A Prosciutto Festival in Pictures

One of the greatest joys of a fall trip to Italy – for me, at least – is the array of food-related festivals on the calendar. It’s harvest season, and no matter where you are in the country there’s bound to be some kind of food being celebrated in September and October especially.
During an Italy trip in September of 2009, I found out about a festival going on that month in and around Parma celebrating prosciutto. Naturally, I had to go. I ended up taking a day-trip one weekend with some friends to the town of Langhirano, about 12.5 miles south of Parma, where there’s a (kind of mediocre) Prosciutto Museum and where that weekend’s Prosciutto Festival was being held.
Here’s an overview of our day (in photos) at the Prosciutto Festival.
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I will say that while touring the prosciutto factory was interesting, the tour was entirely in Italian and I was only half paying attention (okay, probably less than half), so I didn’t come away with very much information about what we were looking at. Thankfully, my friend Sara of Ms. Adventures in Italy was along for the ride, and not only was she taking pictures she was also doing a better job of listening. You can read her trio of posts about the tour which includes all kinds of detail about the steps involved in making prosciutto:

And if you’d like to go to the prosciutto festival yourself, here’s the official website for the Festival del Prosciutto di Parma.
all photos in the slideshow by Jessica Spiegel and may not be used without permission