Grana Padano, a successful italian story

Grana Padano is a hard cheese, cooked and slowly aged. It is produced in thirty-two provinces of the regions Emilia – Romagna, Lombardy, Piedmont, Trentino-Alto Adige and Veneto.
It is very often confused with Parmigiano Reggiano, Parmesan cheese. The cheese called “parmesan Lodi ” was divided into Grana Padano and Parmigiano Reggiano only on the 1st of June 1951, during a meeting that took place in Stresa, a little town in front of Lake Maggiore, in the region of Piemonte, when some technical and European dairy operators sign a convention.
Grana Padano is an Italian cheese with Protected Designation of Origin status (PDO) since 1966. That means that the three key stages of the production chain (1.farming and cows milking, 2.harvesting and processing of milk into cheese, 3.aging process) must necessarily take place in the area of origin.
Grana Padano Protection Consortium, Consorzio tutela grana Padano, was founded in 1954 in order to protect each step of the production of Grana Padano, by giving it Production Guidelines. Nowadays it includes 446 companies, divided between producers, seasonal, authorized facilities for portioning this cheese and facilities for packaging grated Grana Padano.
The legend says that this cheese was born in the Middle ages.
In 1134 the monks of the Chiaravalle Abbey, in latin called Sanctæ Mariæ Clarævallis Mediolanensis, an Abbay which is in the south of Milan, a few kilometers away, decided to reclaim the area of the Po river for expanding agriculture and livestock. At that time the cheese was produced in special boilers inside the monasteries: these can be considered the first dairies. The monks called this new cheese “caseus vetus”, old cheese, but people who had no familiarity with Latin, gave it another name, derived from the particularity of the pasta, which is compact but grainy, “grana”. Thus was born the name of this cheese:  Padano, from the plain of the Po river.