For a girl who is approaching her 40th birthday and wants something a little different than just the usual dinner to help celebrate the finale of her thirties, visit the Gran Sasso area of Abruzzo…
You can still have the dinner, albeit tastier & slightly more sustainable than the local London fare, but afterwards you can have an adventurous journey being driven back to your mountain village accommodation where you will more than likely see some some of these porkers.
Up close[ish] for a quick view of 2 minutes (no longer please!) – boars are simultaneously beautiful, comic, scary (their tusks can be up to 30cm long) – the most intriguing thing their bristles and the eyes that glint in the headlights & clearly convey “please just leave me alone” or “get out a shotgun to hunt me”. Subsequent to this little birthday treat, what had been one of my favourite meats I have since been unable to stomach – perhaps we all need a little bit more of a reality check with the animals we munch away on without thinking about so often…
Sadly over the parched summer of 2007 in Abruzzo, boars have been coming down closer to actual villagers and farms to get water and food, and locals complain about damage – sad that the boars can’t complain back about the global warming that is driving them to ‘human areas’.
Anyway a few facts for everyone who’s a fan of this wild noble piggy:
A group of boars is called a singular of boars
Boar meat in Italian – Cinghiale
Further Reading
Everything you wanted to know about cooking boar
Recommended wines to accompany boar
Wild Boar Festival Italy – August (normally the first weekend) – Teramo August, Ioannella di Torricella Sicura (Teramo), Collicello di Cagnano (L’Aquila).
Sammy Dunham is a web marketing consultant, designing websites & writing copy to optimise web presence for her clients at 
Now if I was in Abruzzo today, I'd quite like to hop on a bus to Rome and see the snow clad Colosseum 
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