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.

There is one very special artisanal cake which signals the coming of spring in Italy and is particularly associated with Easter.  It is known as La Colomba di Pasqua, or the “Easter Dove" and is as popular across Italy as the Panettone is at Christmas time.

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.

Bar Midland is a bar and restaurant in Castlemaine, Victoria, which we visit on our Highlights of the Goldfields Track tour.  It was founded by locals Loudon Cooper and Alexander Marano and they have just received their first Chef Hat award. Eating here is a true highlight of our week.

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.

A number of our walking holidays in Italy bring us into contact with food and wine producers and these visits often make truly memorable moments from each of our trips.  Here we have a look at Italy's fabulous formaggio and some of our best cheesy experiences!  

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.

Two recently-published cook books caught our eye in the last couple of weeks so we thought we'd share them with our Hedonistic Hiking readers - one on Australian food and the other on Italian Delis.

As we continue to miss Italy and won't this year have the chance to catch up with so many of our favourite chefs and restaurateurs, we have re-visited this month three more truly fabulous dining experiences from our tours in La Bella Italia.  From the highly sophisticated cuisine of Piedmont in the north to the flavoursome rustic dishes of the wild Abruzzo mountains, all these menus are prepared with love and a real passion for seasonal local ingredients.

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.

Last month's Blog about some of our favourite dining experiences in Italy seemed to attract so much attention that we have decided to share some more culinary highlights this month too!  We've ventured a little further afield this time - to Austria and Slovenia -  as well as down to the foot of Italy.

The start of the new year has us looking forward to dining again in Italy, which we hope will be possible in the second part of 2021. For this Blog we've taken three unforgettable dining experiences from our tours and shared them again, to whet all our appetites for travelling to La Bella Italia as soon as we are able.

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.

Jackie's latest Blog for the US magazine Sixty and Me looks at spicing up your lockdown menus by recreating dishes from your favourite travels.  With a little imagination we can all revisit favourite food memories that transport us to happy times and places and, if you can source a local wine to go with the dish, even better!

One small thing we can do to help our Italian friends at this difficult time is support businesses involved in the procurement of Italian food and wine.

You can be sure of great food in Italy at any time of year but visit at Christmas and the offering becomes decidedly sweeter. As in other parts of the world, dried fruit and spices feature in many of the sweet treats, with nuts, honey and the addition of chocolate in some.

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.

Entertaining over the festive period and looking for a little inspiration? This easy but satisfying recipe for gnocchi with mushrooms is a dish we learnt how to make with our wonderful Italian friend and cook Orietta and it really brings to life the flavours of autumn in Italy.

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.

It seems that the world cannot have too many cookery books and our fascination with the Italian kitchen and Italy's bounty of delicious fresh ingredients continues apace.  More and more books on the subject of food are published each year and here are three that have recently caught our eye ...

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.

We love chutney as an accompaniment to our picnic lunches on the hikes, as they go so well with the cheeses, crusty bread and cold meats we find along the way and are a great way to use up a glut of fruits or veggies.  Here are three of our favourites.

In all cases, the chutneys must be preserved in sterilised jars. To sterilise the jars, wash them thoroughly in very hot soapy water, rinse them in very hot water and then put on a baking sheet in a 140C/fan 120C/gas 1 oven until completely dry.

The last weekend in February was party time for Hedonistic Hiking as we hosted our annual long lazy Italian-style lunch in the historic village of Wandiligong, and enjoyed some of the very best ingredients that north east Victoria has to offer.

Mick was at the helm, ably assisted by old friend Brad Wolter, and the menu was a journey through some of our favourite Italian dishes but using ingredients sourced entirely from suppliers close to Bright.

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!

Risotto is one of the most versatile dishes as it can be made with an unlimited selection of fresh vegetables and herbs, funghi and truffles, nuts, meat, seafood and cheeses and you need hardly ever make the same risotto twice. Ready in just 20 minutes with a little stirring, this is fast food but wholly delicious and nutritious.

This week we went with our group on the Tuscan Harvest tour to one of our very favourite restaurants in the heart of Chianti Classico. 

I've just been staying with my friend Caroline on the stunning coastline of East Lothian, to the east of Edinburgh, on the Firth of Forth.  It is a really beautiful and unspoilt part of the UK with some great walking on the fabulous wild and empty beaches.  Caroline is a professional food writer and, as we were walking, we dreamt up and then created the perfect trail bar - a delicious mix of nuts, seeds, dried fruit and honey to keep even the hungriest hikers satisified.   Here's how we did it:

If there is any fresh herb which transports me in an instant to high summer in Italy then it is basil. The word comes from the Greek basilikos, meaning royal, and the herb is grown throughout the Italian peninsula, although its associations are perhaps strongest with the coastal region of Liguria, where the world-famous pesto alla genovese originated.

One of the highlights of our stay in Saluzzo on our Jewels of Piedmont tour is dining at the fabulous Il Sigillo restaurant next to the famous Abbey of Staffarda. The Abbey, a cistercian monastery founded in 1135, remains one of the most complete medieval complexes in the Piedmont region.

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".

Fancy something nutritious and filling, but simple to make?  Our three soups this month are full of flavour and very easy to prepare - and there's something for everyone, whether you're leaving behind the winter or the summer. All recipes serve 4. 

We've just been on a flying visit to Sydney to meet up with Tuscan winemaker Renzo Marinai, newly arrived from Italy, who is here for our special dinner in the King Valley this weekend with the Dal Zotto family.

Christmas is behind us and after all the over-indulgence most of us are trying to return to a spot of healthy eating.   Here are three favourite salad ideas - as seen by many of you on our walking holidays in Italy and Australia  - which might offer a little inspiration for New Year eating. They are recipes which will work well whether you are reading this in the northern or southern hemisphere.

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.

As if we hadn't eaten enough delicious food on our Culinary Tour of Northern Italy, we stopped on the way home to Siena on the edge of Turin to visit Eataly, a "supermarket" which celebrates the highest quality produce from all over Italy and champions small artisanal producers who still follow traditional methods.

One of the first things we do when we get back to Italy in April is to plant our salad and vegetables so that we, and our Hedonistic Hikers, can enjoy our own fresh produce over the summer.  On many of our tours later in the season we use our home-grown salads and veg.  Our home in Tuscany is part of a larger working farm and we are able to use a small plot of land behind the main villa.