By Toni Lydecker
Several salamis and a hare hang from pegs on the wall, and a merchant is preparing to weigh a wedge of cheese. This is the scene that appears in a 15th-century fresco in the castle of Issogne, a quaint town in Italy’s smallest and highest region, Valle d’Aosta, where I arrived several days ago. Standing before the vintage painting, I notice that the wheels stacked on the merchant’s table look just like the Fontina cheeses I’ve glimpsed in gastronomie and restaurants all around this dairy-rich countryside. And, in fact, the cheeses are more or less the same, despite a centuries-wide generation gap. Indeed, Fontina Valle d’Aosta—Italy’s venerable mountain cheese—is proudly unchanged ...

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