Eat Chic: Eataly Opens The First Food Theme Park in Bologna (FICO) :: NoGarlicNoOnions: Restaurant, Food, and Travel Stories/Reviews

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Forget Disney World — the upcoming "Eataly World" is a massive Italian food-themed park, and it looks just as amazing as it sounds.

Admission is always free to Eataly World.

FICO Eataly World: The focus of places like Disney World and Six Flags is rides. You pay an entrance fee, and that enables you to go to Space Mountain (or whatever). Eataly World, however, is focused on all aspects of Italian food: growing, harvesting, processing, and craft. Much of the park's 20 acres are dedicated to farms and factories that you can visit, enabling you to see directly how Parmigiano-Reggiano is made, or how your favorite olive oil is pressed.

"At Eataly, each forkful of pasta has a story: farmers cultivated grains, millers ground flour, pastai (pasta makers) shaped dough, distributors delivered it to Eataly, and our chefs cooked the pasta to perfection and paired it with seasonal sauce before we drop it at your table."

In many ways, Eataly World is an extension of what the various Eataly establishments around the world already do — just many, many times larger. At Eataly, you can watch pasta get made by hand and choose to either buy some to cook yourself or have it prepared by an expert cook. You can buy the guanciale, cheese, tomato and whatever else on-site, and go make bucatini all'amatriciana at home. Or you could eat it on-site. Eataly World takes that concept to a far grander scale, where you can see the cows who produced the milk that became the cheese you're eating. Then you can see the aging process of that cheese before it became a nutty, salty, unbelievably complex and delicious sensory experience.

The 20-acre theme park (to put things into perspective, that's about double the size of their flagship New York location spread out across acres of fields in the Italian countryside rather than stacked high in a skyscraper) will include orchards, pastures and gardens as well as 25 restaurants and 40 workshops, where visitors can indulge on homemade everything–from pasta to pizza to vegetarian options–and shop along the way. To make shopping that much simpler and have tourists feeling as though they're at their very own green market, bicycle-maker Bianchi has created their first-ever shopping rental bikes for the property complete with a jumbo-sized storage crate at the front, Bloomberg reports. To make this project the best it can be, the brand is sparing no expense, funneling $106 million into the park, to be exact. We're hoping the super-sized budget is used toward freshly made cacio e pepe served in individually sized rounds of parmigiano reggiano upon entry and fondue fountains of Barolo and Nutella at every turn. Things we are hoping the park skips out on? A store that solely sells orange Crocs; that we can easily live without.

Fico