Day 14 - Erbusco

I’m sitting here, writing this piece under a beautiful blue sky, the convertible roof open and the sun streaming in. It’s a glorious day as our trip winds down to its final two days and our plan for the day is simple. Do nothing.

With the top down it is a bit chilly, so I get up and walk into the closet and get a sweater, returning to the bed to continue reading internet stories of last night’s Red Sox World Series clinching victory. But how is this possible, without veering off the road? Our convertible is not a car, but our hotel room here at l’Albereta (Via Vittorio Emanuele, 21, Erbusco, tel. 030.776.0550). With a push of a button the domed ceiling above our four poster bed slowly retracts, making a its fifteen foot journey in about five minutes, leaving a similar size opening above our heads and exposing nothing but clear blue sky. On a day like today, with cool temperatures and a clear sky, this unusual room feature will get a real workout.

We had tried the roof the night before, while having our truffle picnic in our room. While allowing in the fresh air, the effect was not the same as it is this morning, as it had been pitch black and mostly cloudy outside. Every few minutes or so, however, an airplane would pop through the clouds just over our heads, its navigation lights illuminating the clouds and its flashing beacons creating a light show which, while not quite on par with the aurora borealis, was at least quite mesmerizing.

So this morning we slide open the roof once again, surfing the internet for more stories about our beloved Red Sox. This, of course, is overkill, as we had set our alarm for two o’clock the previous night in order to wake up and watch the game on our computer. When we tuned in the game was in the second inning and the score was 1-0 Sox. We proceeded to watch through the last out, or at least I did (Suzy tends to fall asleep as soon as the power on button is pressed on a TV), over three hours later. It was a fabulous game, and being able to watch it live on my Slingbox was nearly flawless, the only problem being that we had to use our high speed UMTS card to connect to the internet, which is a much slower connection than wi-fi. As a result the Slingbox spent a great deal of time buffering its video stream, which would slow down and speed up like an old time silent movie, occasionally cutting off a pitch or two, including Mike Lowell’s home run and Mike Timlin’s inning ending strike out. On these occasions it was clear enough from the context of the game to figure out what had happened and the hours I spent watching highlights and replays afterwards filled in the rest of the blanks. The bottom line is that we saw the Sox win a World Series and got to witness the celebration live, even if it was nearly six o’clock in the morning here. Good thing we don’t have any activities planned for the day.

In all my years of baseball fandom I have followed just two teams, the Boston Red Sox and the Atlanta Braves and for many of those years being a fan was a frustrating experience. Then things changed in the early 1990s as the Braves ascended to the top of their division and remained there for 14 years. Around this time the Sox shook off their slumber and began to challenge the Yankees for dominance in the AL East, reaching the playoffs on a regular basis. Through all of their success, however, the two teams had only two World Series titles among them. I had not been present to watch either title, having a work obligation when the Braves beat the Cleveland Indians for their title and being here in Italy, and without a means of watching the game on TV or computer three years ago when the Sox swept the St. Louis Cardinals. So, I was not going to let a little fatigue get in the way of watching this game. Today I am bone tired from staying up all night. But to paraphrase Winston Churchill, “when I wake up tomorrow, madam, I will be well rested and the Red Sox will still be World Champions.”

* * *

So what to do when you are staying at world class resort and spa, with nothing to do? This feeling is so foreign, so unusual to us, that we frankly don’t quite know what to do. For those of you who read our daily accounts, I hope that it appears that we glide effortlessly from mouth watering meal to a life altering experience to soul affirming moment of cultural discovery and connection. But let me let you in on a little secret and a literary term I learned in high school. It’s called “poetic license.” In writing these stories I take a little liberty to emphasize some facts and details and to deemphasize others. The result is a little like my Slingbox account of last night’s game. Some portions are speeded up, others slowed down, but in the end you get the essential gist and most of the details. Like making sausage, you are spared some details you don’t really want to or care to know, such as the amount of time we spend each day simply writing and posting our stories. But beyond that there are the mundane or unpleasant details of the long drives from place to place, the inevitable missed turns, on the fly change of plans, interminable meetings with suppliers, oversleeping, hangovers, stomach aches, coughs and colds and general malaise. We try to spare you these details and I only mention them because today we don’t have to consider any of them. We simply get to do nothing.

Unlike Seinfeld, I don’t think I’m so good about writing entertaining story lines about nothing.

So I will simply say that our story about nothing may not be all that entertaining to you, but I know of two people who would love to replay this episode over and over again. Especially the part where the nice bartender in the white jacket serves lunch for the two of them on a semi-private terrace balcony overlooking a garden blazing with fall colors, starting them off with a couple of glasses of cold, crisp chardonnay that is grown in the field just beyond the garden. Or the part where they get to wander around the grounds, surprised as they come across a particularly beautiful vista or a strategically placed sculpture. Or where they sit in silence in the sauna, sweating out the impurities of two weeks of overeating, overdrinking and undercaring for their bodies, and then get to sit around the quiet indoor pool, reading, napping and reflecting. Or how about the visit to the spa, where the woman’s face gets squeezed and contorted for an hour while the guy is asked to put on a paper thong bikini before being kneaded, pushed and prodded by a guy named Jordan. You probably have no interest in these mundane things, preferring to read about the cooking classes, the meals, the ancient city festivals and the like. But there are two who like the other story, too.

On a day when we are full of mixed emotions, a two week journey coming to an end, the baseball season coming to an end, much business done successfully and some incomplete, this is a nice story.

And as the couple plays a final game of backgammon on the four poster bed under a chilly, clear sky that is as much a part of their room as the couch or bed table, they prepare to face the final day of packing up and travel, happy that on this day they have had a day to do nothing.

A presto,
Bill and Suzy

Day 13 - Alba-Erbusco

Today, as the Boston Red Sox stand on the verge of their second World Series title in four years, it’s get away day for us. After 13 days, our trip is coming to a close and we are bound today from Piemonte to Lombardia, a few hours to the north, where we will set up camp for two days before taking a short drive to Milan’s Malpensa airport and our long flight home. But just like the Sox, we do not plan to coast home. There is much work to be done before claiming the trophy.

We awake to another beautiful day in Pollenzo, the small hamlet about twenty minutes from one of the commercial and cultural centers of the Piemonte, Alba. This is the second day of nice weather after a stretch of cold drizzle, and it feels like business as usual for we seasoned Italian travelers. In fact, one of the great advantages of travel in Italy is a high likelihood of great weather.

Our itinerary today is fairly simple. We will drive a couple of hours to Erbusco, a small town on the other side of Milan from where we are, not far from the city of Brescia. There we will return to a favorite destination of our, the Albereta, a luxury hotel and, more recently, spa, located in the Franciacorta wine district about an hour from Milan and an hour and a half from Malpensa Airport. We have stayed at the Albereta on a couple of occasions for some last minute relaxation before returning home, but our return flight on Wednesday is so early that we will pull up stakes and spend our last evening at a hotel that is a shuttle bus ride from the airport. This time our itinerary includes two days at the Albereta simply to relax and to discover and enjoy the property in a way we have been too rushed to do in the past.

Along the way to the Albereta we plan to stop in Alba to experience the white truffle festival. This annual event, which takes place on weekends during the truffle season between September and November, is written up in all of the guidebooks and websites, but we want to experience what it is like, how the locals really perceive all of the hoopla about truffles and to enjoy the sights and smells of this celebration.

Before checking out of the Albergo dell’Agenzia we arrange to borrow a couple of bikes from the hotel for one last excursion. We have picked up a map and guide the evening before and it speaks of a long bike trail along the Tanaro River that is flat and easy to navigate. We get the keys from the concierge and unlock a couple of bikes, old and uniform and a far cry from the 24 speed bikes we have used to ascend to Fiesole and Torgiano. These single speed bikes remind me more of the clunker I had growing up, right down to the coaster brakes (there are also hand brakes included). We set out from the hotel’s parking area and park, which includes some excavated Roman ruins, and cycle to the main square in front of the Albergo. Travelling by bicycle, especially on this extremely easy, flat terrain, is relaxing and a great way to see scenery that we have missed from the car. We take a spin around the village of Pollenzo, getting a good look at the Gastronomic University and a couple of inns and restaurants that we had not previously seen, and then point our cycles toward the countryside.

The path remains completely flat and a real joy to traverse. The promised path along the Tanaro River turns out to be too difficult to reach, requiring us to bike along the main highway, a narrow two lane road, for a couple of miles before reaching the bike path. We opt instead, then, for a meandering country road that takes us through a number of farms (with “attenti al cane” – beware of the dog – signs warning us not to come too close) and through groves of tall trees that are blazing with fall colors. In all we bike for about an hour before returning our bikes and getting in the car, our bottoms aching from the bicycle seats and ready to experience the world famous Alba white truffle fair.

The center of Alba is not easy to reach by car. There are numerous traffic circles and sharp curves, piazzas and one way streets. Even with Marky Mark, which tells us exactly where to turn (missing the fact, on occasion, that we need to go three quarters of the way around a traffic circle rather than simply turning left, which would be a catastrophe), the driving is particularly tough today. During the white truffle season the center of Alba is transformed into a great outdoor party, with the truffle festival taking place indoors in a building in the center of town. After fighting traffic for a while we find a parking space near the center, worrying slightly whether we will be able to find the exposition center.

The answer turns out to be simple. Simply start walking and within moments the crowd will sweep you along with them, a human torrent that will surely carry you to the truffle festival. We join this wave, disembarking occasionally to check out the stands that are lined up along the street, selling torrone, nuts, candy, souvenirs and all manner of cheeses, meats and fungi. Along the way a number of booths are selling white and black truffles which are displayed in plastic or glass cases to keep away unwanted hands.

We make our way to the entrance of the exhibition hall and get in line to pay our €1 admission charge. Italians, who have never proved themselves particularly adept at standing in single file lines (an obviously an Anglo-Saxon invention), jostle and maneuver for any advantage to be the first in line to buy a ticket and then stand in another line. We play their game, subtly throwing elbows and shielding any ingress with our bodies. At last we reach the front of the line and pay an additional €6 each for a ticket entitling us to a red wine and spumante tasting, and our fee earns us a free wine glass and holster which ties around your neck. Everyone else inside the exhibition seems to have done the same, for everyone has a piece of cloth hanging from his or her neck with a wine glass tucked inside it.

Even before entering the exhibition hall it is clear that the featured item here is truffles. While there are only a dozen or so truffle exhibitors here, each of them at booths and tables arrayed along the central portion of the hall, the aroma of truffles is as unmistakable as it is powerful. As we enter the hall we see hundreds of gawkers, most with wine glasses around their necks, but most of them are not examining the truffles. Indeed, the truffle market apparently opens early in the morning when most of the serious commerce in truffles takes place, access limited at that hour by invitation only. At this hour any riffraff can enter and the tables are crowded with dozens of curiosity seekers, gourmands and a few home chefs who wish to get a bargain on a truffle. Bargains are possible here, as the prices are as low as one can find. We, too, are interested in buying a truffle, even though we will not have our own kitchen for the remainder of the trip. We have learned during our truffle cooking class several days earlier, however, that we prefer black truffles to the white. This is quite fortuitous for us, as white truffle prices this year are at an all time high, reaching somewhere in the range of $5,000 per kilo. Black truffles, particularly the summer truffles which are available at this time of year (we actually preferred the black prestige truffle, the tuber melanosporum, but Suzy reminds me that these are not currently in season) go for a fraction of the price and we buy a nice one with a good perfume, slightly smaller than a golf ball, for €9. It is put in a paper bag and handed to us and we guard it like Brinks delivery men.

The rest of the two hours we spend in the market is devoted to sampling cheeses, tasting wines (the wine glass necklace comes in very handy) and talking with producers. We find our conversation with a wine producer called the Scuola Enologica, or wine school, particularly interesting. The representatives in the booth are young college aged kids who are enrolled in the school which is located in Alba, and who learn the art of winemaking through producing the winery’s various vintages. We try a couple and they taste fine to our untrained palate. We buy a bottle of the school’s Dolcetto for the princely sum of €4.

We return to our car, a couple of hours drive to Erbusco ahead of us, hoping to make just a brief stop for a snack. We find an open table on the sidewalk outside a trendy bar on the Piazza Savona which we had spied on our way to dinner a few nights earlier and order an assortment of cured meats and cheeses along with a couple of glasses of wine. The wine arrives quickly but the cheese takes nearly three quarters of an hour and grumbling, we wolf it down, realizing that once again we will arrive at our destination after dark. The drive to our hotel takes a little longer than anticipated and, as expected, we arrive around 7:30, once again in the dark.

One of the reasons we have returned over the years to the Albereta, in addition to the total comfort and luxury of this Relais & Chateau property, is a fond memory of a most entertaining evening spent many years ago at the hotel’s restaurant, run by Italy’s most famous super chef, Gualtiere Marchese. When we booked our room for this trip, however, we had been notified that the restaurant would be closed for Sunday dinner and all day Monday, the exact time we would be there. Planning ahead we have purchased a high end picnic dinner for our room at the truffle festival – a fresh loaf of bread sliced into thick pieces by the baker, a brick of fresh butter and our black summer truffle, which I slice into paper thin slices with a truffle slicer that we have purchased at the exhibition. It is a sinfully wonderful treat. In addition we have bought a couple different cheeses, some truffle salami and have saved some of the meats from our snack in Alba. So, saddened by the knowledge that we cannot dine at the Marchese restaurant, but buoyed by the prospect of a dinner of truffle sandwiches, we tuck in to a delicious feast, the powerful scent of truffles filling the room and we eventually drift off to sleep, but not before setting our alarm to wake us a few hours later to watch what may be the final game of this year’s World Series.

The Albereta, truffles and the possibility of a Red Sox World Series sweep. Life doesn’t get much better than that.

A presto,
Bill and Suzy

Day 12 - Pollenzo-Serralunga d'Asti

Whoever said that youth is wasted on the young never met these two guys.

* * *

It is our second full day in Piemonte and when we arise the past several days’ drizzle has been replaced with a cool autumn sun. Our room, on the second floor of the Albergo dell’Agenzia (Via Fossano, 21, Pollenzo, tel. 0172.458600), looks out over the hotel’s grounds, which form a large enclosed park. In the center of the park is a huge mass of stone which stands solitary watch over this vista, an ancient Roman funerary monument that is part of the ruins of ancient Polentia, the town on which modern day Pollenzo has been built.

The hotel occupies a part of the complex which was built in the late 1800s by Emperor Carlo Alberto and which was called the Agenzia di Pollenzo. The Agenzia was a sort of government funded farming complex, replicated in other areas of Italy, housing workers, administrators and scientists, who applied their efforts at improving the agriculture of this area, particularly in the area of viniculture. Based upon the wines we have been drinking over the past several days, the experiment has worked.

Since the unification of Italy, the Agenzia fell into disuse and disrepair and was essentially being used as stables and storage areas for the local populace until the last decade or so. At that time the Slow Food organization, which was born only a few minutes away in the town of Bra, determined to rehabilitate the structure in order to house its Universita degli Studi di Scienze Gastronomiche (the Gastronomic University). That project was completed in 2004 and the university opened its doors to approximately 200 students annually beginning in that year. Today the university offers a three year course of study leading to an undergraduate degree in gastronomic sciences, covering such diverse topics as molecular science, sensory analysis, history of cuisine, food business economics, food and wine tourism and food law. It makes me drool just to think about getting academic credit for studying these topics.

In addition to the university, the Agenzia houses our hotel, the Ristorante Guido (at which we ate last night) and the Banca del Vino. The Albergo is a grand hotel, and our room, a standard double, is very spacious and with all the modern amenities, yet retains a traditional warmth. The bathroom is very nice and it is the first shower we have been able to use in the past ten days that does not spray water all over the floor. If you have read my trip reports in the past, you will know how obsessed I am with the utterly ridiculous, illogical designs used in Italian bathrooms, the result of which is nearly always a flooded bathroom floor. Here at the Albergo, the shower is in a bathtub, using a telephone-type shower head, but there is a glass partition that runs at least partially along the top of the tub, deflecting most of the water back into the tub rather than onto the floor. Nonetheless, I have two words for Italian bathroom designers and vow to spend the rest of my days shouting them from the mountaintop. “Shower curtain.”

So we wake this morning and light is peaking through the heavy curtains of our second floor room. I part the curtains and am nearly knocked down by the jolt of cool, blue light that pours into the room. We have not experienced this phenomenon for several days and perhaps the constant drizzle and cold temperatures has begun to take its toll on us. We feel an immediate surge of energy, which is augmented when we down some excellent Italian coffee at breakfast a short while later. Before heading down to breakfast, however, we notice for the first time where we are located. Ringing the hills which are home to numerous Piemonte hill towns as far as the eye can see (Piemonte means piedmont, or foothills), are the snowcapped peaks of the Alps. For two days the rain has hidden this fact from us, reducing and constricting our point of view. This feeling of expansiveness, of a world without borders, as well as the warming sun and the autumn colors, give our spirits and immediate lift.

We have just one activity planned for the day (in addition to meals, which are, as you as readers know, to us activities unto themselves), a late afternoon appointment to visit the Banca del Vino for a tour and wine tasting. Suzy looks over some brochures and we decide to head back in the direction of Barolo, which we visited yesterday, and to visit Serralunga d’Alba. We call ahead for a lunch reservation and in a short while we are in our car, meandering down the winding road that will take us to Serralunga.

Today’s drive is a meander. It really is quite remarkable how the change in weather has improved our moods, and today, in contrast to the frenetic pace of the past several days, we are in no rush to do anything. So we meander through the valley, our windy road flanked with steep hills that are covered with row after row of grape vines turned brilliant yellow, red and brown. In fact, the fall colors, which have not been much in evidence in central Italy, are bursting from the hills here, and on this day in particular the effect is to give us a feeling of serenity and contentment. Calma, as the Italians say.

We stop several times along the road to Serralunga to take pictures and to enjoy the vistas. It is, simply, a lovely day. But perhaps we meander too long, as it is approaching two o’clock and we will have to drive directly to our restaurant for lunch if we are to be able to return in time for our appointment at the Banca del Vino. Aided by Marky Mark, our trusty GPS, we negotiate the narrow, windy road as it ascends the hills until we can see Serralunga in the distance, its ancient castle, bizarrely misproportioned to be extremely tall and thin so as to look like the castle of an evil king in a Hollywood movie, stabbing the sky on a distant hill.

We arrive at the restaurant, La Rosa dei Vini (Localita Parafada, 4, Serralunga d’Alba, tel. 0173.613219), a handsome white building on the edge of town and built on the edge of the promontory overlooking the valley below. The sky is even clearer than it had been earlier and the main dining room, an enclosed outdoor patio, shares this view. When we try to enter the restaurant the door is locked but there are voices coming from the patio. We notice a sign that says to ring the bell and we do so, and a moment later a young woman opens the door, not inviting us in, but asking us if we have reservations. Thankfully we have called ahead or we might have been completely spooked by this odd way of greeting diners. She looks as though she doesn’t want to allow us to enter, but given our reservation seems to have no alternative. The whole thing is reminiscent of our difficulty getting in the front door of Ristorante Guido the night before.

But almost immediately we are glad that we have persevered. The dining room is a simple, clean white room with a dozen tables spaced with ample distance between them, giving it, when combined with the beautiful view of the countryside outside the windows, a relaxed, comfortable feel. Our waitress and the other wait staff that look after us this afternoon begin to warm to us as we start by ordering local specialties and inquire about various items on the menu, and especially when we ask them to recommend a local white wine, as we are not familiar with the excellent white wines produced in this area. Of particular note is a seasonal specialty of fried egg topped with white truffle, which is shaved onto the dish at tableside using a small wooden slicer. We try a few other local specialties that we have put off until now, including tajarin, the local thin egg pasta and vitello tonnato, thin slices of rare veal served with a tuna sauce. These dishes, while excellent, are truly regional, and due to our lack of travel in this region we are not as familiar with them as we are of the regional specialties in central Italy. For our main course we split a plate of fried porcini mushrooms, which Suzy has been dreaming about and salivating over for days. They are served lightly fried, piping hot and their strong but pleasant aroma sends us over the edge. It is a wonderful meal on a wonderful day.

Time is running short, however, so we hop in our car and return to the Agenzia where we have a 4:00 appointment for a wine tasting and tour of the Banca del Vino. When we arrive we are not quite sure what to make of the Banca, which our brochure describes basically as a vault for the preservation of superior Italian vintages, once again the brainchild of Slow Food and its visionary founder Carlo Petrini. We arrive on time, but the rest of the English speaking tour, which in reality is made up of a bunch of rude English speaking foreigners who, through their boorish behavior throughout the tour demonstrate a complete lack of interest in this project, is late. When they finally arrive a half hour later we are taken through a series of underground vaults, actually little more than renovated stables, where wooden crates, each comprising a case of wine, are stacked according to region, producer and vintage. According to our guide, a friendly and extremely articulate and knowledgeable German lad who, we find out later, is a student at the Gastronomic University, Slow Food invites the best wine producers in Italy to deposit what they consider to be their best vintages each year in the vault. The cases are marked to show the producer, which is apparently quite an honor, and the wine remains the property of the producer. Over time, most producers release a portion of the vintage that they have stored to the Banca for sale to the public, but at least one case must remain on deposit in perpetuity. This way, the public can purchase the finest vintages at a time that the producer believes they have reached their absolute maturity, and a sample of each vintage is retained for posterity. While this all may seem a bit cooky or self aggrandizing, walking through the vault and seeing the names of the various producers and vintages brings back a flood of memories of evenings spent drinking this vintage or that, enjoying a wonderful meal and engaging in a nice conversation with friends. I suppose that it is something that you must experience for yourself.

After the tour, our guide opens a bottle of Barbaresco for us to sample. The guided tour has arranged for a tasting of a single wine, and this is an outstanding wine to sip. None of them seems particularly interested, however, the most impressive comment or reaction being a question by one gentleman as to whether Barbaresco or Barolo is stronger. Ugh.

The horde, mercifully, retreats from this sacred place and for the next half hour Suzy and I have a private tasting of wines with our guide. During that time we taste just two other wines, but his passion and knowledge about the small details and the large give us a greater understanding and, more importantly, appreciation for what we are tasting. He speaks, too, about the course of study he is undertaking at the Gastronomic University, about organized bicycle trips into the countryside in order to better understand the relationship of the farmer to his land and of his encounters with Carlo Petrini. A world of possibilities awaits him after he leaves the university – anything from buyer at a supermarket chain to restauranteur to vintner to government official.

Our conversation with this nice young man recalls another encounter we have had on this trip, with a young man named Steve, the tour leader of our bicycle trip to Fiesole on our second day here. We came away from that day not just tired and saddle sore, but impressed with the passion with which he threw himself at life, moving to Italy from his native Missouri, learning the language, leading tours but with a truly profound understanding of the various points of interest along the way, from the production of olive oil and wine at the estate where we stopped for a visit, to the art of the renaissance masters.

Whether or not our guide at the Banca del Vino or our bicycle guide Steve settle into lives relating to the work they are now doing, one thing is sure. The passion they have shown about the things they are involved in today, a passion which has impressed Suzy and I to the core, is a rare and precious gift. And it is a quality that, when transferred to whatever you happen to be doing at the time, ensures both happiness and success. It takes most people a lifetime to discover such passion, if they are lucky enough to find it at all. For these two young men they have been given the gift of discovering their passion while they are still young enough to really enjoy it. In their cases youth has truly not been wasted on the young.

A presto,
Bill and Suzy

Day 11 - Barolo

We awake to a cold, damp drizzle this morning, our first full day in the Piemonte region, having checked into our hotel near midnight the evening before. Our hotel, the Albergo dell’Agenzia, is located in Pollenzo, a small hamlet near the town of Bra and about a quarter hour from Alba, the principle city in this area, and an hour and a half from Milan. We have come in search of white truffles, the mysterious, delicate fungus which grows wild in this region and which gives it its common name, the white truffle of Alba.

This is white truffle season and the town of Alba celebrates the short season, which runs from September through November, with an annual truffle festival, highlighted by the truffle market at which prize specimens are displayed, gawked at and bought and sold. This will be our destination in a couple of days (the festival takes place on weekends), but today we have arranged to go on a truffle hunt, following a professional, licensed truffle hunter through the woods in search of these delicacies, a dog or two tracking them by their powerful scent. On a previous trip to this area we had attempted to go on a truffle hunt, but rainy conditions forced the truffle hunter to cancel. As we look out the window at the drizzle this morning we get a sinking feeling that a similar fate awaits today’s excursion.

“So sorry, Signor Menard, but your truffle hunt has been canceled,” the clerk at the front desk tells us as we head to breakfast. With these words, we slough off the breakfast room, disappointed but also looking forward to some free time in this magical part of Italy. Besides truffles, the Piemonte is famous for producing hazelnuts which have been a catalyst for developing the chocolate industry here. Anyone who has slathered Nutella on a piece of bread knows just how good chocolate and hazelnuts can be together. We have previously toured the area, visiting one of our confection producers, Cuba Venchi, from the far southern portion of this region. But the candyman will have to wait until our next trip.

If this area is known for one thing, if it has an international reputation for any one product, it is wine. The hills of the Piemonte produce some of Italy’s best wines and a look at the map reveals two small towns on either side of Alba that signify that greatness – Barolo and Barbaresco. This is how we will spend our day.

After taking care of some business we get in our car and begin the short drive to Barolo, about twenty minutes from our sanctuary in Pollenzo. The road snakes along a valley that is flanked with steep hills, covered with row upon row of grape vines. Everywhere the eye can see there are grape vines, which are bare from harvesting earlier this season. On this drizzly afternoon the fading leaves produce a slightly melancholy mood and as we arrive in the main square of Barolo the town is desolate and quiet. We park our car and wander about this small town whose name is synonymous with wine greatness. As we stroll down the streets we pass a number of small cantine, or wine shops, mostly run by the wine producers themselves and, naturally, featuring their particular vintages. We are looking to taste a number of different vintages to get some sense of the differences between them and to discover what make a Barolo a Barolo.

We find what we are looking for in the regional enoteca, situated in the center of town. The single large room features bottles of Barolos from many of the region’s producers, displayed by year, hundreds of bottles each with its own distinct label covering much of the walls. Recent vintages for sale are stacked in racks along another wall and toward the end of the room there is a desk behind which a woman is serving tastings of three vintages for €6. We pay for two tastings and are poured Barolos from three different areas in the DOC zone, each area characterized by different soil characteristics which are reflected in the character of the wines. The woman does her best to explain these differences and to answer our questions, which are many, but strangely she seems ill equipped to do much more than pour the wine into our glasses. We sip and swirl, but do not spit, trying not to appear too much like Paul Giamatti’s character in Sideways. The wines, all of which share the same basic recipe of one hundred percent nebbiolo grape, aged for a minimum of two years in wooden barrels, are delicious and quite different from one another. We compare our impressions and write notes, attempting not to seem too pompous or full of ourselves. In the end we agree that we like all three wines because, simply, they taste good.

Before leaving the enoteca we wander around a bit more, trying to learn what we can about this internationally acclaimed wine. But despite the producers’ investment in this education center, it is difficult to learn much. The place just does not seem to be set up or staffed sufficiently to guide amateurs such as ourselves through a journey of discovery. There are no magical “aha” moments here, and if any light bulbs go off in our heads they are the tiny flickers of a nightlight. On the whole the regional enoteca is a disappointment.

We wander into a few of the cantinas run by wine producers and sample a few more wines. Here the manager gives us some useful information, but in each case we are able to sample only the wines from that producer. What this town needs, we begin to feel, is some sort of institute where they can teach Wine 101, running visitors through the basics of wine production, having them taste a range of wines discussing each one and providing some objective frames of reference for evaluating them. Instead, we are left on our own to teach ourselves and we are proving to be both poor teachers and students.

But we at least are trying. We wander the empty streets of Barolo looking for a simple bar where we can get a glass or two of wine and perhaps a plate of cheese or salami when we wander past such a place. Behind the counter are a couple of young girls with piercings through various body parts and tattoos peeking out of uncovered places. They know something about wine, however, and when the bottle we ask for is out of stock they suggest a comparable substitute which is rich, complex and much appreciated. Suzy is in heaven when she sees a dozen different cheeses in a refrigerator case by the front counter and we order a plate of assorted cheeses to go with our wine. A few moments later one of the girls delivers us a plate with eight or nine cheeses, each one distinct and full of character and each one worthy of being displayed in the fine cheese section at our local Whole Foods. It is simply amazing how the extraordinary can be the ordinary here in Italy and especially in Piemonte. We down a bottle of Barolo and a plate of cheeses that would have cost us well over $100 back home. Here it is served by two punk rockers in a hole in the wall bar for one fifth that cost. The disappointment of the regional enoteca is now officially a thing of the past.

We return to the Albergo and get ready for dinner, which the hotel has arranged for us at the nearby (in fact, attached) restaurant Guido (Via Fossano, 19, Pollenzo, tel. 0172.458422). We know little about the restaurant other than that we should be impressed at having got a reservation and what little we have learned from the internet. We are suffering from food exhaustion and general exhaustion, but are looking forward, with some slight regret, to our first white table cloth meal of the trip.

The dinner does not start off too well. We call the front desk to ask them what time our reservation is for and they cannot or will not respond directly, replying that we “can go now, if you please.” We interpret that to mean our reservation is for now or that we are already late, so we hurry across the courtyard to the doorway the front desk clerk has pointed to. Outside the door a small sign says, simply, “Guido.” We try the door and it is locked. We look through the window and can see one or two people in a cavernous room and wonder if the restaurant is even open. We try another door and then another, in all testing and coming up wanting four times. Thinking this must be the back entrance we exit the gates of the hotel complex and walk down an unlit street until we enter another driveway. This is the real back entrance, and the kitchen and wait staff’s cars are all parked here.

We return through the compound gate toward the doors we had previously tried and notice a buzzer on the gate. We ring it in hopes of asking someone to open the door, but instead the gate lock is disengaged and no human voice responds. We walk back to the entrance doors and a waitress wanders by and looks us up and down through the window. She opens the door, but does not allow us to enter, asking us if we were “reserved.” Although we are generally pretty outgoing we reply yes and she escorts us into the cavernous room we could glimpse from outside. There are maybe a dozen tables in this room, several set for large groups, and only two of the tables are occupied as we are shown to our table. Within moments all types of staff, fashionably clad in black, begin to rain down upon us, bringing us a basket of “paper bread,” large sheets of paper-thin flatbread and an enormous basket of assorted breads and breadsticks. Now that we have found a way inside this culinary fortress and put to rest any fears that we were unauthorized intruders, the horde of staff warms up to us and it is pretty obvious that they are going to do anything and everything to ensure we have an enjoyable meal.

And they succeed with flying colors. Simply put, the food here is as good as anywhere we have eaten in Italy. The atmosphere is not what we have come to love and expect here, as we generally opt for simpler, family run trattorias over fancy white tablecloth places, but this is a place that is at once elegant and completely comfortable. Within a half hour all of the tables have filled up, and we begin to suspect that reservations are made for a table, which is at your disposal at any time. There are no seatings and the tables are not turned over during the evening. So perhaps that is why the hotel did not respond when we asked them at what time our reservation was.

In addition to wonderful, attentive service, the food is great. We start with a complimentary tasting of pumpkin soup, garnished with pumpkin seeds and a meatball. An unusual combination for sure, but you can’t beat the price. The waiter, who looks like a combination of all of Hollywood’s leading men and seems to know it, runs us through a menu where every other entry is a spin on some traditional Piemontese dish, none of which are in our culinary vocabulary. Suzy starts with cardi con fonduta, an unusual vegetable we had come across in the fresh food market in Bologna that looks like giant celery but tastes like a cross between celery and artichoke hearts. She asks to have added, and receives a generous portion of white truffle, which Russell Crowe shaves onto her dish table side (he gives me a slice as consolation). I have a local dish called capunet, which is a rice and vegetable mixture served in a folded up cabbage leaf. It is outstanding. For our primi, we each have a seafood pasta, Suzy’s a maltagliati pasta and mine a tortellini. Our waiter has suggested a very nice white wine, a Gavi, whose light acidity goes perfectly with the seafood. We are amazed at the wine prices, which for the whites are all under €20. For our main courses we again opt for seafood, Suzy going with a mixture of grilled shellfish while I get the “scampi, gamberi and company,” which is lightly fried. All the while we are transfixed as much with the trendy dashing about of the waiters and the tables of beautiful people who periodically excuse themselves en masse to smoke outside, a welcome new law prohibiting smoking in restaurants. The effect of this restaurant is mesmerizing and when the first dessert comes (a complimentary assortment of sweets and a traditional chocolate dessert called bonet) it is well after midnight and tables are only now beginning to empty. An hour later we pay our bill, finish off our grappa and head back to the hotel, which is only a few paces away. On this rainy day in Piemonte we have filled the void of the cancelled truffle hunt with wine and food and we fall into bed, waking only once or twice to check the score of the World Series, and looking forward to another day in this interesting region.

A presto,
Bill and Suzy

Day 10 - Bologna-Alba

Bologna. Most of us know it as an alternative spelling of baloney, the meat product, not the expression of disgust. But to Italians Bologna means cuisine, seriously good food that is not too serious. We agree.
This is our third visit to Bologna, none, however, lasting more than a day. Through those visits we have only scratched the surface, like the grating of parmigiano cheese, which is much beloved in this, its home region. Once again we are only passing through, spending less than twenty four hours in this center of Emilia-Romagna and center of the culinary world. We will try to make the most of our time here.

Despite the beautiful, historic city, the unbelievable food and the luxury hotel, this will not be easy. After ten days in Italy we have hit the wall. It happens in all endeavors, when you think you cannot go on. It happened on our bike trip to Fiesole, it happened while straining to stay awake for the Red Sox’ game seven come from behind victory and it is happening now, on a larger scale, with our trip. At some point you begin to doubt your ability to go on, despite your desire. We have reached that point, that wall. Today will test whether we can break on through to the other side.

Too much food. Too much wine. Too much grappa. Hard to imagine.

Too many late nights. Too many early mornings. Too many things to do. Too many things undone.

In short, too much of a good time.

This is the time that really tests your mettle. Today we will see what we are made of.

* * *

We actually arrive in Bologna the night before, having taken part in an orgy of truffles on our way out of Umbria. The weather had turned dismal – dark and rainy – and the two hour drive from Citta di Castello to Bologna, despite being on modern highway, is a bit, as they say, nerve wracking. While Italy’s autostradas, their principal highways, are generally wide and nearly equivalent to U.S. highways, their minor highways are typically narrower and when it rains the darkness makes it very difficult to see the road surface. This task is made easier by the fact that traffic is bunched so tightly together, with cars overtaking you at 160 km/hr (or 100 mph), others driving up right behind you and flashing their lights and lorries bumper on bumper as far as the eye can see so that they seem to be one enormous convoy (until one decides to make a break for it by lurching unannounced into the left hand lane, causing everyone else to slam on brakes and dig down deep for the most obscene hand gesture in one’s repertoire. The Italians are very good at this.)

We arrive in Bologna several hours behind our anticipated ETA, the rain continuing to fall, making navigating to the city center difficult. Traffic is horrible, as it is nearly seven o’clock, and pedestrians dart in front of us, oblivious to the possibility that we might just run them down. At this point, purposely. We drive down all of the main streets, ignoring the “authorized traffic only” signs, as guests of the hotels in city centers can generally drive with impunity, the hotel calling the local police station to annul any tickets that would otherwise have resulted from traffic cameras recording the violation. Our route to the Grand Hotel Baglione is completely contorted this evening, however, and we at last arrive in front of the hotel after having traversed every sacred, historic and traffic limited avenue in the city. When I speak with the bellman to request that he take down our license plate and register our car with the police, explaining the route we have taken, a horrified look comes over his face. The Baglione, despite being the best hotel in Bologna, can only take care of tickets on one specific route, of which we had been completely unaware and which, of course, we have not at all followed. The fine we likely will face is upwards of €70.

We check into our room and ask the concierge to arrange a dinner reservation for us, declining his kind offer of eating in the hotel dining room (“that would not be our preference”) and within an hour we are out the door and on our way to our evening’s destination, the Ristorante al Montegrappa (Via Montegrappa, 2, Bologna, tel. 051.236331). Even the name sounds good.

From the outside Montegrappa appears to be nothing special, and Suzy suspects from the outset that it is a tourist restaurant, a trap for unsuspecting travelers arranged by a concierge who gets a kickback. Within a few moments, however, we realize our fears have been unfounded. We are seated in an impossibly narrow room, about three bodies wide from the wall to a waiter’s station behind which our waiter and the cashier/hostess are constantly preparing antipasti plates and other small plates for diners in our room and in the other dining rooms of the restaurant. The four tables in our room are two diners wide, and each table is separated by a padded bench. Diners sit next to one another, facing their table and the backs of the party in front of them. Although it is quite comfortable, it is sort of like sitting on a bus.

The food is, as we have come to expect in Bologna, awesome. Awesome but simple. We start with an affetato misto, mixed sliced meats that include salamis, cured meats and a few types of head cheese (to make this “food,” you basically put an animal in a cuisinart, pour the liquefied remains in a casing, slice and serve. Just set it and forget it.) We do not intend to try the head cheese, but are strangely drawn to it. It is delicious. If you can stop yourself from thinking about what it is. Suzy follows this up with a hearty vegetable soup and I have a tagliatelle bolognese, a flat pasta with the traditional meat sauce that originated in this town. Several days earlier, at our cooking class in Assisi, our teacher Letizia implored us never to cut our pasta. This proves to be quite difficult as each strand of tagliatelle is about thirty feet long. The pasta is so long, in fact, that it appears that the entire plate might very well be comprised of a single noodle. I struggle as best I can, twirling a single noodle on my fork, but the resulting skein is like a bowling ball, entirely too big to fit in my mouth. After a while I cut the tagliatelle into smaller pieces, spying around the room to make sure no one is watching.

Next comes the main course, which will live forever in our memories, in our private pantheon of dinner lore. This dining hall of fame is already populated with such great courses as the risotto with rooster testicles, gelatinized cow brain and our nephew’s look of disgust when his Florentine zampa was served, a cow foot replete with chewy tendon and gelatinous grey gravy. Tonight Suzy wants to be adventurous and orders the bollito misto, mixed boiled meats that she knows will be a challenge. She assure me that she is up for the challenge.

Our waiter applauds her courage and some moments later a white plate with four unidentifiable masses that we imagine are some sort of meat, is arrayed before her. The waiter points to each and indentifies them, like a medical student describing the parts of a cadaver, which, frankly would probably be more appetizing than the carnage on her plate. Tongue, presumably from a cow. Zampa, our old friend, but this time just a cross section from the foot, rather than the entire foot in all its glory. The Emilia variety is red, rather than the Tuscan gray. We are not sure whether this is an improvement. A flattened gray flesh the waiter simply calls “meat.” Perhaps on the dark, rainy drive to Bologna we have run this over with our car. We strongly suspect so and consider asking for a discount. And everyone’s favorite, muso di vitello, the lovable veal snout. This gray cross section of inedible meat surrounded by a gelatinous fat and ringed with a layer of gray skin, complete with occasional whisker is so foul even Suzy cannot eat it. She is a real trooper, finishing nearly everything as I look on with tears streaming down my face, making it difficult to see my scaloppini with porcini mushrooms. Sometimes you just gotta break the rules.

* * *

The next morning we are met in our hotel lobby by Rita Mattioli, a local Bolognese woman who among other things runs a cooking school. Our concierge has arranged this, our third cooking class in a span of four days, and we are looking forward to the class, particularly a trip to the local produce market.

Along the way to the market Rita shows us some of the sites of this historic city. It is overcast and occasionally drizzling, but we are kept dry by the porticos that cover the city’s sidewalks. In fact Bologna has, according to Rita, over 40 kilometers of porticos, which give the city center a unique character as well as being very practical in this rainy city. Along the way we pass through the city’s main piazza and immediately recognize a caffe where nearly two decades ago Suzy, my father and I had wandered to get a coffee and sit outside, leaving my mother behind in our hotel and taking in the sights and smells of the city. There we were entertained by a couple of old Italian men who argued with one another in such animated fashion, hands flying in one gesture after another and the drama so thick that they should have been awarded an Oscar. After all of this arguing and gesticulating they embraced, the best of friends despite the nearness of coming to blows just moments before. As I recall this scene it reminds me of our real estate negations only a few days ago.

The market is a magical experience. For Suzy, ever the foodie, this is really the raison d’etre of the cooking class, a chance to visit the best food market in the best food city in the world. We enter the collection of outdoor stalls and open shops from a small alleyway and are underwhelmed by the size of the market. We have visited larger indoor markets and more impressive outdoor markets in our travels throughout Italy. But as we move from stall to stall, shop to shop, discovering a strange item of produce here, which Rita describes to us and talks about possible uses, an unusual fruit there, we can tell that she is sizing us up, evaluating our interest and talent level. Although she has prepared a menu in advance, she buys additional foods, responding to our interests, and speaks of how we will add this or that to our meal. When I see zucchini flowers and tell her how much I adore them, she vows that she will teach us how to fry them. I am very excited now.

We end up with several bags of exotic produce which we will examine or add to our menu and then we head toward Rita’s apartment. Along the way she asks us which wines we would like to drink with our meal and we reply “anything other than wines from here,” an acknowledgement that despite being the food capital of Italy, Emilia-Romagna produces no wines of distinction. Most of their grape production is, thankfully, allocated to the production of balsamic vinegar. Despite being a booster of the region, Rita agrees with us and we decide to select a couple of wines from some of Italy’s better wine producing areas. We then stop for a glass of prosecco at the Antica Drogheria Calzolari (Via G. Petroni, 9, Bologna, tel. 051.22.28.58), described by Rita as one of the country’s best enotecas, or wine shops. When we tell the brothers who run the enoteca that we would like a white and red wine from another region, which they have in abundance, because we do not believe there are any good Emilia wines, they rise to the occasion and suggest two wines, which later turn out to be quite good.

A few minutes later we are inside Rita’s spacious, beautifully appointed apartment. Her kitchen is, like the other kitchens we have cooked in on this trip, outfitted with professional equipment, but has the feel and character of a family kitchen. We begin preparing for the class and within moments later we are learning the secrets of making pasta by hand. Unlike our class in Assisi, in which Letizia taught us how to achieve a great result with little work, Rita will teach us how to make pasta with soul, for here in Bologna, pasta is a religion. She starts by laying two enormous boards on a table for us to work the dough. We measure out our flour and hollow out a well in the middle, adding an egg. Working the egg into the flour with a fork, Rita then shows us how to work the dough with the heels of our hands, imploring us to use our whole body, rhythmically stretching and rolling the dough as we sway from side to side, not isolating the activity in our hands or arms or trunks, but working it with our entire bodies. She goes into the next room and turns on some rhythmic music, pulsing, steamy and with sensual beat, and shows us how to sway and work the dough. This is Dirty Dancing meets Molto Mario, and as Rita sidles up to show me the proper hip contortions I am thinking Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore in Ghost. I don’t care if the pasta tastes like dirt. This is fun.

We finish making pasta and light up a cigarette (just kidding) and head back to the kitchen where we will learn the secrets of Bolognese meat sauce. The secret is that there is no single recipe, but a process which allows and actually calls for innovation and change, depending upon what is available in your kitchen and what is fresh. There is a definite order to things and Rita proves very adept at explaining the theory behind the process.

A tiramisu follows. Not at all a fan of tiramisu, Suzy goes through the motions as we separately beat egg whites with chocolate and egg yolks with vanilla sugar, adding to both concoctions a goodly amount of mascarpone cheese. I can see Suzy’s interest pique when we begin to assemble the dessert, as the possibilities are becoming evident.

Next, Rita shows me how to make a simple pastella, a batter for frying our zucchini flowers. It is really quite simple although not at all enticing looking. The proof will be, as they say, in the pudding. Or at least the fried zucchini flowers.

Before retiring to the table we slice some interesting veggies that are related to mushrooms, which we spotted at the market. Rita chops some celery and adds parmigiano and the result is spectacular. For the next nearly two hours we eat, drink, talk and get to know this wonderful woman whose love of her native cuisine is matched by her love of so many different aspects of her native culture. She speaks effortlessly on countless subjects as we down tortellini, which is made from our pasta dough and tossed in a sage butter sauce, tagliatelle with our Bolognese sauce, fried zucchini flowers, a salad of mushrooms, plates of cured meats that we had selected from the market just hours ago, and, of course, parmigiano reggiano cheese served with aged balsamico tradizionale. All this is washed down with very drinkable red and white wines from Emilia-Romagna and finished off with the most remarkable tiramisu imaginable. This dessert is simply heavenly.

We have now finished our cooking itinerary on this trip. Three classes in four days. During those classes we have found friendship and fellowship, tasted good food and good wine. We have learned much and been much entertained. Each class has been different. Each class has stood well on its own. Each one has left us thinking in a particular way, the collective result of which is an even greater appreciation for food and wine. We are indeed fortunate to have had this experience. Unfortunately, after all of this, our pants are now very tight. Perhaps it is just the humidity.

* * *

We say our goodbyes to Rita, having fallen for her charms and smarts. But now we must leave Emilia-Romagna and begin a three hour drive toward Alba in northwest Italy, a trip that will have us leave central Italy and enter a very different world, northern Italy. Our time in Bologna, while too short, has been memorable, but we have, as alluded to earlier, hit a wall. Three more hours in a car, driving in darkness and a driving rain, is not a prospect to which we look forward. What keeps us going is that our destination is the Osteria dell’Arco in Alba, sister restaurant to the restaurant where the Slow Food movement was reputedly born and that we are to meet our friends from Washington, Dick and Edy Lasner. We press on through the gloom of night and arrive at the restaurant ahead of schedule.

The osteria is a Slow Food restaurant, one that subscribes to the principles of that organization – the right to pleasure and a commitment to the joy of eating. Walking into the osteria, with its inviting décor, tables full of groups engaged in conversation, laughing and smiling, and the smell and sights of good food, we know that we have come home. Dick and Edy are at the table and within minutes we are deep in conversation about their trip, ours, and our mutual love of the Red Sox. We each order a tasting menu, which takes the difficulty out of ordering different courses and which comes with a number of glasses of different wines and after three hours the restaurant is empty, save for the four of us. Once again, it is food to the rescue.

It is amazing how the pleasures of the table can fortify not just the body, but also the spirit. On this day in the region in which Slow Food was founded, our friends from Washington, along with a wonderful new friend from Bologna, helped sustain us and helped us break on through to the other side. Getting to the finish line should be easy.

A presto,
Bill and Suzy

Day 9 - Citta di Castello

I’m falling, falling, falling, twisting through the darkness, not knowing which way is up, not knowing how long I will fall or how long I have been falling. I am falling, falling, falling, corkscrewing through the inky blackness, unsure whether it is night or day, unaware whether it is hot or cold. I can feel nothing, see nothing, understand nothing. I simply go on, falling, unsure how I even know this, knowing not when or if it will end. It is dark, oh so completely dark. I can see nothing until I close my eyes and then I can see them, the smiling creatures, friendly yet menacing, heffalumps and woozles, Sgt. Pepper and his Lonely Hearts Club Band. I open my eyes so I cannot see them when, with a tremendous crash I hit the ground.

I hurt. The fall has knocked the wind out of me, from the very core of me, and I cannot remember how to breathe. My mind races for memories, clues to get my diaphragm to move, to get my lungs expand, but the jolt has shaken my head as well as my lungs. Like a sharp, heavy, muffled sound of bell struck by a mallet, the impact has reverberated through my head leaving it empty, limp and useless. I am in quicksand, unable to move my legs, my lungs, my mind. Am I dead?

I am not in quicksand, my limbs begin to stir and air begins to return to my lungs in short, shallow heaves. Light begins to unshroud the fog from my eyes, like bandages being unrolled from the head, but it is still nearly pitch black. I can faintly see into the inky darkness from which I fell and all that I can sense is a hazy, dark, blue black muck. It is cool and fresh against my bright pink skin and as the feeling begins to return to my limbs I can smell its freshness and a joy begins to find its way back into my soul that had seemed to be empty for an eternity as I was falling through that void. I slightly slide my belly through the muck and the cool tingle tells me to rub some more, so I bend my legs and turn from side to side, my belly covered in the soft mud, urging me on, and bend forward, dipping my neck in this cool, inviting filth, letting it cool my neck and run over my face. I roll over and wash my back and sides in it, its cool softness reviving me, reminding me that I am alive. And while my whole body and soul reconnect with the earth I can smell it. Not the freshness of the muck but a thin strand of that smell, that wafts through this void like a tiny filament, finding a passage to my very soul through my nose, whispering to my brain the way home, to the source of that smell.

Oh that smell. As the pace of my splashing in the coolness of this mud approaches a fury, I begin to feel that I am two, one of which is completely absorbed in this splashing and rolling, the other rising from and outside my body, drawn out by that haunting smell. I leave my splashing body behind and am drawn to the source smell. Where is it? I must find it.

But it is a kind tormentor. It leaves a simple trail right back to its source. At first it was a faint odor, but even then its direction was clear. I am stopped in my tracks and I can see the smell, see the swirly path in the air, that hugs the ground, a wispy, meaty, musty, heavenly trail that will lead me back to its source. I look back and there I am still, rolling and grunting, my eyes rolled back into my head and I notice that as I leave my other self behind to follow this attraction, my eyes are rolled back too. I can see the trail but my eyes cannot see. I simply know where I am going and I must go there. It draws me there and I am powerless to resist, even if I wanted to. But I don’t want to resist. I must be where it is and so I go on and on and on.

At last I am here. I know that I am here because the faint aroma has been growing stronger and now it tells me that it is here. I don’t know how I know, but I know. Right here at my feet, around this tree. I thrust myself into the soft, cool earth and start to dig. I must find it. I will find it. The aroma closing in around me, closing out the light, enveloping me in a warm dark blanket of dank, musty, nutty sweetness until I can see nothing and feel nothing. All is dark and I am falling.

* * *

Truffles. This mysterious and highly prized fungus with an intoxicating odor and haunting taste is one of the main reasons we have come on this trip, and a special prize that rewards visitors to Italy this time of year, which is the height of the white truffle season. During our trip we have already had a number of dishes that feature truffles, but that was just a prelude to the phase of our trip that is now beginning. Today we have departed Todi and followed the winding road north of Perugia, following our noses to the little known town of Citta di Castello, one of the principal truffle towns in Italy and home of Tartufi Bianconi, the Bianconi family business that is all things truffle - from hunting truffles, to brokering and buying from local trifalao (truffle hunters), to reselling and processing them into a vast variety of products, to maintaining a museum dedicated to the truffle and to running a cooking school that is our destination and will be our home for the next several hours. We leave the highway at Citta di Castello and Marky Mark guides us down narrow, single lane roads and through tiny, rustic villages that appear frozen in time announcing, incorrectly once again, that “you have arrived at your destination” when we are in the middle of desolate country road. Fortunately we have printed the directions that were provided by the agency through whom we have booked this half day class and although the directions are only slightly better than Marky Mark’s turn by turn variety, we find the unpaved road leading into the Bianconi’s farm, a tiny sign announcing Tartufi Bianconi.

We park our oversized car, big enough for a family of 6 (why is it that the rental car companies refuse to give you the small sporty car you requested, “upgrading” you instead to a gas guzzling behemoth that would be more at home in South Beach than rural Umbria?) on the gravel drive in front of the collection of neat buildings that make up the Bianconi’s home and business and are greeted by two women. One is a thin, middle aged woman with a gentle face, like a muse from a Botticelli painting, the other shorter and older, with a sparkle in her eye. These are our hosts for today, Gabriella Bianconi, who will guide us through the mysteries of the truffle, exploring the taste and aroma of the various varieties of these prized fungi, how they grow and where they are found, how they should be handled and how they can be used, and most importantly, how to cook with them and eat them, and her friend and associate, Lena Cedergren, a gregarious Swedish woman who has improbably taken up residence in Citta di Castello and who will translate and entertain us for the day. The two women greet us warmly and escort us into the building that houses the kitchen and dining room where they welcome us and begin to orient us as to what will transpire over the next several hours.

As soon as we enter the kitchen, which opens directly into the courtyard where we have parked, we know the day will be a good one. It has been built specifically for cooking classes and demonstrations, and is outfitted with equipment that is at once professional but with the feel of a home kitchen. It is a large space, with a high ceiling, plenty of room for circulation and preparation. Lena opens a bottle of Grechetto and immediately begins pouring wine for us (and herself). She and Gabriella alternate speaking to us and asking us questions as they show us to the nearby dining room and then next door to the family’s office and product showroom. It quickly becomes evident that Gabriella speaks excellent English, but Lena’s engaging personality and warmth adds not just correct grammar and the occasional correction of phrase, but a sense of humor and joie de vivre that puts immediately everyone at ease.

As we are being shown around, Saverio Bianconi, Gabriella’s husband, arrives in his truck with a white paper bag in hand. He has just been meeting with a local trifalao who has sold him a bag of freshly harvested truffles. We follow Saverio into a small room just outside the main product processing area, where a worker is busy preparing and bottling some sort of exotic truffle concoction for resale, and he places the bag on stainless steel table, a broad smile coming over his otherwise implacid face.

He opens the bag and spills out onto one of two striped towels, which are twisted into a sort of nest shape and already full of various varieties of truffles, the new truffles. The room already reeks of the perfume of these truffles, and it is then that we notice that every room we have been shown to has been suffused with more or less of the same musty sweet aroma. Saverio reaches down into the pile of and plucks forth his prize, an enormous white truffle, knobby and spattered with dirt, about the size of large tomato. He holds it up for us to breathe in and the effect is instant. We are transported to someplace, but someplace unknown, unknowable and unfindable. For a brief moment we are lost in that aroma, our senses ebbing and flowing like the soft but insistent splash of surf on the shore, coming, going, coming, going with each deep inhalation and cleansing exhale. This is why we have visited, to experience truffles more than simply enjoying them on a plate of pasta. For a moment and for this moment they are a religion.

This particular white truffle, a rather large specimen that most folk would assume came from the area around Alba in northwest Italy’s Piemonte region rather than from central Umbria which is better known for its black truffles, should fetch somewhere north of two thousand euros, according to Saverio. It is the largest truffle on the table and it is indeed an eyecatcher, which is why restaurants will pay such a high price for this type of truffle. But we go on to smell, touch, feel and consider the other, smaller white truffles in the cloth bag, each one prized equally by Saverio and each with its own distinct, but equally satisfying odor. Restaurants, it seems, simply pay more per gram for the larger truffles, because that is what diners like.

We move on to the other bag, stuffed with even more truffles, this bag holding a variety of different black truffles which are more plentiful in this area. The black truffles are generally smaller than their white brethren in the other bag, mostly the size of golf ball (or hailstones, depending upon your frame of reference), some reaching the size of ping pong balls. Some are smooth, others are bumpy, with dozens of little knobs, like a raspberry. Their odor, which like the aroma of the white truffle, is difficult to express in words, but it is clearly different from that of the white. In fact, as we are coming to appreciate already, each individual truffle is unique in its perfume and taste. There are hardly any rules, it seems, with truffles, and most of the little information that is out there is wrong.

We return to the kitchen where Gabriella begins teaching us about the various types of truffles. White and black are the two major classifications, but within each category there are different types, the white winter truffle, native to Alba and known as the tuber magnatum is the most costly and generally the most highly prized truffle in Italy. But there is also a spring white truffle (tuber borchi) which is more plentiful but less sought after. The blacks include the tuber melanosporum, known as the black truffle, the black prestige truffle or the black truffle of Norcia and also the Perigord truffle as it is the prized truffle of France (which does not produce white truffles), the more plentiful summer truffle and a number of lesser varieties. She shows us around a small room which the Bianconis have made into the world’s first and, they say, only museum of truffles, with cases displaying different types of truffles, dozens of books about truffles in different languages, charts showing the life cycle of the truffle and its relationship to its host tree on whom the truffle depends for its nutrients and a collection of the different tools used by trifalaos of different regions in Italy and France. This family is passionate about truffles.

Gabriella then begins about an hour taking us through a tasting of the various types of truffles, including fresh varieties as well as reconstituted dried truffles, frozen truffles, truffles in butter and oil, truffle paste. Some are eaten raw, others warmed slightly in olive oil with a hint of garlic. Each one ever so slightly different from the other, but all of them slightly quickening the pulse, slightly electrifying the air and the hairs on our bodies, without disturbing the calm. With so much about truffles difficult to describe or pinpoint, it is perhaps this feeling that best sums it up. Eating them and smelling them is at once calming and soothing yet also exciting and enervating.

For the next two hours Suzy and I work with Gabriella and Lena to prepare a number of fabulous dishes which we will proceed to eat and wash down with wine for another couple of hours after that. Each dish uses truffle in some manner – mashed potatoes with truffle and parmigiano, simply made by adding truffle infused potato flakes to boiling water; celery cream soup with croutons and shaved truffles; polenta cooled into timbales and topped with a truffle paste called tartufata; frascarelli, a peasant pasta that we make by hand by drizzling egg yolk into flour with a sort of whisk broom and which is topped with a crunchy celery and summer truffle sauce; and a simple boiled chicken cutlet roulade, stuffed with prosciutto, tartufata and truffle cheese. Each dish is better than the previous, each one haunting us with the essence of truffle, each one wringing out our souls, twisting one way at the top, the opposite direction below until we are both purified and intoxicated. After six hours immersing ourselves in truffles we are spent. The day has been an unmitigated success.

We find it hard to leave these wonderful people, who have spent the day revealing the secrets of the truffle to us. In these few hours we have grown close to them, exploring the possibility of doing business in the future or at least seeing them on a future trip to the region. But we must leave to begin the second phase of our trip, as we pass from Umbria and Tuscany in central Italy to Alba and the Piemonte in the north. More truffles await us there, including a truffle hunt and the annual white truffle festival. But for tonight we must brave the approaching rain and the impending darkness and make our way to Bologna, our destination for the night and tomorrow morning, memories of our day of truffles imprinted somewhere in our primitive dna.

A presto,
Bill and Suzy

Day 8 - Todi-Foligno-Ponte San Giovanni

It is difficult to imagine that only 24 hours has elapsed since I last updated you as to our progress. When we were last together, Suzy and I were drifting off to a peaceful sleep at the beautiful Villa Tre Grazie near Todi in southern Umbria, having spent the day lurching from a wonderful cooking class, to a difficult real estate negotiation to a meeting with the villa’s caretaker to pick up the keys. Since we left the cooking class, we had constantly been running behind schedule. A couple of hours behind, to be precise. That frenetic pace was to continue today.

We wake up early at the villa to a cool morning, the temperature much higher than the previous few days and patches of welcome blue sky visible in the distance. We set up shop in an enormous sitting room, so large and elegant that it must be called a drawing room, to do our morning’s work. Continuing the trend from the day before, this takes much longer than expected and despite our early start, before long what we expect to be a leisurely day begins to back up against the 4:00 appointment we have made with the real estate agents back in Ponte San Giovanni.

When we met with our friend Paula Hughes several weeks ago in Washington, the meeting at which she offered us the use of her villa, she suggested that we have lunch or dinner at one of her favorite area restaurants and proceeded to show us a lengthy article in a recent issue of Food and Wine magazine profiling the restaurant and its eccentric chef/owner. We had puzzled over when and how to fit this restaurant into our itinerary, as it is closed on Mondays (which would have been an ideal time for us), so we call the restaurant for a lunch reservation today. The owner answers and affirms our reservation, his cheery demeanor evident in this short exchange.

So we hastily close up shop, jump in the car and head to Foligno, a thirty to forty minute drive through the mountains to the other side of Umbria. Our reservation is for 1:00. It is 12:55 as we step out the door. History is repeating itself.

Until now we have navigated by the seat of our pants on this trip, relying on our memories, maps and our familiarity with this area to find restaurants, hotels and appointments. Tomorrow we are heading to new territory – Citta di Castello, north of Perugia, for a truffle cooking class and then onward to Bologna – so I have brought a GPS unit to help guide us our next adventures. We have used this unit here in Italy before, the erudite voice of Mark, a computer generated Brit, always guiding us to our destination, albeit sometimes in circuitous fashion.

We will need Marky Mark’s assistance today. Getting across the mountains that bisect and separate one side of Umbria from the other has been a nightmare for us in the past. Several years ago, on one of our first trips to Umbria, we altered our plans to spend the day in Deruta, a town we had discovered on our previous Italian sojourn and were sent instead on a wild goose chase by our former Italian partner in search of olive oil. Our search landed us in the town of Trevi, a beautiful hilltown on the east side of the ridge, a fair distance from our original and ultimate destination of Deruta, which lies on the other side of the mountains. The valleys on both sides of the mountain are served by excellent highways and the two highways converge both at the north end (outside Perugia) and south (near Terni), forming a sort of squashed oblong shape, like a football. The smart thing to do that day would have been to drive north from Trevi to Perugia and then south down to Deruta along the main highways. It is a route we have taken many times since, and would have taken about a half an hour.

But the very short line on the map, roughly connecting the two towns and making a nearly straight line over the mountains proved, much more enticing than the boring highway route. Pride, one of the seven deadly sins, reared its ugly head, and not even the presence of Saint Francis, in nearby Assisi could protect us. So into the mountains we headed, toward the aptly named town of Bastardo, where, according to our map, we would pick up a small local road down the mountain and connect with the highway to Deruta. We did indeed reach Bastardo but somehow managed to descend the mountain on the exact same side we started. Nonplussed, we scaled the windy passage back to Bastardo only to once again be expelled back down the east side of the mountain from whence we came. Over and over we reached Bastardo, but bad karma simply prevented us from finding a road that went down the other side of the mountain. At last a promising road took us down and toward the west, but as we got lower and lower the track became narrower and narrower until it simply ended. We retraced our steps to Bastardo before somehow lucking into finding the only route through the mountain. When we arrived in Deruta that evening the shops were closing and our day was shot. Fortunately Suzy blamed our partner for having sent us to Trevi nearly as much as she blamed me for stubbornly trying to cross the mountains. Perhaps if we had had elephants, like Hannibal.

So today Marky Mark provides the miracle of safe passage across the mountain, taking us through Bastardo and down the other side until he directs us to the door of il Bacco Felice (Via Garibaldi, 73, Foligno, tel. 335.662.2659, http://www.blogger.com/www.ilbaccofelice.it). Thanks to his help we arrive in Foligno only 45 minutes late, a minor miracle these days. Fearing our reservation might be cancelled, we have called ahead and received permission for our lateness from Salvatore Denaro, the quirky and charismatic chef/owner of this little hole in the wall. If the Food and Wine article is any indication, Salvatore has made quite a name for himself as a result of his outstanding cooking and his promotion of the ideals of the Slow Food movement, of which he is a member and a zealot. Slow Food, an international organization started in Italy and which still counts Italy as its biggest supporter, supports the idea of a slower pace of life and enjoying the company of one’s fellow man around the table, where shared experiences and enjoyment of food and wine can enhance our interactions. Salvatore’s website trumpets this philosophy, announcing that the restaurant is

Per chi ama il vino.
Per chi ama sedersi a chiacchierarecon un bicchiere in mano.
Per chi ama mangiare.
Per chi ama dimenticarsi del tempo che scorre.

(For those who love wine. For those who love to sit and chat with a glass in hand. For those who love to eat. For those who love to forget the march of time.)

We near the restaurant, or so we think, and Marky Mark announces that “you have arrived at your destination.” So we pull into a municipal parking lot, lock up the car and begin to look for the restaurant, which, despite Marky Mark’s tone of certitude, is actually about five blocks away. We walk in circles for a while than arrive in front of the restaurant nearly an hour and a half late. Pausing in front of the restaurant, we consider the two entry doors. One appears to be the main entrance, but there are tables directly in front of it inside blocking any hope of entry. The other appears to open into the kitchen, but we decide to step in there anyway, finding a disheveled counter, bookcases full of books stacked haphazardly and two tables, several men at each, deep in animated conversation with one another. Charging down the hallway, apparently from the kitchen, a bearded man with a protruding belly and a white apron, jeans and a chef’s hat, and in general disrepair thrusts his hand out to us exclaiming “benvenuti, sfortunati, welcome to il Bacco Felice.” This, we surmise, must be Salvatore.

He has of course recognized us from our plaintive phone call asking for his indulgence for being late and assuring him we would be at the restaurant by 2:00. It is 2:15 and while the restaurant is emptying Salvatore insists that we sit and allow him to serve us lunch. We are glad to be in his company and under his care.

As far as we can tell, one does not order a meal at il Bacco Felice. Salvatore and his staff suggest what you will have and bring it to you. Within a few moments after we are seated our waitress asks us what we would like to drink. When I reply that I would like to see the wine list, she replies simply “white or red.” We would like red, but I don’t seem to get through to her when I tell her that we would like a bottle, not simply a carafe of the house red. A few moments later she comes back a very nice Rosso di Montefalco from Ricceri and pours us two glasses. Perhaps there is no wine list. Simply state your preference for color and they will bring you what you should have. Works for us.

Salvatore returns tableside a few moments later, greeting us once again and offering us a basket of warm focaccia and prosciutto, which are delicious separately and together. He fills our wine glasses, then grabs a spare glass from another table and helps himself to a glass of our wine. “Salute from il Bacco Felice,” he exclaims, clinking glasses with us and downing his glass. Then he “suggests” that we start with a nice zuppa di cecci, chick pea soup, with fresh pasta of which he is obviously very proud. Sounds good to us, and when the waitress brings us our soup a little while later we once again agree that our decision has been a wise one. If only all of life’s decisions could be made so simple.

Roasted chicken diavolo is the next course that is ordered for us. It is brought out on a small plate with a simple salad. The chicken is crispy outside, with scorch marks from the grill and seasoned with rosemary, peperoncini and salt, giving it a light kick. We eat it with our fingers, breaking bones apart and gnawing all the meat we can find between ribs and under the cartilage. We have lost all inhibitions in this place and are simply enjoying a relaxing, no worries meal that happens to taste great.

By now we are the only diners left in the restaurant and Salvatore chats us up some more. He seems pleased to see Americans here, but we can only imagine that his exposure in Food and Wine has increased his flow significantly. A shameless self promoter, an enormous reprint of the article appears in the front window along with a menu board proclaiming (in English), “Free glass of bubbly if you mention Food and Wine.” We have not stooped for the free bubbly, but we don’t feel cheated. This, simply put, is the reason we have come to Italy. And our Italian experiences are full of Salvatores.

As he walks away from our table he says to himself, “I think a rocciata.” A few moments later our waitress returns with two plates, each with an almond cookie and a streudel-like pastry that we learn is the traditional Umbrian dessert, a rolled pastry filled with apples, cinnamon and walnuts. It is, apparently, the only dessert served at il Bacco Felice. We are in a hurry to reach our next appointment, which we are already resigned to being late to, so we decline the offer of coffee, instead asking for two glasses of Sagrantino passito, a sweet dessert wine made from the sagrantino grape. We are brought the entire bottle, which we apparently must pay for, so we resign ourselves to being even later.

The sweet wine is a wonderful finish to this fantastic slow food lunch. Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food would be proud. Our couple of hours at il Bacco Felice have slowed down time, despite our frenetic past couple of days. We have enjoyed each other’s company, our souls and our stomachs have been filled by Salvatore, and we are ready to re-emerge into the fast world that waits outside il Bacco’s doors.

We say our mille grazie a thousand times and emerge into the bright afternoon sun, our breaths deep, slow, cleansing and refreshing. This shall pass, as we re-enter the fast world and rush back to Ponte San Giovanni for what will prove to be nearly seven hours of meetings with the real estate agents before submitting a written offer to purchase a beautiful villa outside Assisi. We arrive about an hour late, the delay augmented by our inability to recognize the building, which we drive past several times. Soon we will be back on schedule.

The experience of making an offer to buy land in this foreign country is at once both stressful and enervating. We want this property but are clear what it means to us and how much we want it. Perhaps a meal and a slow food experience helped put this, as it can put all of life’s seemingly intractable problems in perspective. I shudder to think what our experience at the real estate agent’s office would have been like without il Bacco Felice.

We head back to Todi after our marathon meetings, the night turning into morning and our next round of appointments only hours away. Our last act, after signing the purchase offer? A two hour dinner with the real estate agents and Javier, breaking up after 1:00am. The modern world, with all its stresses, seems to need this excuse to slow down. Perhaps we should heed the warning.

A presto,
Bill and Suzy

Day 7 - Santa Maria degli Angeli

Today is just fun. Really fun. Or at least most of it is.

Our door bell buzzes at nine o’clock, just as we are finishing our packing and closing up the apartment. It has been a relaxing, pleasant few days here, despite our somewhat frenetic schedule and our desire to engage in every possible activity, see every local sight and to eat at every known restaurant. We have been able to come and go as we please in large part due to our new apartment, which while quite comfortable has as its most outstanding feature its centrality. As we learned from our excursion to Eurochocolate in Perugia, it is a short ten minute train ride to the center of Perugia; located a few minutes from the autostrada, it is a fifteen minute drive to Assisi, twenty minutes to Spello, twenty five to Bevagna and thirty to Montefalco. Torgiano, home of the Wine Museum and the Olive Oil Museum, two of our favorites, is thirty minutes away by bike, ten by car. And beyond that lies Deruta, the ancient hilltown that is the center of the Italian ceramics industry and in which a great deal of our ceramics inventory was born, a fifteen minute drive. It is remarkably well situated and has the virtue of being called home.

At the door is Javier Casuso, whom we have arranged to see this morning for a brief chat about our real estate project before heading toward Assisi for a half day cooking class. By nine o’clock I am definitely feeling the effects of staying up most of the night watching the big Red Sox victory, but the cooking class promises to offer me an opportunity to veg out, literally, while eating a little, drinking a little and learning a little.

Well as fate would have it I ate a lot, drank a lot and learned a lot. And I had a lot of fun.We meet our teacher and host for the day, Letizia Mattiacci, proprietor of the agriturismo (guest house) Alla Madonna del Piatto (Via Petrata,37, Pieve San Nicolo, Assisi, tel. 075.3199050, cell 328.7025297), on the dot at 10:00 in front of the train station in the little town of Santa Maria degli Angeli, a town perched in the shadow of the gleaming, white, walled city of Assisi. Santa Maria is dominated by an enormous cathedral with a tall, elongated dome, towering over the tiny hamlet and visible for miles along the plain that runs between Monte Subasio, on which Assisi is located, and another mountain chain to the west. Along this plain runs the highway, north-south, through rich farmland that has given Umbria its nickname “the green heart” of Italy.

Letizia greets Suzy, Javier and I warmly and we introduce ourselves to an American couple who has already found her. She is slight in stature, but with a direct gaze and bright, friendly eyes. She speaks terrific English and we are immediately comfortable in her presence. We introduce ourselves to Bob and Carolyn, the other couple, and make our way down the street to Terra Umbra Antico (Via Patrono d’Italia 10/a, S. Maria degli Angeli, tel. 075.8043696) an alimentari, or gourmet food shop, that features the bounty of Umbria.

For the next hour or so we are given a crash course in olive oils, truffles, cheeses and liquors, at each step learning how the Umbrian varieties are the best. We have noticed that with most Italians, there is a real chauvinism, in the best sense of the word, and their pride in their region, be it Umbria, Tuscany or Puglia is never far from the surface. During the demonstration and lively discussion we are joined by our sixth classmate, a woman named Donna who is taking the class for the second time, not because she flunked the first time, but because she enjoyed it so much. She, it turns out, is from Ohio and, like me, has stayed up much of the night getting updates on the Red Sox-Indians game by blackberry. She is not nearly as happy as I.

We buy a few products from the proprietor and then make our way back to our cars for the drive from Santa Maria to Letizia’s agriturismo, where the cooking class will take place. The drive takes us straight toward Assisi and veers off to the left, along an extremely windy and narrow road that climbs a hill across a valley from the pilgrimage town. We climb and weave for about fifteen minutes until we reach the agriturismo, an ancient stone farm house perched on a steep hill, surrounded by several hundred olive trees that Letizia and her husband cultivate, along with some fruit trees and other farming that is required in order to gain the designation, agriturismo.

Our group enters the dining room, where Letizia serves meals to the guests of the inn. No other guests are around this morning, however, so our class has the dining room and the nearby kitchen all to ourselves. Letizia inaugurates the festivities with a bottle of white Grechetto, grown not too far away and hands out aprons. Our friend Javier, who recently took up cooking and apprentices in the kitchen of his favorite haunt, the Deco Hotel in Ponte San Giovanni, has brought along his own chef’s jacket, which makes quite a splash among our amateur group, impressing even Letizia who speaks of getting one herself. Suzy comments that the jacket could add €10 to price of admission.

The main object of this course is to learn how to make fresh pasta, but before we begin Letizia organizes us to make a crostata, a kind of Italian pie, which we fill with dark chocolate, ricotta cheese and citron, a sort of candied lemon. We students roll out the crust that will hold the filling and cover it with strands of crust to make a latticework top. Letizia pops the crostata in the refrigerator for a half hour before baking it.

Again before moving on to the pasta we work on our two pasta sauces for the day, a simple porcini mushroom sauce and a basic tomato sauce, Letizia explaining to us that fresh pastas do not need (or want) complicated sauces. The freshness of the pasta is the real main feature of the meal.

As our porcini sauce simmers on the stove, slowly infusing the kitchen with a soft, rich aroma, we begin making stringozzi, a typical Umbrian pasta made without eggs (eggless pastas being typical peasant fare, as they were too poor to afford eggs) and rolled out in slightly thick strands. Letizia measures the flour and other dry ingredients and then shows her practical side. Many Italian matriarchs would dump the ingredients on a table, make a well, add liquid and start a laborious process of kneading the dough by hand, a process that would normally take up to half an hour. Letizia obtains the same result by letting a food processor do the work, further showing her practical side by adding one egg, some water and a bit of oil to this “eggless” pasta. The resulting dough, which is extracted from the food process a few minutes later, is a shade of off white, elastic and not at all sticky. It is ready for our inexperienced hands to shape into stringozzi.

A hand cranked pasta maker is an essential tool in every Italian kitchen and we learn how practical and easy to use it is. The main part of the machine consists of two rolling wheels that squeeze the pasta into flat sheets, the width of the pasta being equal to the width of the opening between the two rollers, which are adjustable. For this peasant stringozzi we will make thick pasta, smoothing the pasta on several passes through the widest opening before reducing it slightly to the next smaller width. A cutting attachment is then snapped onto the machine, the crank re-inserted to control the cutting blades, and the pasta sheets are fed through the opening, ribbons of pasta emerging from the other end. A “flour dance” ensues, where the moist pasta is dragged through flower to keep it from sticking to and begin the drying process, which for us lasts about a half hour.

We move then to producing an egg tagliatelle. A similar process is used, but three eggs are added to the flour and resulting ball of dough is a shiny yellow color, a bit stickier, much more moist and equally elastic. We roll these through progressively narrower openings until it is a very thin sheet of yellow pasta. These sheets are cut into the same width as the stringozzi and the flour dance is skipped. We have made pasta.

Now it is time to eat pasta. Letizia sends us to the table, fortified with more wine and a few minutes later emerges from the kitchen with some cured meats and cheeses that we had sampled at Terra Umbra Antica a few hours earlier. She serves some toasted bread soaked with her own olive oil, which is fruity and delicious, as well as some of the spreads we have sampled. It is quite the lead up to the main course.

As Letizia makes her way from the kitchen to the dining room with our stringozzi con salsa porcini we can already smell the woodsy aroma of the mushroom sauce. The pasta looks beautiful, and it is almost a shame to have to eat something you created. But we do. With gusto. And with smacking lips. Letizia’s admonition that fresh pasta does not need complicated sauces has been correct. We can think of nothing better than our pasta, which an hour ago was mostly a bunch of flour in a white bag, paired with our porcini sauce, a little olive oil drizzled over the whole concoction and a simple glass of vino rosso. Life really can’t get much better.But wait. It just did. Letizia emerges from the kitchen with our tagliatelle, topped with a tomato sauce so simple even President Bush could make it. We had sautéed some garlic in olive oil and added a can of the best quality tomatoes. This simmered for half an hour and transformed itself into the richest, most soothing accompaniment tagliatelle could have ever wished for. Perfection through simplicity. Minimalist heaven. Buon appetito.

* * *

What a day. What a class. But it is, unfortunately, not over for us. We are already several hours late to a meeting with a real estate agent to talk over a possible purchase, so we have to part company with Letizia, Bob, Carolyn and Donna much too early. But not without first savoring our crostata, which is a delight.

So off we race, from Assisi back to Ponte San Giovanni for a couple of hours of unpleasantness before abruptly leaving there, also an hour and a half late to meet the caretaker of the Villa Tre Grazie in Todi, about a half hour to the south. The villa, which is generously being lent to us by our friend and supplier of Canonica Verde spices, olive oils and honeys Paula Hughes, will be our home for the next two nights. Tonight, however, we must fight the rain and traffic and a sense of embarrassment at being so late before arriving at this beautiful villa.

But as we say our goodbyes to the caretaker and sink into a comfy chair, the unpleasantness of the last several hours is eclipsed by the faint memory of the aroma of porcini and the phantom taste in the back of my mouth of tagliatelle pomodoro. It is memories like these that keep us coming back for more.

A presto,Bill and Suzy

Day 6 - Montefalco-Boston

Sox win! Sox win! Sox win!

Those beautiful words are replayed in the hearts and minds of the millions of faithful that comprise Red Sox Nation last night as they tuck themselves into bed, bleary eyed but dreaming dreams of a second World Series victory in three years. The game has been late, as have each of the games in this nail biting series, but it has been worth staying up for and now sleep awaits.
But for the sole representative of the Nation residing in Ponte San Giovanni, the clock is not so kind.

In order to catch the decisive seventh game of this League Championship Series, I had to wake up at 2:00 in the morning, sit through an unbearably irrelevant pregame show on Fox, and live and die with every offering from Dice-K, watching a 1, then 2 then 3 run lead shrink back to a 2 and then 1 run lead, which would have been no lead at all had the second base umpire not blown a call (in the Sox’ favor) on Dustin Pedroia’s tag out of Kenny Lofton who seemed to successfully stretch a single into a double. When 5:00am tolled, with a 7:00am wakeup time scheduled, this Sox fan decided he would simply have to read about, rather than watch the result. Reading about the 11-2 victory at 7:00 on Monday morning made that hour an instant nominee for favorite hour.

It has not always been that easy to be a fanatic of American sports when travelling in soccer-mad Italy. More on that later.

Back to Sunday morning. We rise late having no real agenda for the day, catching up on reading, writing and relaxing, the only thing missing is a copy of the Sunday New York Times. I check a few websites offering predictions about the evening’s upcoming baseball game. After a leisurely morning we eliminate some potential plans, such as driving to Norcia, which seem to ambitious, particularly given the inclement weather which is cold, cloudy and threatening to rain, even possibly snow.

We decide against a trip to Foligno, which we want to visit if only to have a meal at the trattoria Il Bacco Felice, a small family run restaurant that was recently written up in Food and Wine magazine. We opt to try dinner there on Tuesday, instead, if a reservation is available, and decide to return to Montefalco, Umbria’s greatest wine producing town, which is making a name for itself internationally with its award winning Sagrantino di Montefalco wine. We have made two previous visits to Montefalco in the past, each resulting in good meals, but suffering from seat-of-the-pants-itis, which leaves us wondering what this little hill town is really like. We look up the name and phone number of the trattoria we have been unsuccessful at visiting in the past and give a call to see if a table is available. Unfortunately a recording tells us that the telephone number we have dialed is no longer in service, so we set off by car, hoping that our thirty minute drive will be successful.

Thirty minutes turns to an hour as we miss a turn here and there. Signposts indicated Montefalco – 4km one moment, then a few minutes later, Montefalco – 11km. We climb hills then plunge back down into valleys. Something is not quite adding up, so we retrace our steps and eventually the signs indicate that we are getting very warm.

We arrive just outside the village gate (Montefalco is not large enough to really call a city), cars jammed in every space and then some, so we cross our fingers and drive through a barrier that is clearly marked “for authorized vehicles only,” even to those who read very little Italian. Along this one way street there are numerous empty parking spaces, but no entrance through the city walls. So we press on.

We finally get to the end of the road, a narrow alley that is bound on one side by the city wall and occupied parking spaces, on the other by a low retaining wall that holds the city in place above the valley hundreds of feet below. Getting out of here will require backing down the entire street we have just traversed, in the wrong direction along this one way street. Just then the reverse lights of one of the parked cars lights up and it begins to back out of its space. Salvation, as we will be able to park, avoid backing up or turning around and we are right next to another (city) gate.

The car backs out of its space and begins to inch down the one way street, as we start to negotiate the narrow parking space. The other car stops and seems to be watching us as we then notice another very obvious sign that parking in this stretch of spaces is limited to those with Zone D permission and that others will be subject to towing 24 hours a day. We have ignored these types of bluffs many times in the past, having only received one or two parking tickets (and never having been towed) over years of driving here. As a friend explained to us recently, “the Italians love to make laws, but they make them so complicated that no one follows them.” I’m not sure that this applies to parking laws, but judging from how Italians park their cars (behind dumpsters, between trees, on sidewalks) we have become pretty comfortable that parking enforcement is not high on their list of national priorities.

But I have a bad feeling today, especially as the car that vacated the spot keeps seeming to look at us, apparently to see if we are going to take his space. Finally I blink and we back down the street in search of a more legal parking space. I am silently ashamed.

We enter the village gate and walk up a steep stone street toward the main piazza, which we have visited before. The restaurant, Coccorone (Largo Tempestivi, Montefalco, correct tel. 0742.379535) is just off the main piazza, down a short windy alley, which we had had difficulty finding previously. Then, we arrived in town late at night hoping to eat there, followed signs to where we thought the restaurant was, and walked in circles for half an hour, only then discovering that the restaurant was closed for renovation. Today we are in luck, for all signs, and roads, lead to Coccorone, and we enter to find a warm, inviting refuge from the cold, a fire burning in the fireplace, white tablecloths on the tables, cases of local Montefalco wines stacked in bins throughout and every table completely full. And, according to the not-so-helpful hostess, full until the end of time. There is no way we will ever get a table here, she seems to be saying, adding that we really should have called for a reservation. In my most syrupy Italian I explain to her that we had tried to call but that her phone was disconnected. She gives me a card with the new phone number and recommends what we imagine to be a crappy little tourist restaurant in the main square. It is obvious that this woman has no time for me and probably thinks I am a complete jerk, which Suzy seems to agree with.

Fuming, we wander up the street and spy a nice little restaurant which we decide to try, being told that we will have to wait about twenty minutes. (An American woman at the table by the doorway tells us that she will be leaving in a few minutes and that it is definitely worth waiting for.) We plan to return in about ten minutes and set out for the main square to take some photos.

When we arrive there, we find the restaurant recommended by the unfriendly hostess of Coccorone, the Ristorante Enoteca Federico II (Piazza del Comune, Montefalco, tel. 0742.378902), which is not at all the crappy, tourist restaurant I had imaged it to be. In fact, the two small dining rooms, separated by an arch and walkway, seem cozy and inviting. We enter and inquire about a table and are told the wait will be about 10 minutes. We then spy the wine bar (enoteca) part of the restaurant, featuring dozens of local wines (which are sold in the attached wine shop) and our decision is made for us. We sidle to the bar, order a glass of the Sagrantino di Montefalco, the local gem of a wine that is produced just outside the town walls, and wait for our table.

This particular Sagrantino is a whopping 14.5 percent alcohol content and the first sip courses through our veins like red hot chili peppers. Our faces immediately flush and standing at the bar becomes an adventure, but the rich, deep taste is worth it, especially on a cold, blustery day where nothing has seemed to go quite right. A few minutes later we are escorted to our table, happy for the security of a chair.

We proceed to have a wonderful lunch of pastas and meat. Suzy starts with a stringozzi (a local peasant pasta, like a fat spaghetti) with cinghiale (boar sauce) with a modern touch – it is flecked with shavings of chocolate. We’re not generally fans of nouveau cooking, but the chocolate merely peaks through the meaty, tomato-y sauce, enriching it and rounding it somewhat. I have a tagliatelle con tartufo, flat pasta with truffle sauce whose unmistakable aroma announces its presence before the waiter steps into our dining room. We follow this up with a filetto al sagrantino (fillet with sagrantino wine sauce) that is divine and tagliata con rucola e balsamico (steak with arucola and balsamic vinegar). The food is terrific. But once again, in this wine town, the food is overshadowed by the wine.

We order a bottle of Sagrantino, from a different vineyard, this one a mere 14 percent alcohol, but the former effect is amplified. We stagger through our pasta like a punch drunk boxer and only begin to catch our wind as the secondo is served. The effect of this wine is like being kicked in the head by a donkey. The first kick makes you woozy and the second one really shakes you up. But the next several don’t seem so bad and after a while you forget that you are being kicked.

In this Sagrantino-induced haze we strike up a conversation with an American couple at a table across the room. They are visiting Italy for a good while, looking at business opportunities relating to wine production, the husband recently retired from the Mondavi company after having founded and operated the Woodbridge winery for many years. We exchange notes on wine but also on different foods, nutrition and the philosophy of the table. The couple is conversant on every subject, opinionated as well, and they clearly appreciate diversity in the food supply and enjoy regional differences. Italy is definitely a good place for them to be. We talk about what we all perceive as America’s seemingly growing appreciation for food and the table and after they leave it occurs to me that in Italy it is not just a small group of obsessive “foodies” that demonstrates a love of food and the pleasures of the table, but everyone. This is truly a country of food junkies.

As we leave the restaurant (having stopped off at the enoteca to buy some bottles of Sagrantino for private tasting back home), we notice three stainless steel vending devices attached to the wall outside the restaurant. Each of the shiny boxes has a large glass window on the front displaying a half dozen or so bottles of wine inside. There is a small slot at the top of each box and below each bottle there is a nozzle. This is, of all things, a wine tasting vending machine. After watching another group of American operate it, we learn that one goes inside and buys a smart card that is charged up with credit by paying at the cash register. You insert your card in the top of the machine and press a button corresponding to one of the wines in the case, specifying 30ml, 60ml or 90ml samples and the wine is dispensed below. A startlingly imaginative use of technology that at once seems funny and eccentric but may also serve as a warning against our seeming desire to have everything we want when we want it and our even more dangerous impulse toward building lives that are completely independent of one another. Sharing a glass of wine with others, and especially the pleasure of tasting new wine and comparing the experience with your fellow man, is a quintessentially human experience that should be savored and encouraged. Let’s hope that we won’t let technology inadvertently tear apart yet another essential human interaction.

But technology can’t always be bad, right? After all, thanks to technology I am bleary eyed, exhausted and happy, having watched six innings of the Red Sox victory that advances them to the World Series. Years ago, actually decades ago, during our first trips to Italy during football season, I remember waking up at 3:00 in the morning to watch the Monday Night Football broadcast featuring my Miami Dolphins (those were better years for the franchise) on a local broadcast of some Italian sports network. The problem was that the network required a subscription, so all I could view was the scrambled signal, twisted and contorted, without sound. I would stare at the TV for minutes at time, catching a momentary glimpse of the original picture as the scrambling sequence recycled. Eventually I would drift off to sleep, knowing who was in the lead, able to wait for two days to read about the game in the Herald Tribune.

Today you can find the USA Today in almost any city, and although the publishing calendar creates the same two day delay in news, its sports section highlights US sports in a way that the Tribune never did. High speed internet connections are available almost everywhere in Italy, often right through your hotel, but if not the major cell phone companies, TIM and Vodaphone, offer high speed wireless internet cards for your computer that work just like the Sprint or Verizon models, without the annoying guy who says “Can you hear me now?” These cards can be activated for a month at a time with very reasonable plans, such as our 100 hours of usage for €30. With a device called a slingbox connected to my TV at home, I can watch my own television over the computer anytime I want. Like at 2:00 in the morning on the day of game 7 of the ALCS. Three years ago when we were in Italy we missed all four of the Red Sox’ historic World Series victories, leading to their first championship in over 80 years. Thanks to technology we won’t make that mistake again.

A presto,
Bill and Suzy

Day 5 - Ponte San Giovanni-Perugia

Chocolate is big business.

Today is our second day in Umbria, and when we awake yesterday’s winds are still blowing, but have brought cold temperatures with them. The skies are a melancholy gray and for the first time we begin to notice leaves of yellow and dark red on some of the trees. When we left America less than a week ago, signs of autumn were everywhere, along the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina where we had been a few days earlier and the Taconic Parkway of New York’s Hudson Valley. There the sun and sky had that particular autumn feel, a deep, soft, gold color that seemed to give off a soothing low frequency hum, so low you can’t hear it, but which announces to your body that it is nearly time to find shelter and rest.

Those signs of autumn were nowhere to be seen or felt on our first couple of days in Italy. Skies had been clear and cloudless, and if not the intense bright blue of spring and summer, a blue only slightly shaded with white. Evergreens, including the iconic cypress, filled the landscape as far as the eye could see, punctuated here and there with the green leaves of other types of trees. It seemed as though fall would never come to this land, or at least Tuscany and Umbria.

But fall arrived in Umbria today, or this morning more precisely. Chill winds were blowing and piles of leaves, newly shorn from their hosts, were circling each other, showing off their pretty ambers, reds and oranges to one another. Little Italian ladies, bundled up against this sudden drop, hurried by, burdened with shopping bags, only their eyes visible from beneath the coats, hats and scarves that were attempting vainly to keep out the slicing cold.

From our apartment window we enjoy a cup or two of espresso, having figured out how to turn on the gas to the stove the night before. We hesitate to leave our comfortable little haven, but a meeting with our accountant beckons, to discuss some of the research she has been doing on the villa we are considering buying.

After a productive meeting with Stefania, we stop by the apartment to get additional outerwear, having misjudged how cold it really has turned. Then Javier drops us off at the train station in Ponte San Giovanni, where we will take a short ten minute train ride to Perugia’s Sant’Anna train station just outside the historic center of town and a short walk to the escalator that passes through the city walls and the Rocca Paolina, depositing you on Perugia’s main street, the Corso Vannucci.

But today’s visit to Perugia will be anything but ordinary. Today is the second to last day of Eurochocolate 2007, and it is Saturday, the final weekend. Perugia will be mobbed by thousands of tourists visiting the dozens of tents set up Italian chocolatiers as well as a few of their Swiss, Belgian and Dutch brethren.

Our first introduction to Eurochocolate came several years ago on our second visit to Perugia. We had briefly spent the afternoon there with my mother and father, as part of an overly ambitious day trip that had us drive from our villa in Chianti (in neighboring Tuscany), past Lake Trasimeno and into Perugia, then to Pienza in the Val d’Orcia. It was entirely too much driving, brought on by the optical illusion one suffers when looking at the tiny distances between destinations when they are drawn to scale on a map. How could a two and a half in drive take three hours? Why is our road drawn in yellow when all of the others are in red and why does it squiggle so much? The visit to Perugia, too rushed to see anything and accomplishing little other than getting the four of us alternately quarreling and giving the cold shoulder for the ill-advised drive to Pienza, was as near a disaster as we experienced in our travels together. So when Suzy and I decided to return there for a couple of days many years later, it was with a sense of trepidation and caution.

The day of that return to Perugia was also on a weekend, a Sunday if memory serves correctly. We navigated without incident from wherever we had been staying to the exit for Perugia from the autostrada, remembering vaguely the windy ascent that lay ahead before reaching the historic city center where our hotel lay. But as soon as we neared the city traffic came to a complete stop. Hundreds of cars, motorcycles and, especially, buses formed a miles-long jam that inched forward more slowly than the hundreds of pedestrians who were scaling the hills on foot. Completely clueless about the cause of the jam, it was probably a half an hour later (and definitely only several hundred yards ahead) that a banner stretched across the roadway announced the reason – Perugia Welcomes Eurochocolate.

On that day, in one of the greatest driving triumphs in our career of navigating Italian cities, we talked our way past a young policewoman, convincing her that we were staying in the centrally located Brufani Hotel (which was true), drove our car through pedestrian-only streets choked with thousands of revelers in the throes of chocolate-induced intoxication, the bumper of our rental car parting the human wave like Moses and the Red Sea, and found a parking space directly in front of the hotel entrance, beside one of the dozens of tents set up in the main Eurochocolate exhibition area which was headquartered, you guessed it, right in front of the Brufani.

Today we have no desire to inch our way into Perugia, opting for the regular light rail train that connects Ponte San Giovanni to Perugia Sant’Anna. We buy our tickets (andata e ritorna – round trip) from an utterly charmless railway employee who seems less than thrilled at dealing with the mob and after a bit of confusion due to the fact that special “chocotrains” have been added to the schedule to accommodate the throngs of cacao lovers, board our train. Ten minutes later the human wave carries us out of the train, away from the station and toward the escalator to the city center.

We emerge from the escalator and see our beloved city (we have visited there probably a dozen times since our first, rude introduction) completely transformed. No longer the hauntingly beautiful Venice of Umbria, it has become a Disney on Chocolate. The main street, along which dozens of white tents are lined up are jammed, and when I say jammed I mean completely full of people. Literally so full that there is no room to add one extra body, but the escalator continues to spit out more and more Italians into this mass of humanity, like some demented piece of factory equipment, adding each look alike cog, with its dark hair, jeans, dark ski parka and bags of swag to this churning crowd.

Crowds are not Suzy’s specialty. And despite her love of chocolate, especially the high end, interesting fare displayed and offered for sale by the elite chocolate producers of Italy that are here today, we make just a quick pass through some of the nearby tents before deciding to escape from the main street and seek lunch away from the crowd. We convince ourselves that perhaps after lunch the crowd will be smaller.

We wander a few hundred yards to one of our favorite trattorias in Perugia, the Osteria del Ghiottone (Via C. Caporali, 12, Perugia, tel. 075.572.7788). We have made it a point to dine at the Ghiottone every time we visit Perugia, and we have chatted at length with the owner, always complementing the food and leaving a decent tip. We enter the small door, down a couple of steps into a small waiting room with a couple of tables and the owner greets us, and within a second or two his eyebrows rise and his eyes widen in recognition. “How are you?” he asks in English and we exchange pleasantries telling him how happy we are to be in his restaurant again. His brow furrows a bit, as this is Eurochocolate, the town is stuffed to the gills and the restaurant is completely booked. He scans the little anteroom and sheepishly offers one of the tables here, which we gladly accept. Other than the occasional cold blast as other diners enter, only to be turned away, it is warm, friendly and inviting.

We order the antipasti del Ghiottone, which Suzy declares is the best antipasti in all of Italy. We back up her words by devouring nearly every offering on the five plates that are presented – mushroom canapés, eggplant offerings, a plate of prosciutto and other local salamis, eggs scrambled in truffle butter and simply hardboiled, crostini with olive paste, salsa verde, red pepper spread, the list goes on and on. As we tuck into our pastas (fettuccine with wild boar sauce and penne alla norcina) we notice one of the waitresses consulting an English-Italian dictionary and then conferring with the owner. He shuts the book, comes to our table and asks us in Italian if we can help translate for one of the other English-speaking guests. Cos’e melanzane in inglese? We explain that it is eggplant to Americans, aubergine to the Brits. He seems confused that there could be separate word for the English and Americans, then registers the response, thanks us and disappears into the main dining room. It is nice to be able to be a good Samaritan in a foreign land.

A bottle of wine and a couple of grappas later, we pay our bill, say our thank yous and goodbyes and head back into the bitter cold and now darkening Perugian streets. The crowds are no smaller than before, perhaps a bit larger, but the grappa has taken an edge off the cold and the crowds. We shop at a couple dozen tents, downing a cup of hot drinkable chocolate, which is not the same as hot chocolate, but simply melted chocolate served in a cup, and fight our way back up the Corso Vannucci back toward the train station.

Along the way we bump into Carlos Casuso, one of the sons of our friend Javier Casuso. He is out buying some last minute items for tonight’s dinner to which we have been invited. But before we go to Javier’s house, we must return to Ponte San Giovanni, on the Chocotrain along with hundreds of chocolate bloated revelers, many of them teenagers jacked up on too much sugar. Fortunately the boisterous, sweltering train ride is only ten minutes. Within another ten minutes we are home.

Perugia. Where we can score a parking space in front of our hotel on the biggest festival day of the year. Where we can score a table at our favorite restaurant while thousands look for a place to eat. Now, in the outskirts, here in Ponte San Giovanni, where we can prop up our feet in our apartment before going back out to dinner at a friend’s house. Perhaps we truly are home.

A presto,
Bill and Suzy

Day 4 - Ponte San Giovanni-Torgiano

The previous evening, with the wind at our backs and Florence in our rearview mirror we make the hour and a half drive through the Tuscan countryside toward Siena turning to the east past Lake Trasimeno to Ponte San Giovanni, our destination for the next several days. A small bedroom community of Perugia, at whose base it sits, Ponte San Giovanni is a gritty little hamlet displaying little charm and it will be our task over the next few days to discover the gem underneath its grimy exterior.

This will be our departure point for exploring the Umbrian countryside and it is well situated for this purpose. Perugia lies less than ten minutes away by car, up a steep, windy road which we have learned to love over the years. We hear that a light train system connects the center of the village with the smaller train station in Perugia, located a short escalator ride through a rocky tunnel to reach the historic center of town. Ponte San Giovanni is also located at the confluence of the two major state roads that connect all of the principal towns of Umbria, the E45 which runs through Deruta, past Todi and on to Terni and the E75, which takes a similar north-south track on the eastern side of the mountains past Assisi, Foligno, Spello and Spoleto before connecting with the E45 at Terni.

We arrive the night before at the dinner hour, drop our bags at our apartment and hop back in the car, bound for Assisi and a most unusual and enjoyable restaurant, La Stalla. For those of you familiar with our blog, we have written extensively about past dinners at La Stalla, which means “the barn” or “stable” which is built into an old barn (with very little spent to hide this fact) and which features an enormous wood burning brazier in the middle of the room on which a single cook prepares all of the grilled meats, vegetables, potatoes, bread and cheeses that are available on the menu. It is advisable to wear something you don’t plan to wear later on your trip, as your clothes will smell like smoke after your meal.

We are meeting our good friend and ceramics artist extraordinaire Javier Casuso and his four children for dinner that evening and while arranging the meeting time Javier suggests on several occasions that we follow him to the restaurant from Perugia, it being tucked away in a camp on the outskirts of a national forest and not a destination for the directionally challenged. We assure Javier that we can find the restaurant with our eyes closed and after about twenty wrong turns pull into the parking lot. Pushing open the large barn entry door we are greeted by a long narrow hallway punctuated by small alcoves that were stalls in a previous life and whitewashed walls coated with years of black soot and covered with names, initials and couples carved into the walls. In the center of the room a deep yellow fire throbs and undulates, throwing off a warm glow and light, sweet smoke. A single cook, apparently the owner who waited on our table last time, manages the food with a pair of tongs.

Dinner is a delight once again, with all of the standards – toasted focaccia, one stuffed with spinach and sausage, another stuffed with sausage and cheese, polenta served on a wooden board and topped with tomato sauce, grilled chicken, steak, lamb chops and sausages and steamy whole potatoes baked in the coals. On this night we add grilled scamorzza, a smoky mozzarella whose inside becomes runny and whose rind becomes crispy and contorted into odd shapes when grilled. It is one of those foods that makes your eyes roll back in your head when you taste it.

Apologies to all. I was not going to write yet another description of dinner at La Stalla. I ask for your indulgence and forgiveness. Suffice it to say dinner was both delicious and, with our lovely company, most enjoyable.

The next morning we wake up in our apartment, the sun streaming through the living room window, but with temperatures having dropped from the balmy 70s of Florence to the low 60s.

Our apartment. What a strange sound and even stranger thought. True, we have been speaking with real estate agents in this area for nearly a year as we have been on the lookout for a house to purchase to set up a vacation villa rental operation to compliment Bella Italia’s retail operation. In fact, one of the main reasons for this trip has been to see if we can finalize a deal on a wonderful property just outside Assisi. But all of this focus on buying a villa has almost made us forget that we have assumed the lease on a one bedroom furnished apartment in Ponte San Giovanni. It is here, in our new apartment, that we awake this morning. The feeling is a little odd, but quite good, that this is our new home.

After figuring out how to turn on the stove we brew a couple cups of espresso and wait for our friend Javier to arrive. He is an integral part of our villa enterprise and we have some details to resolve before meeting with the real estate agent early next week. After ironing out everything, Javier takes us down to the building’s basement where he shows us the garage, inside of which are a number of bicycles. We perform some minor maintenance (raising seats, pumping tires), say our goodbyes and begin our second bike trip of the vacation, a ten mile trip to the nearby town of Torgiano, a wine producing town that is one of the beautiful jewels of this region.

The cycling to Torgiano is much easier than our previous excursion from Florence to Fiesole, but we are travelling without the safety blanket of a guide and chase van. We fear that if we make a wrong turn we could become seriously lost, requiring the expenditure of even more energy to undo our mistakes. Fortunately, we know these back roads fairly well, having rented a villa just outside Torgiano last March. The road, which has a few questionable spots, is quite flat and the courteous Italian drivers (yes, you have read this correctly) give us wide berth and often announce their arrival with a short warning beep of the horn. This is a country that is cycle mad, and everyone seems to respect cyclists, on the road, in the city and, as we are about to find out, in restaurants.

Having pedaled five miles we have worked up a big appetite, so we drive over to Ristorante Siro (Via G. Bruno, 16, Torgiano, tel. 075.982010) just outside the center of town. We are dressed in gym shorts and tee shirts and smell like we have biked much further. I go inside to see if we can get a table and they seem happy to oblige. When I ask them where we should leave our bikes, explaining that we have neither lock nor chain, the waitress tells me to put them just inside the restaurant’s front door, and that no one will mind that they block traffic and make for a general nuisance. She then shows us to our table, leading us through the nearly empty restaurant.
By the time we leave nearly two hours later, the restaurant is completely packed, mostly with younger Italian men dressed in suits and work clothes. A few laborers in overalls have been seated as well, but Suzy and I remain the most underdressed and out of place diners in the restaurant. As we walk through the main room, to find the bathroom and as we leave at the end of the meal, however, no one gives our appearance a second glance or a second thought. The sight of real bikers, in stretchy bike pants and colorful shirts is not at all uncommon in restaurants and these people are simply giving us the courtesy of pretending that we, too, are bikers.

Being novices on two wheels we are about to learn what I imagine is common knowledge among biking enthusiasts. The wind, friend of kite flyers, sailors and electrical generators, can be a bicyclist’s friend. Indeed, our trip to Torgiano was aided significantly by a stiff tailwind that made the trip over effortless. This prevailing wind, however, not only did not change direction during our lunch, it built into a gale, bending ancient cypress trees, blowing litter down the road and across the austere vineyards and making birds take refuge on tree limbs. If we had been privy to a weather map, I am quite confident that a meteorologist would chart the wind by locating Ponte San Giovanni on the map and drawing a line directly to Torgiano along the road we were about to take. This journey promised to be less of an adventure than an ordeal.

An ordeal punctuated by rest stops seemingly every hundred yards. The wind blew so hard in our faces that even on downhill segments we had to strain at our pedals to make sure we were not blown back up the hill. On several occasions we stopped to check our tires, suspecting that our brakes were out of alignment and were partially deployed. Alas, this was not the case. How can something unseen cause so much misery?

By mid afternoon, saddle sore and exhausted, we returned to the garage, putting away our bicycles, perhaps for the last time, but at least until another calm day. Heading upstairs we collapsed on our bed and took a well deserved nap.

Nothing to do. What a strange sound to that thought, and completely foreign to our busy days here in Italy. But tonight we were on our own, free to hang out in our apartment. So it is off the grocery store, always an adventure, for a few ingredients to prepare pasta and salad. We find fresh zucchini flowers there, so we add that to the list, along with assorted spreads and other accoutrements to make crostini varie. And so we return to our apartment, cooking at home and reading until it is time to turn in, making our first efforts at transforming this little place into a home.

A presto,
Bill and Suzy

Day 3 - Florence

Let the food orgy begin.

When we last left you, dear reader, the sweat was drying on our tired bodies, having just scaled on bicycle the summit known as Fiesole (ok, perhaps a bit of an exaggeration) and having been returned to downtown Florence by our guide, enjoying the pleasures of an Italian haircut. Upon return to our hotel we had asked the concierge to arrange dinner reservations for us at our favorite Florentine restaurant, which shall go nameless in order to protect it against hordes of American tourists. A few moments later the concierge called our room to confirm our reservation.

We arrive at our restaurant, a few paces from the Piazza Santa Croce and enter the doorway into the tiny reception area where one of the two brothers who runs this little piece of heaven on earth immediately registers his recognition of us with a broad smile and an outthrust hand. “How are you? It’s good to see you,” he utters in very passable English, something he would have been unable to express a few years ago. We exchange greetings and are quickly shown to our table.

We pass through the front room and up a couple of stairs to a smaller back room with perhaps six tables. The front room, which seats maybe thirty people, is full, despite the early dinner hour (eight o’clock generally marks the time when restaurants begin to get busy, although you can generally find a table at seven thirty). Couples and larger groups are hunched forward in animated conversation and there is a noisy but friendly buzz throughout the room. The back room is nearly full and equally noisy. All of the voices, except ours, are Italian. All of the clothing, glasses, handbags and dogs (you will often see Italians entering restaurants with a small dog, who usually sits quietly underneath the table throughout the meal) are Italian. This is a local haunt, always filled with locals. We feel privileged to be allowed in and can think of no better recommendation for a restaurant.

We had tried to book a table here the previous evening, our first night in Italy. Unfortunately, the restaurant was closed. Another favorite was booked solid, so we allowed the concierge to recommend a good restaurant for us, Parione (Via del Parione, 74/76r, Florence, tel. 055.214005). We arrived there at 7:30, having just travelled from Washington, DC and wanting to get a relatively early night’s sleep. We were surprised to find Parione completely full, waiters dashing around and people obviously enjoying their meals. The three small dining rooms were similar in appearance to our favorite restaurants, plain wooden tables, open faced cabinets filled with various vintages, and a low, yellowish lighting that provided just enough illumination to allow you to see the menu, but which promoted calm.

But while the menus of these two establishments were similar, the experiences were very different, due largely to the fact that Parione caters directly, and it seems, primarily to the American tourist. As we are being seated every conversation we overhear is in English and our waiter, who rushes us to our table, speaks better English than my college age son. He is charming, no question about it (the waiter, not my son, although he is charming too) and entertains us with his bubbly personality as he runs through the menu with us, dumbing it down for these obvious dummies. Whereas our favorite place sticks to traditional Tuscan specialties – fettunta (toasted bread slathered with olive oil), crostino tipico (toasted bread with chicken liver pate), bruschetta pomodoro e basilica (toasted bread with diced tomatoes, basil and olive oil), assorted Tuscan meats and the like, Parione presents a menu that seems to want to make the American comfortable, featuring non-Tuscan offerings such as insalata caprese (sliced tomatoes with mozzarella and basil). There is nothing wrong with Parione’s menu, and our meal of bistecca alla fiorentina (chianina beef steak grilled to perfection and sliced from the bone), roasted potatoes and white beans is terrific. So good, in fact, that we have the identical entrée the following night at our local hangout. It is served the following night without so much glitz and commotion, but the humble owner nonetheless proudly carries our slab of beef to our table for us to inspect before it is cooked. Proclaiming that it is “un kilo e trenta” or 1.3 kilograms (just under three pounds) it is a deep maroon, red color, moist with its juices and about two inches thick. An enormous bone will give it even more flavor as it is cooked. (During the mad cow “epidemic” in the 1990s, the European Union required member countries to ban the sale of certain cuts of meat on the bone, fearing that this would encourage the spread the disease.
Surprisingly the Italians complied with this directive rather than withdrawing from the EU. We were fortunate enough to be visiting Italy several years ago just after the ban was lifted and heard a number of stories of city-wide celebrations where diners “welcomed back the bone.”)

Our bistecca is accompanied by white beans drowned in olive oil and sautéed beet greens. We wash all of this down with a bottle of Tignanello, a “supertuscan” red wine which has been priced at the same €60 for the years we have been coming here.

So, two nights, two bistecche, two exceptional bottles of wine. Not a bad way to start your trip. But while both meals were outstanding, we much prefer the local restaurant. Here dinner lasts a minimum of three hours. The waiters leave you to enjoy your food and your companion’s company, sometimes going too far, as it is often a challenge to get your check at the end of the meal. In contrast, Parione left us with the sense that we were being rushed, perhaps so the table could be turned over to another American couple after we left. Our waiter at Parione was a character, making jokes and yucking it up with us, but all of this was in flawless English, which sadly makes you forget you are in a foreign land. Not to say that our experience was in any way unpleasant; the food was excellent and the evening enjoyable. It’s just that the slickly packaged Parione made us feel as though we had dined at a very high end sort of Epcot. It looked like Florence, smelled like Florence but never quite felt like Florence.

The final point in favor of our local favorite occurred when we pushed away from the table. The night before at Parione we had struck up a pleasant conversation with a nice couple from Nova Scotia. As we left that restaurant we exchanged handshakes and goodbyes. The following night as we stepped away from our table, the distinguished Italian couple sitting to our left and with whom we had not spoken during the evening turned to us and wished us a good evening. By this simple gesture, we felt we had been welcomed into the fraternity of Italian diners, as sort of honorary Italians, and that made all the difference in the world.

* * *

For those of you who regularly read this blog, in which we have been recording our culinary travels in Italy for the past several years, you already know that we deserve to be members of the fraternity of Italian diners. We eat so much, so often, in so many places in this country, in fact, that if it had a dining Hall of Fame we would have been inducted into it already.

And if these future Hall of Famers have a new favorite place in Florence, it has to be the Teatro del Sale.

The Teatro del Sale (Via dei Macci, 111/r, Florence, 055.200.14.29, www.teatrodelsale.com) is a cross between a night club, social club and restaurant. It was established in 2002 by the owner of the popular and successful restaurant Cibreo, an expanding empire which now boasts of one of Florence’s best upscale restaurants, a more downscale caffe, a gourmet food shop and now, the Teatro del Sale. This complex is a stone’s throw away from the Mercato San Ambrogio, an outdoor fresh food market that is one of Florence’s best and definitely worth a visit in its own right.

The Teatro is housed in a former theatre and has been configured to include a gourmet shop, an expansive kitchen which can be viewed from the dining area behind a long plate glass window, seating for nearly 100, a stage for evening performances and a couple of comfortable sitting rooms for members. The key word here is members, for the Teatro is a club or circo-lo, open only to members. Membership is open to anyone, however, for a nominal €5 and runs from the date of joining until the following July. We originally joined a year ago and our classy little membership card, our names and membership numbers inscribed with a gold pen, announced us as the 57,000th member. Good Lord they sell a lot of memberships. The entrepreneur inside begins to scribble calculations on the back of a napkin.

We have only been to the Teatro for lunch, which runs from 12:30 until around 2:00. Like the dinners there, meals are served buffet style. Members find a table or a space at one of the longer communal tables and watch the kitchen staff preparing pasta and sauces, while grilled meats rotate on skewers in front of a large wood fire. Then a small opening in the enormous plate glass window swings open and the head chef shouts out in animated Italian what is being served. The antipasti has consisted of a dozen or so items, laid out on a central table, including polenta with cinnamon, pickled beets, pickled fennel and other grilled vegetables, a variety of cheeses, sliced prosciutto and other cured meats, several salads and thin slivers of toasted schiacciata, a Florentine version of foccaccia, which has been soaked in olive oil. As the food is set on the table, the members swarm about, jostling to get to the food before each other, Italians not being known for their skill in queuing up.

Heaps of food are taken back to the tables and a quiet falls over the room. Occasionally someone is elected to refill the table’s water jug or to get a fresh bottle of water. Handfuls of drinking glasses are transported to the entrance hall where a dispenser filled with very drinkable house wine is constantly in motion. Within a quarter hour or so the window swings open and the chef is shouting out the name of today’s pasta, and an enormous pan, perhaps two feet across, is passed through the window and transported to the serving table.

By now the dining room is as full as it will get, for members know that they can come late and get all of the antipasti they want. If they arrive late for the pasta, they fear, there will be none left for them, so a wave of diners has been arriving for the fifteen minutes or so before the arrival of the pasta. And when the pasta is announced it puts the commotion of the antipasti to shame. It is as though the diners are sharks and someone has poured gallons of blood onto the table. Elbows fly with such precision that an NBA player would be proud, shoulders slice through openings in the human wave like surgical lasers and, when not being served by one of the waiters, pasta is heaped on plates in monumental piles that would make Richard Dreyfuss’ character in Close Encounters proud. Italians love their pasta.

And so they should. We are given relatively small portions cavitelli pasta with a rich, silky tomato basil sauce, doled out on small desert plates. It is so incredibly satisfying that we sneak back for seconds, which is no problem as hardly a dent has been made in the enormous basin of pasta. So incredibly satisfying that later when I am having dessert, Suzy opts for yet another plate instead of chocolate cake.

The mixed grilled meats, rotated on skewers over a wood fire and which are the final course are often a bit of a letdown. This not because they are disappointing, but because there is little room left in our stomachs. We do our best to locate adequate intestinal space and finish off a healthy portion of chicken and lamb which have been seasoned with rosemary.

So nearly two hours after having wandered into this old theater we stumble out, our bellies distended and our brain cells diminished, the bright Florentine sun causing us to squint and adjust to the reality that much of the day remains ahead of us. At €15 for lunch, this is the best deal in the city and as two of the exclusive fraternity of 57,000 members we are proud to be recognized as members of the club.

So it’s off to Avis, by way of Vestri, Florence’s premier chocolatier, where we pick up a small cup of creamy drinkable chocolate and begin the ordeal of driving through Florence back to the Pierre Hotel to collect our baggage. After less than 48 hours we have to leave our favorite city, bound for Perugia and a whole host of new culinary and cultural adventures.

Stay tuned.

A presto,
Bill and Suzy

Day 2 - Florence

What fit of madness can explain why an overweight, unathletic, out of shape man in his late forties and his wife would choose to spend their first full day on vacation, after nearly twenty four hours of travelling across the world, on bicycles, pumping and straining to reach an ancient hilltown when a perfectly good city lay before them right at their feet? I struggle with that question the following morning as my legs tremble from their recollection of our adventure yesterday and my bottom still retains the unpleasant memory of a hard, unyielding bicycle seat which was its host for nearly six hours.

We awoke at an unpleasantly early hour, assisted by the confusion of our body clocks, which have not yet adjusted to local time but which have lost track of home time already. We dress in the athletic gear that we have optimistically brought along with us and looking completely ridiculous, depart our hotel, the well-situated Pierre (Via de’Lamberti, 5, Florence, tel. 055.216.218) just off the Via Calzaiuoli and a stone’s throw from the Duomo. Although running a few minutes late we charge into the hotel’s breakfast room for a quick cup of coffee and a bite to eat, drawing disapproving, or at least unbelieving looks from our fellow hotel guests at our unusual and inappropriate attire (please don’t worry yourself, we were clad in workout gear – shorts and tee shirt, not bike shorts), a situation that is hard to swallow from anyone who has put up with the hoards of wacko tourists in this town as we have. We feel a definite lack of comfort as we descend into the depths of “them.”

We hurry down the street toward the Ponte Vecchio, making a left hand turn along the Arno river toward our destination, the much more recently built Ponte alle Grazie. This bridge connects the oltrarno (the other side of the Arno) with the main side of the city, connecting with the Via de’Benci, which runs up to Piazza Santa Croce. This bridge, where we are to meet our tour guide, served as our daily transit point to central Florence nearly twenty years ago when we lived here for the summer as student, wife and newborn son. Every corner, alleyway and building in Florence bring back some sort of memory of that trip or one of the many other visits we have made to this exceptional place.

We are unaccustomed to rising this early in Florence while on vacation and there is a very different feel and look to the town as it, too, is shaking off its previous evening’s slumber. Workers outnumber tourists as they charge past in their stylish Italian outfits, sidewalks and streets are wet from their daily washing and the sun has yet to rise above the buildings, leaving the streets in relative darkness and the air cool, heavy and fresh. In our shorts and tee shirts we begin to wonder if have dressed appropriately for the day.

We arrive a minute before the appointed hour and there waiting for us is our guide, Steve, a young man on leave from college back in Missouri, who guides groups of cyclist ranging from two people to twenty from Florence to the hilltown of Fiesole, some number of miles up and away from Florence. We meet Sue and Laura as well, two middle aged women from Virginia who will round out our group. Steve greets us all, shows us to his van and we weave our way through traffic to the outskirts of town where his employer, I Bike Italy (tel. 055-234.2371, http://www.blogger.com/www.ibikeitaly.com) stores their bikes in a small locked garage. We are assigned mountain bikes, each with its own name (mine is “the Promise,” Suzy’s is “Up and Away,” others, such as “Crash and Burn” and “the Mangler” thoughtfully not assigned today given the small group).

As we don our helmets and listen to Steve’s introduction and instructions, anticipation is rising and each member of this unlikely group seems to be trying to hide a case of nerves, as none of us has ridden a bike since childhood. We alight from the garage area to begin our first segment, a short ride onto the main road, across a bridge and along a country lane where we will assemble in front of a gate with a plaque that welcomes us the countryside that inspired the setting of Boccaccio’s Decameron and has inspired countless other authors and artists since. Our group makes it to the first checkpoint intact, but already there is grumbling and complaining among us, even though the ride has been perfectly flat.

We head out for our second segment, where we begin our ascent to Fiesole, the road a gentle incline punctuated with short, steeper segments that challenge us and cause at least a couple of us to dismount and walk our bikes for a spell. It is during this segment that it becomes apparent that the genius who came up with the line “it’s like riding a bike; once you learn you never forget” had never met Laura. Not a half an hour into our trip she has crashed her bike (getting on it, mind you, not riding it), has cut her arm and has given up on riding to Fiesole. Steve has to pedal back to the garage, get the van, pick her up and run the trip from a van, rather than from his bike. I can only imagine how incredulous (read, pissed off) he is, but he betrays no ill will.

We stop several times along the way to Fiesole, getting directions to our next checkpoint from Steve and stopping to enjoy some of the most amazing views of Florence imaginable. From the hills above town the entire ancient renaissance city is visible, the famous Duomo of Brunelleschi rising above everything, providing a frame of reference from which you can find the church of San Lorenzo, the Pitti Palace, the Piazza Signoria and all of the other famous buildings that one discovered and fell in love with in Art 101. A hazy layer of smog blankets the entire valley, obscuring the view somewhat and reminding us that this town is not just a museum piece, but the center of an industrial area in a modern economy.

By now the sun is high in the sky and temperatures have warmed somewhat. Still the air is slightly cool and crisp but the burning in our legs and sweat generated by this unusual activity make us glad we have dressed as we did. We are getting accustomed to and even possibly adept with the gear shifters on our bikes and the dismounting and walking up hills has become less frequent, even as the hills have become steeper. On some of the steeper inclines our feet pedal furiously as our bikes, in lowest gear, inch forward at a ridiculously slow rate. But we are captains of our own ships now and each of us (except Laura) is determined to arrive safely in port at Fiesole.

And so we do arrive, around noon, in the main square of Fiesole, sweat streaming from our pores, chests heaving and each of us emitting more odor than the Italian national soccer team. But we have done it. We have achieved what seemed impossible a few hours earlier. As we began our trip we were nervous about our ability to even ride a bike. As we mounted the first few stages that concern gave way to doubts whether we would have the stamina to make it all the way, whether on bike or on foot. Fiesole seemed a long walk away. As we entered the piazza, we did so as different people. Despite a rather steep final ascent I was damned if I was going to dismount and walk into town. Summoning every bit of energy I pumped my legs and ignored the burning and broke through into the piazza. For a moment I was Lance Armstrong, and I could imagine the short, heavy Italian matrons lined up at the bus stop cheering and going into a frenzy over my nature-defying achievement. Such is the mind of the cyclist. Or so I would imagine.

Suzy and I wander around the main piazza, our first visit here since our first trip to Italy when Bill studied law at Georgetown University’s summer program in Fiesole. Despite its proximity to Florence, this is a town largely unvisited by the tourist hordes and little has change in the decades since our last visit. After walking up to the belvedere that affords a spectacular view of Florence below, we return to our bikes to learn that our victory over Fiesole was only pyrrhic. We are far from over. A forty five minute ride is required to reach the restaurant where we will have lunch and another couple of hours remains on the program. These I Bike Italy people are very good at managing egos and expectations, indeed.

Nearly an hour later we arrive at La Panacea, a small trattoria set in a cool garden outside the town of Olmo. Despite the fact its business card proclaims seafood as its specialty, we enjoy typical crostini topped with chicken liver pate and bruschetta topped with flavorful tomatoes, basil and local olive oil pressed at an estate a short five minute bike ride down the road. We follow that with heaping plates full of spaghetti with pesto sauce and penne with tomato sauce, carbo loading for our return trip. The trattoria Panacea lives up to its name, the food, relaxation and most of all the padded chairs a panacea for us.

Before descending back to Florence, we stop at the Fattoria di Montereggi, a winery and olive farm where the proprietor bottles modest quantities of chianti and extravirgin olive oil. Steve shows us entire operation, from the plants to the pressing equipment, explaining how wine is fermented and olive oil obtained from mashed olives. We then get to taste a little, buy a little at insanely low prices and begin our downhill coast back to the outskirts of Florence. Along the final leg, a steep, windy road that skirts Settignano, the childhood home of Michelangelo, and passes a number of castles, we barely have to pedal at all, using our breaks constantly as the pine forest whizzes by. Never have I loved gravity so much. Thank you, Mr. Newton.

After checking in our equipment, Steve drives us back to the Ponte alle Grazie and we say our goodbyes. It has been about eight hours since we first met and it is still our first day in Italy. The strenuous activity has perhaps made us forget our jet lag and has definitely filled us with an overflowing sense of well being. As we return to our hotel, legs tired and bodies aching, we are beaming, smiles creasing our faces. We pass an old fashioned barber shop and we stop in for a quick haircut (Matteo Parrucchiere, Via dei Neri, 26/r). The barber finishes up trimming the mustache of a man in a beautiful plaid wool jacket who looks like he stepped directly from the set of the Godfather and begins plying his trade on my head. Twenty minutes later I am transformed, confirming my belief that Italy produces the best barbers in the world. It is a thoroughly enjoyable visit.

Back to the hotel for a hot shower and dinner reservations at our favorite restaurant in Florence. More on that tomorrow.

A presto.
Bill and Suzy

Day 1 - Washington-Milan-Florence

Rather than a smooth, flowing moving picture, today’s account of our adventure is a choppy, jerky series of still images, garnered from snatches of consciousness and punctuated by periods of deep, if unrestful sleep. It is a travel day, from Washington, DC to Florence, by way of Philadelphia, Frankfurt and Milan, but despite nearly 36 hours of planes, trains and automobiles (not to mention Pullmans), we have arrived at our favorite destination in the world – Florence.

Not much noteworthy to report on the flight over, other than the inevitable hassle that occurs when one flies on a codeshare operated flight, which has, unfortunately, become more common as the struggling airlines seek ways to increase their revenues. We have booked our tickets through US Air, having snagged a ridiculously low business class fare, but the routing takes us across most of western Europe, which is tolerable given the width and pitch of the seats, with two of the flights operated by US Air and one by its codeshare partner, Lufthansa. While US Air is happy to collect the ticket revenue for the Lufthansa-operated segment (Frankfurt to Milan), they act utterly powerless to help out with such mundane details as getting us seats together on the Lufthansa flight. They seem to be asking for the ugly American to rear his ugly head.

No worries, however. The flights go smoothly, other than an incredibly loud and possibly drunk woman sitting across the aisle from us on the Philadelphia-Frankfurt segment, who keeps her seatmate, aislemates, cabinmates and, probably, flightmates, all up to date on all the details in her miserable, unnoteworthy life. Thank goodness for the amenity kit provided by the airline, with its earplugs and eyeshades. With one earplug inserted (on the conversation side of my head) and noise-cancelling headphones blaring Louis Prima tunes, I am just about able to drown out her droll dithering.

We are excited that our multi-hour layover in Frankfurt will be eased by a visit to the Sheraton airport hotel, compliments of US Air. After toting our carryon bags for a mile or two we arrive in the lobby and the front desk attendant begins to arrange a day room for us, where we can shower, get an internet connection and check in on the fate of our beloved Red Sox.

Disappointment greets us, however, when she returns to tell us that there are no rooms available. We trudge back to our gate and after another mile or so, aided by dozens of fifty foot segments of moving sidewalk, we enter the Lufthansa business class lounge where half the German population seems to have called seatbacks, taking nearly every chair, couch or stool. After a protracted search we do find a couple of seats and also discover that the lounge also has a shower facility, which I sign up for.

I truly believe that a bed and/or a shower during a long flight is (as Donkey might say) one of the most refreshingest things in the world. Many years ago, while traveling to Italy with my parents we punctuated our layover in Zurich with a 4 hour nap in a day room operated by the airport, a particularly pleasant transatlantic crossing that conjures itself up on occasion. Today, as the hot water relaxes the tired muscles that had crabbed themselves into tight, twisty knots at the sound of hours of Ms. Platitude’s transoceanic blathering, a sense of wellbeing re-emerges, even though we are only about half way to our destination. I highly recommend a hot shower for the tired traveler.

We arrive in Milan’s Malpensa airport in the late morning, nearly a day after we had begun our travel. It has been several years since we have flown in here, opting for Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci airport (Fiumicino) for our recent transits. Despite all the hype about Malpensa construction and upgrade, it (or at least the terminal at which we arrived) remains a tired, rundown, unappealing welcome to the country. Well, we Americans have JFK, so we’ll call it a draw.

Outside the terminal two busses, or Pullmans as the Italians like to call them, wait to whisk passengers to destinations in downtown Milan, including the Stazione Centrale, or central train station. A high speed train will also take you from the airport to central Milan, but for some reason it pulls into the Cadorno Station, which requires a taxi or other form of transportation if you are taking a train to Florence or Rome. Just under an hour later, and €6 lighter we arrive at the Stazione Centrale, Milan’s main train station.

It has been several years since we have travelled through this station and as we approach the monumental doorway we recall how rundown the station was on our last trip, scaffolding everywhere as they attempted to modernize the grim interior. As we enter we can see the enormous progress they have made in the intervening years – scaffolding has been removed and replaced with large wooden barriers that block off much of the floor space. It is still dreary and dreadful, but now the cavernous interior space has been so chopped up as to make it crowded as well.

We buy our tickets from the automated ticket machines which are incredibly simple to use, find our track and climb aboard the train, which is originating from this station. We have twenty minutes to run spare, so I run back to the station and buy some sandwiches, arriving back at the train a few seconds before the doors shut and it heads south. Disaster narrowly averted.
Mussolini may be long departed, but he left behind a fantastic train system. The fast trains between the major cities are first rate, clean, fast and on time, and our train is no exception.

After loading our luggage into the racks above our seats we drift off to sleep, waking every ten minutes or so. After an hour and half we reach Bologna, the culinary capital of Emilia-Romagna if not of all of Italy (or perhaps the world!), a place to which we will briefly return in a week or so. After departing the city we begin the final hour of our journey, crossing some of the most fantastic (in the fantastic sense of the word) scenery imaginable. I’m not sure I know how to define a crag, but looking out the window the word craggy jumps to mind (and that is not from my reflection in the window). Hills jut up into sharp peaks faced with sheer rock, peaks plunge into steep valleys and here and there bare trees dot the crags (Johnny, don’t forget to dot your crags). Some hills or mountains are ripped in two, gigantic faults splitting them apart. I have taken this train route a number of times and will never tire of it. It conjures up the image of the Mona Lisa, sitting for her portrait among the craggy hills of this part of the world.

At last we arrive in Florence, a mere twenty one hours after having taken off from Washington, D.C. we are somewhat tired, despite the naps and the shower, but we’re back in Florence, the birthplace not only of the renaissance, but of our love of Italy. It is about 5:00 in the afternoon and we have much to do, literally miles to walk, before we sleep – an appointment with our jewelry producer, renewal of our memberships to the unique and quirky dinner and social club, the Teatro del Sale, tasting a few glasses of wine at our favorite new wine bar, Coquinarius (Via delle Oche, 15r, Florence, tel. 055.23.02.153, closed Sunday night and open every other day from 9am until, as their business card says “late night”) and, of course, dinner. But today was about travel so we will end our story here. Perhaps tomorrow we will divulge some details about what took place this night, but then again we certainly will be regaling you with stories of our bicycle trip from Florence to the hilltown of Fiesole. Tune in tomorrow and if nothing is posted, please have the authorities begin searching for our bodies.

A presto,
Bill and Suzy