We have already told you about the history of the King of Cheeses, but today we want to delve into a more specific topic, namely the etymology of its name. Why is Parmigiano Reggiano called that?
As we have already explained, the production area of Parmigiano Reggiano PDO is enclosed within the provinces of Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Bologna (west of the Reno river), and Mantua (east of the Po river).
This contrasts with the cheese's name, which, upon superficial examination, suggests it is produced exclusively in the provinces of Parma and Reggio Emilia... It is the intricate historical events involving Parmigiano Reggiano that have caused its name to only partially reveal its origin.
The first written records of Parmigiano Reggiano being commercialized date back to the 13th century, in a notarial act from Genoa that mentions the caseus parmensis (the cheese from Parma). This cheese, exported from the Parma area to the rest of Italy, would soon become very well-known, even being mentioned in Boccaccio's Decameron: "And there was a mountain made entirely of grated Parmesan cheese, on which people stood, doing nothing else but making macaroni and ravioli and cooking them in capon broth, and then throwing them down from there, and whoever took more, had more."
The great surge in the production of this cheese occurred in the 16th century, with the establishment of dairies (vaccherie) that included a creamery to process the owner's milk, along with that produced in the sharecroppers' stables. In these years, little by little, the production of Parmigiano Reggiano also spread to the province of Modena.
In the 18th century, the Duchy of Modena, a de facto producer of Parmigiano, found itself excluded from the name of a cheese that was now being exported even outside Italy. During that period, the duchies of Modena and Parma were caught in a grip of continuous sieges, and so the Modenese dukes had the idea of modernizing the countryside and improving Parmesan production. They expropriated lands entrusted to the clergy and sold them to the bourgeoisie, transforming the economy of the area and concentrating the production of Parmigiano made by the Modenese bourgeoisie in the Reggio territories. Hence the term Parmigiano Reggiano, which implicitly also includes the Modenese territory and, later, also part of the Mantuan and Bolognese territories.
The official institution of the name dates back two centuries later. And in the 20th century, particularly in 1996, the European PDO also arrived.
