If you’ve ever gone to the bank in Italy, or tried to shop, one conclusion you might come to is that the concept of the line (and certainly standing in one) has not occurred to any Italian who has ever lived on the face of the earth. (See: Non Linear Italians).
But:
Ok, so we went to the little seaside resort village of San Terenzo near La Spezia on the Golf of Poets today. Hardly anything’s been written about San Terenzo. Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley is celebrated there; he lived in Villa Magni overlooking the sea on San Terenzo’s main drag.
We had a great lunch at Ristorante La Palmira on Via Trogu, 13. I like the narrow little street with the laundry hanging over you when you eat on the little tables outside. Atmosphere, Italian style.
Here’s our primo piatto (for 2):
If this doesn’t qualify as food porn I don’t know what does. (Martha says it looks gross, but it’s wet and messy and smells like fish, so I’m still going with the porn angle) It’s three colors of lasagnette with a shellfish sauce (frutti di mare). It was very, very good. The squid ink black lasagnette are pretty dramatic, eh? A 500 ml bottle of Colle di Luni Vermentino made the whole deal even better.
What’s nice about the location is that you can park outside of Lerici and walk to San Terenzo. It’s only a couple of kilometers along the sea.
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There is nothing like a few days of bad weather-tension to unleash a giddy happiness with at the critical moment, the atmospheric dénouement that comes at the first peek of a sun thought to be lost.
You see, it seems we arrived in Italy only to spend our first two days in the rain. Out back, Enrico’s garden was a soggy mess. At night it thundered, although the thunder blended seamlessly with the canone they put out at the perifery of the polenta corn fields to blast away at the cinghiale, the wild boar crazy for corn.
Then came Sunday. The skies cleared early. Sun, glorious sun, poured in the windows.
It was time for a road trip. I loaded the cameras. Martha took the wheel. The backroads were ours.
(Ok, so they weren’t truly ours—there were other vehicles on the twisty, narrow bits of tarmac fringed by a tangle of well-fed and watered rainforest undergrowth we had chosen as our route. As we squeezed by, spooky tendrils of greenery brushed the car ever so gently.)
We headed over to the town of Fivizzano on these backroads. Then back home by another route. We were not afraid of getting lost; our car has GPS.
Such technology, we’d come to find out, wasn’t much help in the outback of Tuscany. In the Lunigiana the screen showed a tangle of roads. Unmarked. The towns were sometimes identified but the names often misspelled. Oddly, the misspellings often involved the letter “g”. Either the g was missing, or it was added to a name that didn’t naturally contain one.
Anyway, the pictures in this article came from that drive. Pretty, eh? You can tickle them with your mouse and click them and they will puff up nicely for you. Unless they disappear under your browser window, the shy little buggers…
A morning of rain after a night of rain.
There is always a rush, when we return to Italy, to get into the spirit immediately. Before even opening our front door we head to a restaurant, any decent one, to take in the Italian spirit of eating as much as to ingest the food. It’s all in the passionate voices, the hand waving, the smell of hot pasta arriving in bowls, the heat the comes in puffs as the pizzaiolo catches the edge of your quattro stagione with his crude peel and gives it a flip to rotate it on the hot stone floor of the wood-fired oven, the waitresses who scurry to fill orders…
Then shopping. A joy, even in the rain. A hundred salami, who can choose just one? Bread, “forno a legno, per favore!“ Cheap wine, then maybe a great one because you can afford it, too. Then those chicken legs that roast so well, the skin rendering its fat and transforming itself into a thin and tasty parchment wrapper, grease free—a trick American soggy, water-chilled chickens cannot learn. But you needn’t buy chicken if your cravings are fowl, there’s dark-flesh piccione, hacked pheasant, quail.
Lunch: Anchovies in green sauce, garlicky salame, torta delle erbe, a special, “Piccante” type of Gorgonzola with an exotic place of origin you’ve never heard of, fragrant bread to stack it upon.
And after lunch? The sun arrives. We are home.
I’m getting the laptop cleaned up for a trip to Italy next week and there are some left-over links to some fine articles I need to tell you about. But first let me say that fall is my favorite time to visit, from September through mid-November. I’ve found that at the end of November the weather always turns nasty in northern Tuscany. On the other hand, November is winter truffle season…
Anyway, on to the links: Did you know that the The Peking to Paris Motor Challenge passes though Italy mid-October? Before that it will pass through Turkey, and I’ll be visiting Istanbul in October.
We’ve planned a night visit to Pompeii. Should be nice. Will it be better at night? I can’t say right now, but if you sign up for our free newsletter or watch this space religiously, we’ll transmit our opinion of the Pompeii night tour.
But the question is, can technology bring Pompeii alive? The linked video might change your mind.
I’ve just discovered the American in Padua blog via this interesting article on modern bread waste in Italian supermarkets: Sacchi di pane fresco gettati nell’immodizia. Don’t worry, the article is in English. It’s a shame that supermarkets are undermining the nearly waste-free principles of la Cucina Povera, but they are. (Oh, and Tuscan bread lasts longer because it doesn’t have salt, I’ve been told. I’ve always wondered about this, as salt is usually considered a preservative, but it also dries things out).
Why can’t local groups get the bread and distribute it to the poor? I’ve never understood the all-pervasive idea that free, day-old bread makes people lust after the specter of homelessness, but that seems to be just me—and Jesus maybe, but his philosophy isn’t as nearly popular as that of Leviticus these bleak days.
In any case I can’t wait to get home to Italy. Fresh bread baked in a wood oven that you buy by weight so you can buy just what you need, non-poisonous eggs, and air-chilled barnyard chicken that when roasted offers up some parchment-thin, greaseless skin and tender, juicy flesh. Mmmm. And everyday wine that doesn’t break the bank.
Add porcini and truffles and fall sounds like foodie heaven, doesn’t it?
