Spring has sprung here in California. It’s a bit of a cold spring, but stuff is popping out of the ground at an alarming rate. If weeds were good to eat, we could feed half of California.

That’s a new Calla Lilly we’ll sink into the soil as soon as the morning temperatures stabilize below freezing.

But you’re not interested in gardening in California, are you? No, you’d rather be sinking a shovel into the ancient soils of Umbria or learning to sort the wild edibles of Italy wouldn’t you?

Well, you can. In fact, for the money, if you’re interested in gardening and are going to be in Umbria, I’d venture to say you’d be nuts not to take a Spring Garden Workshop at the Art Monastery at Casale Santa Bridita. A more beautiful place to garden would be difficult to find, I’m guessing.

I actually don’t have to guess. I’ve been there. The picture on the right shows the little cafe (you know, called a bar in Italy) with some great views of the surrounding rural countryside.

The good news is that the workshop doesn’t cost a lot. Where are you going to get a week of experiential travel for a mere €390? With limoncello tasting. Check it out.

I like the direction archaeology is heading. It used to be that folks looked only for treasure. You found treasure in the vast palaces of the ruler. It was fun. Gold! Grants! Exhibits worldwide!

I’m one of those people for whom the powerful and wealthy hold no particular interest. I mean, can you name even one of those overcompensated Goldman Sachs wonks who brought down the entire economy by making gambling instruments out of poor people’s mortgages last time? I doubt it. They are not interesting people in the least.

Archaeologists are wising up to this view. They’re starting to bring alive the more interesting parts of the city; the brothels, the slaughterhouses, the little shops and cafes.

And now, for a price, you can join them and learn about the real folk while they do.

Yes, this morning in a flurry of twitterings, I learned from Napoli Unplugged of the Pompeii Food and Drink Project in which you pay “to explore the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, Italy, as a research participant in an ongoing noninvasive (that means no digging) study with a staff of historians, architects, and classicists.”

These kinds of experiences are quite enlightening—with prices commensurate with the degree of potential enlightenment. Yet you won’t likely get the opportunity to do this kind of thing again in your life without spending four years in school—and you’ll have takes to tell your friends that will make you the envy of your social group, even if it is only facebook.

Check out Pompeii Food and Drink Project

I’ve decided to illustrate this post with a picture of nearby Naples, where food is an art practiced not by the elite, but by your ordinary folk who talk with their hands. And believe me, it’s some of the best in the world.

Martha and I have just celebrated the wondrously arcane task of cobbling together her Italy Travel Fan Page by spending an evening listening to a cd of Italian music called Putumayo Presents: Italian Café while enveloped in the fumes pouring off a chicken roasting in a very hot oven. The swinging Italian music came from the era shortly after the war, when American musical styling gained a foothold in Italian cities, which already had a strong attachment to music and now felt a new post-war optimism, too. It was time for some “dolce vita” and this sweet life would be provided mostly by men. The music, like pizza, then made the long journey back to America thorough the likes of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, among others. I love the music on this CD.

Yes, the era spawned paparazzi, men who took snaps of celebrities from the shadows, mostly women attached to the arms of handsome and nouveau-wealthy men. It was a time of machismo. Men were in.

But something changed, maybe around the time Italy had its “economic miracle” in the 80s. The edge seems to have suddenly come off the machismo, as if we noticed all of a sudden that the prosciutto was pink and feminine, unlike the ruddy redness of the cured hams of Spain, for example.

I got thinking about the people I follow on twitter who talk about Italy with passion. Mostly women. Then, too, there are women writing books about travel in Italy for women, like Susan Van Allen in her 100 Places in Italy Every Woman Should Go (Travelers’ Tales).

Why, there’s even special parking now in the autostrada rest stops. Lady park. Nice.

Get yourself gussied up and head over to the Lady Park some day. Change is good, isn’t it? (But paper money is worth more.)

I wish they hadn’t changed the music though.

Information. Isn’t there a ton of it online? What information do I like best? Cultural information. What are people around the world doing right now? Who’s making pasta? Who’s gutting a wild bore? Who’s stuck in the subway with a live lobster making odd noises in a paper bag?

For all this, these days, we have blogs. When Martha decided to create a list of Italian blogs for Italy Travel, she didn’t want to make one of those “Top Ten Italian Blogs!” lists that people fight and whine over but create constantly, as if there was a cosmic force behind the urge.

There are just too many good blogs out there. So, she let everyone submit a blog, and then weeded out the ones that consisted of only one blog post or had pictures of naked people handling snakes. There were some surprising entries among the old favorites of mine.

For example, there’s a whole blog devoted to Artichokes in Italy. It is called, oddly enough, The Artichoke Blog. It cracks me up how they get these names. Anyway, the blog has great pictures, and is a tribute to writers who can pick a narrow topic and wow you with what they can do with it.

Anyway, if you love things Italian, you will want to check out the compilation Blogs About Italy

Did you know there’s a blog done by researchers Blogging Pompeii? You can get right down in the trenches with them, in three languages yet.

Well done.

Last Sunday night we headed over to Joe and Eddies in San Francisco. Joe and Eddies offers “Italian Cuisine” like they used to serve in the ’70s. Maybe the ’60s, too.

The thing is, we didn’t expect great, traditional “Italian” food; the draw was the rat pack impersonators, especially Matt Helm as Dean Martin (warning, “Italian” music).

Ok, so the crowd was mostly old farts our age, people who remember Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Joey Bishop, and Sammy Davis Junior with particular (or perhaps peculiar) fondness. We sat in rapt attention as “Dean” crooned the old songs, his “cigarette” glowing with LED redness while the two olives in his “Martini” seemed glued to the glass.

(I likely have used up my quota of quotation marks. When you bring back the dead, expect some virtuosity in manufacturing the “props” (oops).)

So there we were in front of some of what folks used to call Italian food. You know, huge, heaping platters of all manner of meats troweled with tomato sauce so thick you could use what’s left over for Spackle, providing your walls didn’t mind the phosphorescent redness of it.

To be sure what was in front of us was Italian-American food. Now, there’s the rub. How do you review something which, like the performers, was brought back from the dead in an interesting way?

Surely you’d never find a thick, unctuous tomato sauce redolent—NO! REEKING of—garlic in Italy. (If you’ve never been, don’t be disappointed if your taste buds don’t get assaulted by the over-concentrated fumes of such a sauce; this kinda thing is virtually unknown these days in Italy).

On the other hand, we’re not reviewing “real” or “traditional” Italian food here. We’re looking at a reproduction of what Americans did to the thought of Italian food. They jazzed it up. They boosted the flavors to “heights unknown” as some tarnished TV chef might say. It’s the characteristic that sets America apart, this idea of cramming all manner of food ingredients together until the whole shebang doesn’t just sit placidly on your tongue while you contemplate its honesty and freshness; we feel compelled to transform most food into a goddam buzzbomb going off and rattling your senses. It’s not food, it’s an experience: you can’t taste the pork ribs under that sauce, or differentiate them from the hunk of pork shoulder; blanketed by all that sauce there are simply lumps of different texture, some still with bones. But you know you’ve eaten when you’re done. So does every one else. There’s that raw garlic we love and think the Italians do, too.

So, you know what? I sorta liked it. I wouldn’t want to eat it every day. It would mangle my taste buds into a useless clot within the month. But it was honest, authentic and true to its roots. The concept was clear, unlike places like the Olive Garden, where the food advertises itself as authentic while it’s almost pure American or at least badly tarted-up Italian.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? In Italy, the cuisine is codified through social controls that allow only for the minuscule modification of traditional recipes. What I’m sayin’ is this: Italians will refuse to eat food you’ve cooked for them if you haven’t salted it right or you’ve let the gnocchi cook a half a millisecond too long. Don’t try this at home if your feelings are easily hurt.

In America, however, the sky is the limit. You can cook just about any damn thing with just about any number of other odd ingredients and folks will say, “golly, that’s, well, interesting!” They will even have a second course if you force it on them. Folks are easy.

Which is why we don’t have a national, codified cuisine. At least we don’t have one not put on our platters by immigrants anyway.

Or maybe the 70s were just a superior time when minimum wage was enough to live on and we went out in our cars with their 400 cubic inch engines just waiting to burn the tread clear offa the tires because tires were cheap and so was gas.

Those were the days, eh? No candy-ass buckling up of them seat belt thingies either.

Which reminds me of Dean Martin:

When I die I want to die peacefully in my sleep just like my father did. I don’t want to go kicking and screaming at the top of my lungs like those other people in the car he was driving.

(There are other ideas of Authenticity in Italian cuisine floating about in the web-o-sphere these days. Try: Food For Thought: Evolving Ideas About Italian Cuisine)

Tuscany is a hot, swinging place. If you were to be poking around the medieval piazze of Massa Marittima, you might come across a frescoed fountain. The fresco, made reasonably brilliant from restoration in recent times, is a harmonious composition featuring a huge tree and women below, reaching for the fruit of said tree.

How quaint, I hear you whisper, ever so softly.

Look at the tree closely though, and your puritan hackles are in danger of being raised up. The tree bears phalluses. Lots of them. Big, too.

I like the medieval, especially around the 12th and 13th centuries, when pilgrimage was rampant and sexual carvings were being hammered out in droves inside Romanesque churches along the routes. It’s so not the stuff of the 21st century.

In any case, folks close to the mural want the tree of phalluses to represent a pagan wish for fecundity, a desire that isn’t passing through the modern population of Italy like wildfire for sure. It is likely to have politics attached to it, as explained in Negative Campaigning, Medieval Style, which also has a great picture of the fresco.

And if you want to sit back and hear about Massa Marittima’s phallus tree, here’s an NPR report

Unusual fruit indeed.

One of the things I like about Italians is their public recognition of hypocritical conduct by religious figures, especially around the issues of overindulgence. It’s food all over again.

The picture to the left is a Presepe figure of a monk. It’s my favorite. Tickling him with your mouse and clicking will make him much, much bigger.

Monks, you see, are supposed to live the simple life. They often take vows of poverty and of silence. But in their Christmas cribs, Italians have a way of reflecting life as it is, not as it was supposed to be. Our monk seems to have gotten used to living the good life.

Food itself can be the vehicle for this “knowing wink” of the faithful. I was reminded of this from Serena, who writes of The Priest Stranglers, a gnocchi dish allegedly given the name gli Strozzapreti because of the fervor with which a parishioner’s gnocchi were consumed by a visiting priest, who might shove enough of the free food down his greedy gullet to choke himself to death. Sure is a more colorful name for a dish than “Spinach Dumplings with Herbs” in any case.

In America, we accept greed as part of a modern “Christianity” which seems to have been built solely around selective misreadings of Leviticus. On television, religious figures sit on golden thrones, dispensing their vindictive advice to all who can stomach it. Whatever happened to the simple life, the turning of the other cheek, the love of neighbors?

In Italy, it’s all in the gnocchi.