – i.e., a food festival by any other name. It is a 3.5 day festival taking place in Piazza Bra at the moment; the “plazas” of the name are the virtual groupings of different kinds of stalls; the stalls themselves are only in one real plaza, i.e. Piazza Bra.

Entrance to Le Piazze dei Sapori

Here’s a look at the festival with photos taken today by the two webcams the city has set up in Piazza Bra (which are there all the time, not just today).

Piazza Bra Webcam #1

Piazza Bra Webcam #2

I’ve also added a permanent Verona webcams link on the right-hand side of this blog’s homepage for future reference if you want to see a live view of Piazza Bra in Verona at any time.

Anyway, Le Piazze dei Sapori festival isn’t huge, so it was possible walk around it just a short amount of time. Eating our way through it, however, is going to take a little longer. But we did our best at lunchtime today to try a couple of things. Although this morning we had also walked over to a small little market/deli with foods from Puglia, a region in the tip of the “heel” of Italy; Chris has discovered this shop the other day on one of his daily walks. The friendly guy at that shop kept giving us samples of stuff to try: savory fried dough balls, fresh mozzarella, and other cheeses, handmade crackers, etc.  So by the time we got to the booths at the festival, we had already quite a few little “samples” that made us not as hungry for lunch as we might otherwise have been.  I say that to explain why we have only managed to try a few things so far. The main things we tried were:

1. Stuffed olives, Olive Ascolane, of two different types. The brown ones are filled with meat, the black one was rolled in black truffles. Very good:

2 types of Olive Ascolane

2. “Bombeta”; pork neck rolls filled with cheese and spices. “Traditional” — perhaps at least for festivals – in Puglia (the shop that we had gone to earlier didn’t have them, but the sign in the festival called them a traditional “explosion” of flavor. The ones we got were piping hot, and so you couldn’t taste the cheese when they were that hot. However, once they had cooled off a little, the cheese flavor did come through. Chris kindly paused in his eating so that I could take the second photo below, to show off what the inside looked like. They were OK, but I wouldn’t get them again:

Bombeta “explosion of flavor”

The stalls are not only of foods from Italy; I noticed a paella stall from Spain, along with several stalls with sausage and würstel, at least one that was German and one that was Polish. And among the stalls with sweets there was one that had an assortment of breads and sweet tools that looked *exactly* like one where we used to get stuff in Bolzano. I asked the clerk where the stuff was from and she said Merano … which is near Bolzano. Too funny.

South Tyroleanl Bread Stand

We were there at mid-day and it wasn’t terribly crowded yet. But it had a range of tourists – and a local looking for snack at lunchtime too:

Gladiator in search of a snack – it’s the same one seen twice in a “sweep” photo

Anyway, nothing like a Friday food festival on a to make the perfect theme for a Food on Fridays post.