Territories that tell their stories, hands and tales that endure, biodiversity, craftsmanship, and food culture. In a single word: cheese. Writing a catalog here would be dispersive, as well as coldly didactic. The best thing to do then becomes to taste and listen. One of the perfect places to do this is Bra, a city in Piedmont that every year becomes a crossroads of people, stories, milk, yeasts, and visions, transforming streets and squares into a great collective narrative about food as cultural identity.
Here, where over 400 producers including cheesemakers, shepherds, and refiners give voice to an Italy that has not stopped believing in slowness, care, and responsibility towards the land, raw milk cheeses, salumi from Presìdi, naturally leavened breads, craft beers, and projects that bring back to the center the agricultural value of food intertwine. The Urban Agricultural Bakers bring to the square a precise idea of bread: not an anonymous product, but the result of a short and visible supply chain.
"Every loaf has a name and a surname," they tell. "Our laboratory is a transparent showcase because we want those who buy the bread to see where it comes from."
The journey of Retrogusti begins in the cellars of the refiners, where the cheese matures away from the light, in the silence and humidity that only the earth can create. Ruben Valbuena, from Cultivo Quesería, works with milk as if it were a living matter.
"The difference is in the underground, because there time has its own rhythm, and we need only to follow it."
His forms age in stone caves where every mold and every climatic variation become an unrepeatable signature. From the valleys of the Pasiegos in Cantabria, Sarah recounts the La Lleildiría project as a return to the deep meaning of farming: “Here the land meets daily labor. Staying is a choice of responsibility towards the future.” In Varese, the Guffanti family carries on a story that began in 1876, when an abandoned silver mine was transformed into a aging cave for Gorgonzola. Five generations later, that air still smells of pastures and memory. “Cheese is like a photograph of the meadow where the cow grazes,” says the new generation today. “It reflects what it eats.”
Descending towards central Italy, Danilo Basili, in Orvieto, continues to work as he was taught: evening milk and morning milk together, gestures passed down orally, patience as a method. His cheese tells a story of shepherding made of continuity, not fashion. And then the Caciofiore Romano, curdled with wild thistle: bitter, velvety, ancestral. Every taste is a lesson in unwritten history.
Next to cheeses, Bra thrives on the street. Street food that is not entertainment, but a cultural project. Sbaffalo is born from friendship and authentic cuisine. The Polpetteria transforms the most universal dish in the world into a narrative of peoples and recipes.
"The meatball is home, wherever you go."
The beers follow the same philosophy. Serrocroce, an Irpinia agricultural brewery, controls the entire production cycle: from malt to glass. "Every beer is a liquid poem made of earth and patience." The Lab Fermentazioni, on the other hand, experiments: IPA, Triple, Berliner IGA with grape must, contaminations between wine and beer that create a new language. Every day finds its harbor at the Osteria dell'Alleanza, where producers and chefs meet without barriers. Here, the kitchen becomes a political and cultural space.
"Chefs are educators," explains one of them. "They connect producers and consumers. They tell the story of the landscape through the dish." Rare cheeses, fragrant breads, live beers, spiced meatballs: each table is a map of Italy. Every bite is a declaration of belonging.
The consequence is that events like Cheese are not just a fair, but rather a collective act of cultural resistance, a kind and stubborn way to defend diversity against homogenization. They become the place where milk meets the land, where bread becomes landscape, where beer and wine become a story. It is the celebration of an Italy that is not afraid to be small, slow, authentic. And when the lights go out and the scents of cheese and yeast linger in the air, what remains is the strongest awareness: the future of food still passes through the hands, care, and soul of those who believe in the beauty of things done well.
