This small village in the southern province of Potenza is trying to become the latest Italian town to enter the Guinness Book of Records by producing what it hopes will be the world's longest sausage.
According to the Rotonda town official responsible for tourism, Giuseppe Bonafine, butchers are already at work producing some 60-70 meters of sausage a day. By Saturday, the sausage should measure 450 meters, thus beating the record of 413 meters held by a town in the Sardinian province of Sassari.
The project, which involves using some eight tonnes of ground pork from local farms in the Pollino National Park area, will be completed in the middle of the carnival period. If successful, this was not the first time that Rotonda has made the Guinness Book of Records, having produced the world's longest sandwich and exhibited the world's biggest and tallest ox.
However, both records were set some years ago and have since been broken.
Italian towns are not new to the Guinness Book of Records and, in fact, many seek to set world records as a way to attract tourist attention. Last August, the small town of Mottola in the southeast region of Puglia produced and ate the world's biggest flat-bread 'focaccia' pizza.
The tomato-topped focaccia measured 23.7 metres by 12.5 metres and covered a total area of 297 square metres. It took two days to make and was cooked in an ad hoc oven set up in the town's main square.
Some 40,000 people - tourists and locals - came to help eat the pizza.
Mottola already had the Guinness record for making the world's longest sandwich in 2004, 634.5 meters long. August 2005 also saw the making of the world's longest pizza, 240 meters, in the Adriatic resort town of Pesaro. In May 2005, the world's longest focaccia was baked in Genoa by an enterprising pool of bakers who produced a 126.34m-long piece of the white pizza.
A record-breaking torrone was made in January 2005 in the medieval Marche town of Camerino: 400 meters of jaw-breaking nougat, honey and almonds. In December 2004, the largest castle ever made from
chocolate was constructed in Macerata Feltria, in the Marche region.
The "Castle of the Queen of Hearts", named after the Alice in Wonderland character, was two meters high, four meters long and four wide.
It was built with over 2,000 chocolate 'bricks', each weighing seven kilos, and had heart-shaped doors and windows. All the inside furnishing were also made from chocolate. In March 2004, a Sicilian citrus tart measuring more than a kilometer across entered the Guinness Book of Records.
The tart, made by the pastry chefs in the fishing village of Capo d'Orlando, pipped the previous record-holder, made in the northern village of Scortichino near Ferrara the previous year, by 100 metres.
Other Guinness records held by Italy over the past two years include the world's longest soccer match, over 9,000 minutes; the longest performance ever of a single song, by a three-man Sicilian blues-rock group, 14 hours and two minutes; and the world's singing record, when Marche crooner Tony Di Modugno disgorged cabaret numbers in his village theatre of Ostra Vetere for two days and nights, croaking his last notes on the stroke of 54 hours.
