Some of the world’s greatest cured meats, like culatello, come from the plains along the River Po north of Parma.
That’s why Massimo Pezzani, a great salumi enthusiast, converted a cellar attached to his restaurant into a culatello-aging room. In Italy salumi, cured meats, represent an authentic cultural heritage, a treasure chest of biodiversity which must be preserved at all costs. Envied and copied in many countries, Italy’s cured pork products are without doubt the world’s most celebrated.
The province of Parma is recognized as the heart of Italy’s salumi industry, the real world capital of the pig, home to culatello di Zibello, prosciutto di Parma and salame felino, to name just a few.
L’Antica Ardenga is the creation of Massimo Pezzani. In the early 1990s he opened an osteria of the same name in Diolo di Soragna, in the northern part of the province of Parma. In just a few years it become an important destination for lovers of good food and the local peasant flavors, and soon earned a place in the Slow Food Osteria Guide.
The diners’ enthusiasm for the salumi aged by Massimo’s loving hands was so great that what started almost as a hobby on the side soon became a more time-consuming job than running the restaurant.
The search for ingredients, the processing and the ever-greater number of orders convinced Massimo to dedicate himself full-time to making salumi. Over the past few years he has been renovating a 1930s building which had historically been used for the production of the area’s typical cured meats (culatello, coppa, strolghino, salame gentile, spalla cruda, pancetta) and made it the site of his own salumificio, L’Antica Ardenga.
The strictly artisanal production, the great attention paid to the selection of ingredients and the skill of Massimo and his collaborators led to L’Antica Ardenga quickly becoming one of the most celebrated standard-bearers for Parma’s cured meats.
Today Antica Ardegna belongs to the Consortium of Culatello di Zibello Producers and offers three Slow Food Presidia: culatello di Zibello, mariola and spalla cruda.
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