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GENOA Where the Hills Meet the Sea — and Somebody Brought Focaccia Genoa is squeezed between steep green hills and the Ligurian Sea, and its food tastes exactly like you'd expect from a city with one foot in each. Basil. Olive oil. Garlic. Pine nuts. Chickpeas. Anchovies. Fresh fish. Pasta. Herbs growing on terraced hillsides above the water. This isn't the heavy cooking of inland northern Italy. Genoese food is brighter, greener and surprisingly frugal — the cooking of sailors, merchants and...

PARMA Where Patience Tastes Very, Very Good Parma is a city that seems to have looked at the idea of fast food and politely declined. Here, some of the greatest things on the table are made with remarkably few ingredients: pork and salt, milk and rennet, flour and eggs. The trick is what happens next. You wait. For months. Sometimes years. And eventually somebody puts a plate of prosciutto and Parmigiano in front of you, opens a bottle of wine, and suddenly patience seems like an excellent...

MODENA Where Time Is an Ingredient Modena is the sort of place that makes you reconsider the meaning of “simple food.” A piece of Parmigiano. A slice of prosciutto. A few drops of balsamic. A glass of sparkling red wine. None of it sounds particularly complicated. Then you discover that the cheese may have aged for years, the vinegar for decades, the wine comes from vineyards tended by generations of the same families, and somebody’s nonna still has very strong opinions about how thick the...