page_title: Caviar
section_title: Italy
hierarchical_section_title: Caviar / Industry / Italy
caption_attribution_description: English: Sturgeon fishing in the Po river around 1950
context_page_description: Caviar is a food consisting of salt-cured roe of the family Acipenseridae. Caviar is considered a delicacy and is eaten as a garnish or a spread. The roe can be "fresh" or pasteurized, with pasteurization reducing its culinary and economic value.
  Traditionally, the term caviar refers only to roe from wild sturgeon in the Caspian Sea and Black Sea. Depending on the country, caviar may also be used to describe the roe of other species of sturgeon or other fish such as salmon, steelhead, trout, lumpfish, whitefish, or carp.
context_section_description: Beluga sturgeon were common in the Po river in Italy in the 16th century, and were used to produce caviar.
  Cristoforo da Messisbugo in his book Libro novo nel qual si insegna a far d'ogni sorte di vivanda, Venice, 1564, at page 110, gave the first recorded recipe in Italy about extraction of the eggs from the roe and caviar preparation "to be consumed fresh or to preserve".
  The writer and voyager Jérôme Lalande in his book "Voyage en Italie", Paris, 1771, vol. 8 page 269, noted that many sturgeon were caught in the Po delta area in the territory of Ferrara.
  In 1753 a diplomatic war broke out between the Papal States, governing the Ferrara territory, and the Venetian Republic about sturgeon fishing rights in the Po river, the border between the two states. From about 1920 and until 1942 there was a shop in Ferrara, named "Nuta" from the nickname of the owner Benvenuta Ascoli, that processed all the sturgeons caught in the Po river for caviar extraction, using an elaboration of the original Messisbugo recipe, and shipped it to Italy and Europe. Production was sporadically continued by a new owner until 1972, when sturgeon stopped swimming up the Po river. Since 2015, some sturgeon have reappeared in the Po.
  Currently, Italian caviar is obtained almost entirely from bred sturgeons. The caviar production is concentrated predominantly in Brescia, which is considered the capital of Italian caviar: in this area, in Calvisano, is located the world's largest sturgeons farm that produces annually 25 tonnes of caviar. Italian caviar is generally the most sold and appreciated in the world: Italy is the world's leading producer.
caption: Sturgeon fishing in the Po river in 1950, Italy
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