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?

Today starts the thirteenth annual Parma Ham Festival, “Festival del Prosciutto di Parma. It runs through the 19th, so I hope to catch the end.

What you might not know is that there is a string of museums dedicated to food in the province of Parma called Musei del Cibo, Food Museums.

What’s interesting is that there’s a new one. “What might it be dedicated to?” I hear you ask. The tomato! It’s hard to think of what they’d put in a tomato museum, which is why I want to go.

It turns out, from reading the lit, that Parma’s place in the tomato world was in its developing industry. It was more about preserving the tomatoes, just as Prosciutto Crudo is about preserving ham.

But the other reason I want to go is that I live in little Piano di Collecchia and the museum of the Tomato is in Collecchio. I like to think of it as the masculine version of our town. I’m probably wrong.

The web site says the museum isn’t quite ready to open yet. But I have two months and I’ll bug them via email.

In any case, Collecchio has an interesting history, from early Neolithic pile-dwellings to to a city growing into a stop along the Strada Romea or Via Francigena. There seems to be lots to see there, and I don’t suppose many have heard of it.

So I’m hooked—and my curiosity further stoked by the final paragraph in the description of a place just outside of Collecchio:

In Ozzano at the Bella Foglia farm can be found the “Bosco delle Cose”, the extraordinary Museum of Agricultural Life which houses the amazing collection gathered over an entire life by Ettore Guatelli (1921-2000) which is an evocative picture of a culture and agricultural way of life which has disappeared. Today the collection is owned by a public foundation. ~ Collecchio and its environs

Who could possibly get bored with a week’s vacation in Italy?

Read about:

• Festival del Prosiutto di Parma

• The Tomato in Parma

• The Parma Food Museums

(Oh, and sign up for our newsletter below if you want to stay in touch with our meanderings.)

There, I’ve written a title that sounds journalistic. It probably won’t happen again.

German publisher Meininger has named Cantina Tollo the best cooperative winery in Europe. Cantina Tollo is in the Abruzzo.

The Abruzzo has traditionally been a place from which jugs of cheap Montepulciano d’Abruzzo came to American. Then there was yet another earthquake, then “The American” and now a cooperative winery that beats out the French, Germans, and the fine wines of Chianti and Piemonte. What next?

(Perhaps the judges were influenced by the picture in the upper left of the Cantina Tollo website. I am a pig too. I like it. A slender wine glass nestled between two of those “ample” breasts pornographers like to talk about will make me thirst any time. So sue me.)

What makes Cantina Tollo interesting is the cooperative part. In the US, the word “cooperative” is reviled, especially by the political right wing. “Nobody gonna drink no Communist wine in these states, ya hear!” Nope, we love big companies who hold sway over the population and own their senators outright and make cheap crap.

But listen up, talking about the cooperative:

The farmers own little land individually, partly because of the nature of the countryside, and partly due to family histories and external events. Every grower ekes out his existence on these small patches of ground, working all out. Here lies Cantina Tollo’s main strength : intensive care of the vineyard rests in the hands of those most concerned with the results. At the Cantina the day of the harvest is decided on area by area and grapes delivered to the Cantina. Here they are vetted load by load and sent on their way to their own pressing line. That’s how wine is made, the grapes are given the name of the wine before they are pressed, each lot being assigned its own cycle and process. The wine is subject to only physical processes as wine is a living, delicate substance that must be handled without artifice. ~ Vinitalia: Beyond the confines of the Abruzzo

Isn’t it romantic to think about “intensive care of the vineyard rests in the hands of those most concerned with the results” instead of gross profits?

Oddly, when I registered my Italian presence with the local constabulary last time in Fivizzano, the guy would only talk about the fame of Abruzzesi Earnest and Julio Gallo.

The grass is always greener…

I’ve recently had a nice twitter discussion about “the olden days” in the Cinque Terre, and it brought back memories. I was there then—thirty years ago. Nobody else who uses twitter seems to have been alive then.

(It’s amazing and somewhat disconcerting to realize that you’re old enough to have experiences nobody else has had. Pass the Geritol.)

The web doesn’t seem to have much about the history of the Cinque Terre. At least there’s nothing of any depth. It would be great fun to do an oral history of the place. You’d just pick out some grizzly old fart on a bench in Corniglia and start talking about the old days and record the whole deal. Takers?

There are some self-serving “Readers Digest Condensed Versions” of Cinque Terre history floating around the web. Rick Steves makes Cinque Terre History his own.

Translation of the piece if you don’t want to read it: A bunch of stuff happened and then I came on the scene and changed the place for good.*

I’ve read other things about the tiresome pirate attacks when the villages weren’t really connected well to the rest of Italy, and about the 20th century poverty, when folks laboring hard in the vineyards hoping for a cash crop to get them through the winter were forced to sell to buyers who had them over a barrel—as in, “you can sell cheap to me or you can let the stuff rot because nobody else is coming to your isolated and backwards village to drink this swill…”

You can just hear them spitting, can’t you?

In any case, the Cinque Terre I remember from 30 years ago used to be a very laid back place. I remember two distinct episodes. Once I was walking the trails in fall, and there were people out harvesting grapes. Men and women with grizzled and purple hands were cutting the bunches on the steep slopes and flinging them into big plastic baskets to be balanced upon the heads of eager and sturdy youths who’d take them down the trail into town.

I remember standing on the narrow dirt path, facing a line of youth laboring under these enormous loads and wondering what to do. I quickly pulled off the trail far enough to let them pass, wedging my ample form between vines and waiting. Nobody passed. I peeked out and saw the leader of the group motioning me to go ahead. I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t even figure out how the grapes didn’t fall off his head due to the fact he was motioning me forward with a free hand.

Eventually stumbling forward in my stupor over such excessive politeness I edged past the grinning troops, only later to encounter an old woman on the side of the trail with a rickety table upon which was arranged some seasonal fruit. She looked poor. I don’t remember how the poor looked that long ago, but something about her screamed poverty to me. So, given that I had no water or food, I decided to buy a couple of fruits—say they were apples, I don’t remember any more. I took a couple. She turns away. Finally, I ask “how much” in English and she answers something that seems like “whatever you think.”

Hmmm. So I get out 1000 lire, figuring that was enough. At the time it might have been about 75 cents, I dunno, but she looks at me like I’ve murdered her only child in front of her eyes, clutching at her chest like she is about to embark upon an unplanned trip to her maker. So I put out another 1000 lire.

Now she looks at me like I’ve just laid a greasy monkey wrench on her only-for-special-occasions lace tablecloth. I remember being afraid she was going to spit.

So I scrounge for another 1000 lire note. Bingo. I mean, it’s not like she’s smiling or anything, but she takes the money and I’m free to go. That’s like 4 bucks for two apples. Somehow, I think I got taken.

The odd thing is that I was probably the only person who’d had that experience that day. Hardly anyone went to the Cinque Terre. I may not even have known back then that it was named that; I had a rail pass and was just traveling up the coast, stopping when the stopping seemed good.

Things have changed, eh?

——

*You may also wish to read: Rick Steves, His Foreskin, and the Cinque Terre. It’s quite popular here.

There is a beautiful article with a stunning picture on the “it’s not you, it’s brie” blog about the ancient movement of animals along historic trails, the transhumance:

Defined as the seasonal migration or movement of humans and their livestock from lower to higher pastures in spring and summer, transhumance is when pastoral people or shepherds move with their animals to take advantage of the seasonal landscape. ~ Transhumance: What Goes up Comes Down Cheese

Kirsten goes into the reasons for this movement; she finds four of them. I think there are more.

I’ve recently written about the waning Queijo do Serra cheese industry in the Serra de Estrela mountain range of Portugal. Shepherds are not passing along the art; the cheese is becoming rare.

And each year the natural fires on the slopes get hotter and more destructive.

Oh, my! You see, sheep and goats eat that stuff, things that grow and die on the slopes. As we hunt away the natural predators and remove the animals that replaced them, the balance tilts.

Getting the sheep out into their natural habitat makes much better cheese. Folks willing to pay the bit extra for all that extra complexity of flavor also, and perhaps unwittingly, promote the environmental balance that comes from a way of raising animals that doesn’t differ much from the way they’d live naturally.

When I worked in central Sardinia, I remember the time every year when local shepherds took their sheep to the sea. It was odd because if our group went swimming, the old women would be astonished. Many of them had never been so far as the sea, less then an hour drive away. But the Transhumance was part of the fabric of the society. Shepherds gathered, told stories, drank, spread news and the sheep ate well.

Sheep-edible lants in the salt marshes near the sea brought a tang to the Pecorino cheese that makes Sardinian Pecorino some of the best. Not only that, but some elements of traditional Sardinian cuisine were naturally produced from the transhumance: the dry flatbread called “Carta di Musica” or Pane Carasau was developed to survive the long journey in saddlebags, and could be cooked like pasta or eaten like bread. Today it’s an expensive luxury food, even in Italy.

So the transhumance is an important historic event that warrants a new look at its value to today’s rural society and our own feeling of well being when we’re eating well.

Here’s a proposal. Next time you crave cheese, put down that big ‘ol orange block of industrial crap cheese and pick up a little package of Sardinian Pecorino or some other cheese born from tradition. Same price. You don’t have to eat much to be satisfied. Touch a little to your tongue. There’s a world of difference, and if it can help stop forest fires, hey, why not?

But really, read Transhumance: What Goes up Comes Down Cheese. It’s beautiful.