Why this Olympian is making everyone crave Italian cheese

By Julia Buckley, CNN

Updated 12:18 PM EDT, Fri August 2, 2024

Old photos of Italian Olympic gymnast Giorgia Villa with wheels of parmesan cheese have sparked interest in the region where it's made. Gabriele Seghizzi

Editor’s Note: Sign up to CNN Travel’s Unlocking Italy newsletter for insider intel on Italy’s best loved destinations and lesser-known regions to plan your ultimate trip. Plus, we’ll get you in the mood before you go with movie suggestions, reading lists and recipes from Stanley Tucci.

The Olympics are a spectacle of athleticism, hard work, peak performance – and perhaps, for some, eating parmesan cheese.

Italian gymnast Giorgia Villa, who was part of the team taking the silver medal in the women’s gymnastics – Italy’s first medal in the event in 96 years – has swiftly become better known for her love of cheese than her moves on the mat.

The 21 year old from Lombardy in northern Italy was sponsored by the Consorzio del Formaggio Parmigiano-Reggiano (Consortium of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese) in 2021.

Photos taken to celebrate the pairing have now gone viral, after resurfacing following Villa’s Olympic glory.

The gymnast is seen in her leotard, sitting on a pile of giant wheels of cheese, and doing the splits over a line of the wheels.

She was also shot doing handstands beside the cheeses, cartwheeling in their presence, and reclining next to a large chunk of parmesan, with tantalizing flakes where it had been hewn off from the reel. In one photo, she is hugging a cheese wheel close to her chest. In others, she cannot resist anymore, and is cramming chunks of the crystal-filled cheese into her mouth.

Villa was part of the team that took the silver medal this week at the Olympics. Sipa USA

Other photos show her doing truly impressive work on the bars, but none have caught the public imagination in the same way that the cheese-fueled images have.

The images were shot by photographer Gabriele Seghizzi, who has the full set on his website.

The photos have put the spotlight on Emilia-Romagna, Italy’s gastro-haven region which is home to products from prosciutto ham to filled tortellini pasta, tagliatelle al ragù and culatello and mortadella cold cuts.

Parmigiano-Reggiano, or parmesan cheese, is most famously made in the hills around Parma, about 65 miles northwest of Bologna. It must be produced in the provinces of Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Bologna and Mantova to qualify as true Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Cows are fed strict diets and it takes around 550 liters of milk to produce one of the giant wheels that Villa is sitting on for her pictures. Not that the wheels are formed immediately – they are left to age for a minimum of 12 months, though some more expensive cheeses can take 24, 36, 40 months or more.

At 12 months, each wheel is tapped by an inspector with a special kind of hammer to listen to its ageing progress. Each wheel is stamped with its own identity number, to prevent fakes and identify which factory it was made in, and is branded – literally – as a true wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Want to try it in its homeland? Bologna is the most obvious foodie destination in Emilia-Romagna. Here, in the streets beside the Basilica of San Petronio, there has been a market since the medieval period, and today dozens of shops sell dizzying numbers of different cheeses.

Less visited Parma is the spiritual home of parmesan cheese, however. The city center is full of delicatessens which usually let you taste various cheeses of differing ages before you buy. And bars and restaurants around the city sell taglieri, or giant platters, of cheese and cold cuts. You can also visit parmesan factories or producers in the hills. There’s even a museum, the Museo del Parmigiano-Reggiano in Soragna, 40 minutes outside Parma.

The Parmigiano-Reggiano consortium has also sponsored tennis Jannik Sinner so let’s hope the photos from that partnership come to light next. But until then, there’s always Parma itself. Buon appetito!

Source: CNN