Learn Italian and Italian traditions: the mozzarella and cheesy insults

After our mini course on cappuccino, espresso, lemons and pizza, today we look at more food.
These three cheeses are the golden boys of the Campania region: the three most famous Italian buffalo milk cheeses.
Before modern times, a cheese as fresh as mozzarella was impossible to keep and was never destined for commercial use.

Home made mozzarella was made exclusively for the family and played second fiddle to the provola – a seasoned and smoked buffalo cheese.

This resulted in the term “mozzarella” being used as a personal attack to criticise a person with no backbone or personality.
In the colourful Neapolitan dialect, “provolone” is also used as an insult: “t’a cummann’tu miez e furmagg’ ….
Pruvulò!!!”.
In Italian, this would be written “te la comandi tu in mezzo ai formaggi …Provolone!!!” with a literal meaning of “you’re the one who commands in the middle of the cheeses, big provola” (I’ll leave it to your imagination to devine what that might mean).

If you want to know more about Italian cheese, especially while travelling, you could try a trip along the “strada della mozzarella”, or mozzarella trail, to discover the places of a 500 year-old tradition, when the first mozzarella appeared on the Pope’s table in Rome.