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Tasty Travel: Calabria
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OK, the United States has Hatch, New Mexico, ("Chile Pepper Capital of The World"), with its annual Hatch Chile Festival. But did you know that the world of heat has a European counterpart that doesn't need to hide behind Hatch at all? In the southern Italian region of Calabria, we discovered the village of Diamante, Italian for "diamond". For ten years by now, this tiny town at the Tyrrhenian Sea (part of the Mediterranean Sea off the western coast) has been hosting the annual Festival del Peperoncino in September. This is a spectacular four-day celebration of the powerful pods. It is important to point out that for centuries, Calabria has been a hotbed of chile pepper agriculture, and this of course had a significant influence on Calabrian cuisine. Quite recently, the region even got its own Peperoncino Museum. A one-week trip yielded so much information that we decided to break it down into eight chapters, as listed above. Starting on Monday, the 30th of September, we will be publishing one article every week on Diamante and the Peperoncino Festival until all eight are complete, or until Harald's fingertips are sore from typing! About the author After four years in the fiery-foods business in the U.S., fiery-foods.com Webmaster/designer Harald Zoschke and his wife Renate moved back to Germany, and they opened the first German (Web) Hot Shop in 2001 (www.pepperworld.com). Thanks to the central location of their home country, plane trips to almost any other European country take just around 1 to 2 hours, and EU citizens now enjoy traveling without borders, and paying with one currency. So besides their annual trips to the Fiery-Foods and Barbecue Shows in the U.S., the capsicum couple often visits "hot spots" in the Old World. A German-language version of this Calabria article series can be found here. |
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