Mozzarella di Bufala Campana. Storia, tradizioni e immagini di un formaggio nato all’ombra del mito della Magna Grecia

A captivating journey, begun more than a thousand years ago. The long and extraordinary tale of buffalo mozzarella blends and overlaps with the social and economic events of a corner of southern Italy. Stories of men and beasts, of deprivation and oppression, where the weak often found themselves ever poorer and more exploited and the powerful ever richer and more overbearing. Welcome to the land of mozzarella. Welcome to the province of Caserta, where the last peaks of the northern Campanian Apennines descend towards the sea and the Aversa plain. It is here, in this slice of land, known for more than ten centuries by the place name Terra dei Mazzunë, that a large part of the national buffalo herd is concentrated. And it is not far from here, in the Reale Industria della Pagliara delle bufale di Carditello, that in the mid-eighteenth century the Bourbons wanted, alongside a buffalo farm, what, given its purposes, may have been the first dairy in the long history of mozzarella