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If you tell an Italian that you're heading to this or that city in Italy, the response is almost always the same: Oooh! Lì si mangia bene (rough translation: the eating's good there). Italians are famously proud of their own neighborhood cuisine, but they're as eager to taste what's cooking down the road. And if you force an Italian to choose just one city where the local cuisine is better than the rest, the winner — always after careful thought — more often than not turns out to be Bologna.

The traditional Bolognese menu of egg-based pasta, thick sauces and magical twists with the locally cured prosciutto and parmesan cheese leaves visitors supremely satisfied — if a bit more stuffed than after a Neapolitan seafood dinner. Bologna is the capital of the fertile, food-producing region of Emilia-Romagna, and plucks the choice offerings from surrounding cities and small towns for its restaurants and open-air markets — from Modena's balsamic vinegar to Parma's prosciutto to Piacenza's soft pork sausage. While absorbing the best of the rest, Bologna is considered the birthplace of several staple products and inimitable dishes. The Bolognese sauce (other Italians call it ragù) is chopped beef or veal with just a light touch of tomato sauce, a bit of pancetta, onion and a splash of milk and wine; it is served over tagliatelle pasta or as the filling of a lasagna. Proud locals also say tortellini, the small triangle-shaped meat-and-cheese-filled pasta, were invented in Bologna — though Modena also stakes that claim.

Situated at the base of the Apennine foothills halfway between Florence and Venice, Bologna has a thousand-year history as both a way station for travelers and a prestigious university town. The constant flow of visitors has brought in many delicacies and ingredients — and of course, sent away generations of messengers bearing glad tidings of the city's legendary cuisine. Giovanni Tamburini, owner of a family delicatessen in the heart of Bologna's historic center, speaks like a proud butcher one minute and a philosophy professor the next. As lunchtime customers pass before the 150 available varieties of sausage hanging nearby, Tamburini explains that understanding food is like studying archaeology. "There are always new discoveries to be uncovered," the bulky connoisseur declares, after one of his regular customers recommends a special spicy salami that has long been produced in a small village near Parma. For those who thought all hams were created equal, Tamburini offers the premium Culatello prosciutto, taken from the most prized section of the pork hind. At €51.65 a kg, it's worth every buttery cent.

Mortadella, the region's famed processed pork meat, is believed to have arrived from Celtic conquerors who were used to eating their meat in paté form. Though now considered a poor-man's sandwich filler, mortadella used to be made from the finest cut of the livestock, before production was increased and popularized after World War I. Tamburini is convinced that the region's trademark tortellini must have arrived from China. "The form is too perfect, too precise for us to have invented," he says.

Motioning toward some of the 90 different cheeses and 95 pasta shapes he sells, Tamburini says he frowns on too much cross-pollination of regional and national cuisines and insists on sticking close to the basic traditions. Bologna, to the disdain of some top restaurant critics, has been very wary about welcoming nouvelle cuisine, but Tamburini is unrepentant. "Abandoning traditional dishes is like trying to wash away the memory of poverty," he says. "Experiments are okay, but [a chef] must have great, great culture to know how to introduce new variations."

One man he considers up to the task is Massimiliano Giannone, the young chef who reigns over one of the city's culinary landmarks. Giannone grew up in Bologna on the staples of tagliatelle in meat sauce and tortellini in meat broth, which gave him the stock to get the chef's post of Pappagallo, a revered 99-year-old restaurant just around the corner from the two 12th century towers at the heart of the city. But since he took over the kitchen five years ago at the age of 25, he has jazzed things up just a bit. Among his innovations are a twisted, short Genovese pasta with scallop coral as a first course (€10) and duck breast with mushrooms, marjoram and sweet apples for the second (€20). Both dishes are lighter than the typical local fare, and depend almost entirely on ingredients rarely used in Bolognese cuisine (fish, though plentiful in the not-too-distant Adriatic, is considered foreign food here). "We try to step outside the canon without falling into nouvelle," Giannone says. But even at the Pappagallo, tradition is observed: the tortellini are served only in the old-fashioned broth. Some things taste just too good to change.

• JEFF ISRAELY/ Bologna
• Bologna is the country's favorite place to dine