Industry Travel Founder Kenny Dunn Products Culinary walking tours | Founded 2011 (2011) Headquarters Rome, Italy | |
Type Culinary Tourism, Italy | ||
Eating Italy Food Tours offers food and cultural walking tours in Rome, Italy. The company was founded in 2011 by Kenny Dunn—a Philadelphia native and former UN World Food Program Officer who moved to Italy in 2008.
Eating Italy Food Tours has received international coverage and has been featured in national and regional newspapers, such as Germany’s DW, Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter, Denmark’s Fredag, Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth, India’s The Telegraph, and Canada’s The Hamilton Spectator. Eating Italy Food Tours has also been listed in the guide-book series of Rick Steves—a renowned author of European travel literature—and in Fodor’s—the world’s largest publisher of English language travel and tourism information. The tour is ranked among the top ten things to do in Rome on TripAdvisor.
Tours
Eating Italy Food Tours organizes four hour walking tours through two areas of Rome—Testaccio and Trastevere, and also offers cooking classes since May 2014. The Testaccio tour comprises over 12 different food tastings of traditional Roman cuisine, including a visit to gourmet shop “Volpetti” featured in The New York Times, as well as to “00100 Pizza”, acclaimed in The Guardian. The tour also visits rare, cultural sites, such as the neighborhood's food market, the ex-slaughterhouse, and the Cestius Pyramid.
The Trastevere tours are offered both during the day and the evening. Both include 10 different tastings at places like Fatamorgana for all-natural gelato and Antica Caciara, a family-owned deli founded in 1900. Tastings are paired with hidden cultural sites like the wine cellar of Spirito di Vino that is 150 years older than the Colosseum.
As described by Rick Steves in his 2013 guidebook on Rome, “Eating Italy Food Tours leads fun and insightful walks almost daily through Rome’s colorful Testaccio neighborhood, interspersing history, tradition, and local food culture while giving you a great glimpse into daily life in a less-seen side of the city.”
In the spring of 2014, the company launched two cooking classes: Pizza School for Kids and Cook Dinner with Nonna. The Pizza School for Kids is a two-and-a-half hour pizza p=making class designed for 5 to 10 year olds and takes place in a local pizzeria in Testaccio. Their Cook Dinner with Nonna class is a 4-hour cooking class taught by an Italian nonna, or grandmother, and takes place in her Roman apartment right near the Colosseum. Both cooking classes teach visitors how to cook a traditional Italian meal.
Eating Italy Food Tours offers tours and classes six days a week. Over 30,000 people have participated in the tour since its inception in 2011.
In the summer of 2013, the parent company—Eating Europe—opened up a second food tour operation in London: Eating London Tours. And in the spring of 2014 it began food tours in Amsterdam and Prague.