If You Can Stand the Heat ...

For 15 years, food-media company Gambero Rosso has been Italy's premier arbiter of taste, doling out make-or-break gastronomical opinions in its restaurant and wine guides, monthly magazine, and on its food TV channel. Now Gambero Rosso has opened Citt del Gusto, a mini-city devoted to taste. The gleaming five-story, steel-and-glass structure in Rome's Ostiense district is a high-tech food-and-wine amusement park, encompassing TV studios, a cooking theater, a 30,000-bottle cellar, workshops, classrooms, a wine bar and a gourmet accessory store.

Best of all is its cooking school: courses range from rank amateur to master classes for professionals, taught...