Traditional Balsamic Vinegar: A History Kept in the Attics of Modena and Reggio Emilia

In the farmhouses and town houses of Modena and Reggio Emilia, the season of the vinegar used to announce itself on the stairs. The museum devoted to traditional balsamic vinegar at Spilamberto records the lore: work in the acetaia, the room under the roof where barrels of cooked grape must stand ageing, resumed when the characteristic smell came back down the stairwell in spring. Summer heat set the contents moving. Winter cold let them settle.

The room belongs to a house. Around it came, in turn, a word, a written method, an association, a museum and a protected name. What follows traces that sequence and asks what it left under the roof.

A vinegar before the word

Grape must boiled down is old enough to appear in the Roman farm manuals, and Columella, writing in the first century AD, is one of the authors who describe it. Nobody has shown a straight line from those pots to the barrels of Modena.

The earliest undisputed written reference associated with this part of Emilia is a poem, and it comes from the hills of Reggio Emilia, where Canossa stands. The monk Donizone, writing a life of Countess Matilda of Canossa around 1112 to 1115, recorded that Boniface of Canossa had given the future emperor Henry III a prized vinegar, in a silver vessel. The gift dates from around 1046, some seventy years before the poem. The specification for the Reggio Emilia vinegar describes the text in those terms.

The passage does not use the word balsamico, and it does not say how the vinegar was made. Whether the Canossa gift was the aged, cooked-must vinegar of the later barrels is an open question, and writers on the subject raise it themselves.

The word in the ducal cellar

From 1598 the Este dukes held their court at Modena. Their domains, the Duchy of Modena and Reggio, took in both of the cities that now share the vinegar’s two protected names.

As early as 1730, according to accounts of the Este court, Duke Rinaldo I gave some of the vinegar to the scholar Lodovico Antonio Muratori. The word comes later. In 1747 a record of the ducal cellars applies balsamico to vinegar; the European specification for the Modena vinegar calls it the earliest official record to do so. Writers on the subject read the name as a reference to the medicinal properties first attributed to it.

Bottles were then requested for the circle of Catherine the Great in 1764, and in 1792 Duke Ercole III sent a flask to Frankfurt for the coronation of Francis II.

The method on paper

The Este state ended in 1859, when Francis V left Modena. By then some of the vinegar had passed into private hands: in the Napoleonic years the ducal barrels are said to have been auctioned, with local noble families buying them. Around 1860 the last barrels of the ducal acetaia were taken, by order of Victor Emmanuel II, to the castle of Moncalieri near Turin, where they were reportedly neglected and dispersed.

The first full account of the method comes from private correspondence, not from a court. It is a letter from Francesco Aggazzotti to Pio Fabriani, regarded as the first full statement of the production rules. Most accounts date it to 1862; the European specification for the Modena vinegar says 1860.

Until then, as far as surviving sources show, the method had lived in what families did.

A room that goes with the house

The rooms where it was done are easy to picture, because visitors still describe them. Jancis Robinson, visiting a loft in Modena in 2014, described a warm, dim space with low rafters darkened by years of evaporation. The barrels were black and in places warped, set on wooden racks, with squares of cloth over the bung holes.

Marisa Barbieri’s attic, in the family home near the centre of Modena, holds 24 batterie, sets of barrels of graduated size. In all there are 150 barrels, some of them from the late nineteenth century. Visit Modena, the area’s tourist board, says her father Gino left them to her.

A visitor’s account published in 2013 climbs the stairs to that attic behind her daughter Franca, the third generation to make the vinegar, who learned it from her mother. Franca and her four siblings each inherited a set of barrels, and she started three more for her own three children. As a small child she saw her grandfather carry the vinegar in buckets.

Estimates of how many such rooms exist are loose. Luca Gozzoli, a former mayor of Spilamberto, has put the number of Modena families who keep an acetaia at several thousand. The Reggio Emilia consortium describes production in its province as spread through the attics of numerous homes.

The Barbieri sets echo what visitors are told. Robinson was told that a batteria is often begun when a child is born and handed to the child at marriage. A separate account, of the nineteenth century, places the addition of valuable barrels to a bride’s dowry among wealthy families after the Napoleonic years. Both describe habits, not a rule with fixed terms.

From a fair in Spilamberto to a protected name

The next steps were taken in public. The fair of San Giovanni at Spilamberto resumed in 1967 after an interruption of about twenty years. Rolando Simonini presented “natural” balsamic vinegar there among the town’s other specialities; the museum’s guide counts 57 samples at that fair.

Simonini went on to found the Consorteria dell’Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Modena, established in law, according to the museum’s guide, by a statute of 1969. It is a separate body from the Consorzio that now protects the name. One producer’s history says the Consorteria’s common method of the 1960s built on Aggazzotti’s letter.

Since then the Consorteria has run the Palio di San Giovanni each year, where tasters judge and reward the best vinegars. The museum’s guide says about a thousand producers now compete.

A ministerial decree of 5 April 1983 recognised the Modena name as a controlled designation of origin. Production rules for Modena followed by decree in 1987, the year the producers of Reggio Emilia formed their own consortium. In 2000 the European Union granted two protected designations of origin, or DOP, one for Modena and one for Reggio Emilia, and the Modena application cites the decree and the rules. Each covers a product and a method, set out in a written specification. The museum opened on 24 November 2002 in Villa Fabriani, at Spilamberto.

One hundred and sixty-eight thousand bottles

In 2025, the consortium reported in January 2026, the Modena DOP was bottled as 168,068 bottles of 100 ml. That is 1.5 per cent more than the year before, and about 16,800 litres. More than 107,000 of the bottles were affinato, the twelve-year category, and more than 60,900 were extravecchio, a label reserved for vinegar of at least twenty-five years. The Reggio Emilia DOP is counted separately.

When the attics shook

Two earthquakes struck the plain north of Modena in May 2012, around Cavezzo and Mirandola. Acetaia del Cristo, near Cavezzo, kept some 2,000 barrels in its attics. A report in Linkiesta on 4 June 2012 described plaster fallen from the ceiling beams and some cracks.

The same report put the loss at about a fifth of the vinegar ageing there and the damage at just over €500,000. It added that most of the production had been saved. Gilberto Barbieri, one of the estate’s managers, said that apart from the vinegar there had been little damage. Had the ceiling given way, he said, the estate would have lost about 100,000 litres.

Stefano Belfiori, secretary of the craft association Lapam-Confartigianato, said that most producers in the area work at near-household scale, with sets of about ten barrels. Many of those who age vinegar in their attics, he said, had not yet estimated their losses. An estimate of over €15 million for the sector had been made the Monday before the second shock. On the floor at Cavezzo, the report said, the vinegar lay in reddish pools.

A tradition seeking recognition

The idea began with the Consorteria: Maurizio Fini, now its Gran Maestro, or head, proposed a UNESCO candidacy in 2019. In October 2022 the balsamic tradition of central Emilia was entered in Italy’s national inventory of agri-food heritage, on a proposal from the Consorteria of Spilamberto and the Confraternita of Scandiano, in Reggio Emilia province. The region’s agriculture assessor called the entry a step towards UNESCO, though it is a national list, not a UNESCO one.

On 19 May 2026 the assembly of the consortium for the Modena IGP vinegar relaunched the candidacy for UNESCO recognition as intangible cultural heritage. That consortium protects a different and more widely sold product from the traditional vinegar, which has its own consortium and its own protected name. The candidacy’s title places the tradition between sociability, craft skill and popular culture, in what it calls the emblematic communities of Modena and Reggio Emilia.

Enrico Corsini, who presides over the Consorzio Tutela of the traditional vinegar, supported the relaunch in June. He saw in it a chance to show the cultural side of the vinegar, and said the project concerns the identity of communities, families and the territory. The announcements did not say whether a dossier has been submitted to UNESCO.

What stays under the roof

The Consorteria, the specifications and the museum have all been built around the practice. The Consorteria’s own collection, 129 casks in 22 sets, lies under the roof of Villa Fabriani, in an attic like those of the families it grew out of.

In Modena in 2013, the way to the vinegar ran up the stairs of a family house, behind a woman who had learned the work from her mother.