caciocavallo

Caciocavallo means cheese on horseback in Italian: cacio (cheese) from Latin caseus, combined with cavallo (horse) from Latin caballus. The name describes the traditional method of hanging the cheeses: two teardrop-shaped balls tied together with rope and draped over a wooden beam to dry and age, one on each side, like a rider's saddlebags. The image was so vivid and precise that it named the cheese itself.

The earliest written reference comes from the Sienese physician Ugo Benzi around 1394, who listed it among Italian cheeses of merit. Bartolomeo Sacchi, known as Platina, described caciocavallo in his 1474 cookbook De honesta voluptate et valetudine as a cheese made by Calabrian and Sicilian herders who stretched the curd while hot. One further theory connects the name to Vlach and Romanian shepherds who hung small cheeses from their saddles during seasonal transhumance migrations through the Balkans and into southern Italy.

By the 17th century, caciocavallo was a fixture on the tables of Naples and Palermo, and Bourbon court records from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies list it as provisioned food for long sea voyages. Its ability to age without refrigeration made it practical across the Mediterranean. The cheese followed Italian emigrants to Argentina in the late 19th century, where local variants developed and are still sold under the same name.

The Italian PDO designation for Caciocavallo Silano was granted in 1996, tying the name to a production zone across five southern regions including Basilicata, Calabria, and Campania. Outside that zone, similar cheeses appear under regional names, but none replaced the original. The horse image survives in the knotted shape that still hangs from beams in cheese shops from Palermo to Buenos Aires.