Identification

In this post I described a statue of an astronomer in the Piazza dei Signori, but couldn't remember his name. A helpful reader sent me a reminder (grazie, Babbo!). The gentleman is Girolamo Fracastoro (ca. 1476-1553), a colleague of Copernicus and professor of logic at the University of Padua. He made some scientific contributions in the field of medicine as well as astronomy, and you can read more about him here.

When in the former Roman Empire...

…cook some classic Roman dishes for a visitor on her first trip to Italy.

One of my good friends from college (whom we’ll call "Darlingtonia" after the botanical name of one of her favorite flowers) arrived in town yesterday and the occasion called for a fabulous meal. Darlingtonia is spending her last weeks before starting grad school on a grand Mediterranean tour, in which food tourism is as strong a motivating factor as sightseeing. She won’t have time to travel as far south as Rome on this trip, so instead, I brought Rome to Verona—fittingly, given the city's longstanding nickname of “Little Rome.”

We started with an antipasto that was not particularly Roman, but was particularly good: local melon with prosciutto di Parma, and a glass of Prosecco (which, as you may already know, is produced here in the Veneto). Simple, delicious, and very refreshing in this unbearable summer humidity:

Here’s the little neighborhood shop where I’ve been buying my salumi; we went there for the prosciutto.


Every time I go in I have to exercise extreme self-restraint not to buy some of everything in the store.


Pig is beautiful.


For the primo (pasta course), we had the long-awaited bucatini all’amatriciana. I had forgotten to pick up some hot pepper, so it wasn’t perfect, but it was still good. I made up for the absence of pepper with plenty of garlic, sautéed with the guanciale:


Then add tomato purée, a little black pepper, and toss it with the bucatini. A little cheese on top, naturally (traditionally Pecorino Romano, but Parmesan was what I had on hand):


The secondo (meat course) was another Roman classic, saltimbocca. The name translates roughly to “jump in your mouth”—it’s made from ingredients that, taken individually, are rather delicate, but collude in a finished dish that is quite robust.

Take very thin veal cutlets and layer them with sage and a slice of prosciutto:


For some reason, I remembered that saltimbocca included cheese (mozzarella), so I put some in, but now that I'm doing a little research online, it seems that this is not correct. I know I've eaten them with cheese before--maybe it's an Americanism.


roll them up and send them to the frying pan:


when they are done, eat them with relish.


A complete traditional meal would have included contorni (side dishes) of green vegetables and/or potatoes, but the dishes were already rich enough, so we just had a green salad.

Many thanks to Darlingtonia for sharing her pictures--some were taken with my camera, some with hers, but on the whole hers are much better. (My digital camera is seven years old, which to me seemed perfectly serviceable--I'm not really into technology--but I didn't realize it would be quite such a creaky antique when compared to the newer models. It offers a fraction of the megapixels of the newer models, eats AA batteries like there's no tomorrow, and my biggest memory card holds "only" 80 photos. Clearly I need to go shopping for a new camera when I get home!)

Coming soon: An excursion to a Renaissance palace; food tourism; and opera!
Later: A day in the life of a foreign language student; art history field trip; Venice!!!

Truffles!

It was so hot last night that I couldn’t bear the thought of turning the stove on; I just made a salad. After our history tour I stopped back in Piazza Erbe at the same fruit-and-vegetable stand—the one at the back of the piazza, which has the largest selection and best prices, and seems to draw fewer tourists than the one near the front. I picked up another head of lettuce (salad again!), tomatoes, eggplants (to be sliced and grilled for panini), cucumber, one enormous potato, some arugula, and a few lovely tart red plums. When I went to the side with the cash register to pay, I spotted some gorgeous figs, and…a little basket of fresh black truffles! I asked the price; €30 per 100 grams. I must have looked baffled while trying to mentally convert this figure to dollars and pounds, so the vendor offered to weigh one for me. A small, light one costs about €5. That’s a whole fresh black truffle—for about $6.50. No question it would be worth trying. At that price, I can even afford to buy another one if I ruin the dish! I’ve never cooked with truffles before because they’re just too expensive (at least where I’ve seen them for sale). I didn’t buy one today because I think I need to plan ahead a little. What should I do with it? There are so many possibilities…I could use it to garnish mushroom risotto, or to infuse gently scrambled eggs; I could stuff slivers of truffle under the skin of a chicken breast and pan-roast it (this is where an oven would come in handy). But I think it’s best to keep it very simple; something with a very mild flavor so the truffle is as prominent as it can be. I will probably just cook some fresh egg pasta and toss it with a little cream or butter and shaved truffle. (By the way, the butter in my fridge was made in Parma, from the same cows that produce the milk used for Parmiggiano-Reggiano, or so the label claims. This is serious butter.)

I’m not quite enough of a hedonist to eat fettucine ai tartufi all by myself, but fortunately, there are houseguests in my near future. (Very lucky houseguests, if I may say so!)

Verona Storica

Yesterday was the first of our weekly excursions into town with the school’s resident art historian, Andrea, whose enthusiasm for his city and its history is unbounded and contagious. Today’s lesson was “Verona Romana,” a walking tour of the remains of the ancient Roman city. Here’s a little bit of what we saw:


A reconstruction of a Roman triumphal arch, that used be across the street from its present location. It was dismantled in the 19th century and reconstructed under Mussolini; the present-day structure is about thirty percent original to the Roman era, the rest is modern (you can see, for example, the difference between the ancient eroded capitol on the second column from the left, and the replica capitols on the columns flanking it). The chief architect’s inscription survives: L VITRVVIVS ARCHITECTVS, that is, the freedman of Vitruvius, architect. Vitruvius, in case you’re not up on your Roman history, was the author of a series of ten books on architecture; this arch was constructed by his former slave and pupil.

Under the arch runs a section of the original Roman road that connected Verona to Mediolanum (Milan). Look closely at the granite cobblestones and you can see the wheel ruts created by centuries of traffic:


Because I’m a total nerd I just had to take a photo of Via Valerio Catullo (Catullus Street).

The carving in the wall below it is a Medusa head from a Roman sarcophagus. Andrea told us that the women of Verona have a saying, based on their two most famous romantic heroines, Juliet and Catullus’s lover Lesbia (we’ll overlook the fact that she was not in fact Veronese, but came from a prominent Roman family): Meglio tradire di morire. That is, better to betray your lover (Lesbia’s unfaithfulness is well documented in verse) than to die for love as Juliet and Romeo did. Please don’t think me callous, but I tend to agree with these Veronese women. I have no tolerance for any degree of infidelity, but on the other hand, I have to confess that I can’t imagine a romantic love affair worth dying for. Speaking of which:


This charming plaque commemorates the spot where, supposedly, Romeo and Tybalt fought their fatal duel. It’s right across from the Porta Borsari, the Roman city gate:


All visitors to the city had to enter through this gate; the buildings on either side of it used to be guard towers, where soldiers kept a strategic eye on the comings-and-goings below. The Porta Borsari is named for the borsa (money-purse) carried by an official who questioned each visitor as to his purpose. If he was entering the city to pray at the temple, or to visit a friend or patron, he could enter gratis, but if he was going in to do business—for example, a farmer going to sell his produce in the Forum—he would have to pay a tax, which the borsari tucked away into their money bags.

I walk through the Porta Borsari almost every day, on my way two or from school. My neighborhood is in the centro storico, or the historic city center; Piazza Erbe, the big square around the corner where I buy my fruits and vegetables, is where the Forum was located two thousand years ago. Now, in addition to the market, it’s lined with shops and restaurants; the buildings cover an enormous span of architectural eras, built between the middle ages and the nineteenth century. In the center of the piazza is a fountain that in the Roman era supported a statue of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom; in the fourteenth century it was reimagined as Madonna Verona, the city personified.


Just behind Piazza Erbe is the Piazza dei Signori, which I’ve also heard referred to as Piazza Dante, because of this lovely statue:


Just behind our Florentine friend, you can see a statue of a man carrying a sphere, standing on top of an arch. That’s a portrait of a Veronese astronomer whose name I’m ashamed to admit I’ve already forgotten. Since the statue was erected, legend had it that the sphere would drop from the astronomer’s hands if a truly honest person ever walked under that arch. But since last year, when Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi traipsed under there with his teenaged girlfriend, the legend has been adjusted: that sphere will never fall!

L'arte di mangiar bene

One of the hardest things about traveling is settling into an eating routine. When I’m jet-lagged I never feel that I want meals at the appropriate mealtimes. The first night in, I had a sandwich at 8:30PM (dinner in Italy, brunch in California), but woke up hungry at 3AM because now it was dinnertime back home. There was, of course, no food in the kitchen when I arrived. By the time I had met with the landlady to get the keys etc, and called home to let everyone know I’d arrived safely, it was after 8PM and the cafés were already starting to close (it was a Sunday). At the only one still open I ordered a panino of roast eggplant, Brie, and speck. It totally hit the spot after a long and tiring trip.

Breakfast was espresso—thank goodness, there was coffee and sugar in the kitchen!—and one of the granola bars I’d brought along as an alternative to airplane food. Which, believe me, was necessary. You’d think you’d be safe ordering the vegetarian meal, right? It should be next to impossible to screw up pasta with tomato sauce, right? So, so wrong. I got a tray of lukewarm penne with a texture reminiscent of dried glue, floating in a watery, sugary pink liquid that bore as little resemblance to real tomatoes as Astroturf to an Alpine meadow. Horrifying. I hadn’t had airplane food in so long I’d forgotten how bad it could be. On the other hand, Air Dolomiti served a rather delightful snack on the short hop to Verona, a mound of sweetened whipped cream topped with raspberry sauce. You read that right: a bowl of whipped cream for each passenger. I only ate a few bites; it was really too rich, but I liked the idea of it.


After school I wandered into the Piazza delle Erbe, squeezing my way past the crowd of tourists gathered around “Juliet’s Balcony.” There were vendors selling every kind of trinket from kids’ T-shirts and souvenir pencils to Pinocchio figurines and elaborately decorated Venetian carnival masks. And, as the name suggests, there’s also a small fruit and vegetable market. Here’s what I picked up:


I have a deep fondness for zucchini blossoms. I haven’t cooked any yet this summer so I was delighted to find them. And the prices were reasonable—all of this was around 3 euro. And for 22 cents I bought a gorgeous nectarine that I snacked on as I walked home. Then it occurred to me that I don’t actually know how to say “nectarine” in Italian.

After coffee break, the rest of today’s language class was spent talking about food. The teacher went around the room and asked each of us to describe a formal meal, e.g. Christmas dinner, in our homeland. Of course, my family doesn’t really do traditional American food for Christmas, so instead I talked about Lebanese food. I described a meal that started with many antipasti (i.e. meze), and tried to list the ones that were easiest on my vocabulary: “leaves of the vine with rice and meat inside, and fava beans with garlic and parsley, and little pizzas of cheese and spinach.” Then, for the main course, “chicken with rice, or little pieces of meat roasted” (how on earth do you say “shish kebab” in Italian?). “Is there a traditional dessert?” asked the teacher. “Yes, we make a pudding of flour of rice with cinnamon and there are nuts on top.” I was almost embarrassed at these garbled descriptions—how is it that I can read Dante, but I can’t describe a simple pudding?—but on the other hand, it was the longest utterance I’d been called upon to produce in Italian in about five or six years. And frankly, everyone in the room was still learning the language; I was hardly the worst off.

I am the only American in a class of seven Europeans and one South American. The rest of the conversation was fairly mouth-watering. The German students described a traditional Christmas feast of roast goose or duck or turkey (“Goose?” asked the Brazilian incredulously; “Sì… quack, quack!” responded the German by way of clarification), served with red cabbage and dumplings; the Brazilian enthused about the fresh tropical fruit juices that were always served at the end of a meal; the Dutch described a childhood breakfast treat of chocolate or sugar sprinkles on buttered toast; the Frenchman waxed rhapsodic about cheeses, which, naturally, got all of us talking excitedly about cheeses.

And then we talked about pasta.

We talked about pasta for a good thirty minutes—about dried pasta and fresh pasta, pasta made with eggs or without eggs, noodles and macaroni and stuffed pastas and hollow pastas. We learned that bavette are the same as linguine and that agnolotti is just the Piedmontese name for tortellini. We talked about the teeny pastina that goes in soups, and the difference between minestrone (mixed vegetable soup) and minestra (clear broth with pastina, children’s food). Back in Santa Cruz, I learned a grown-up version of minestra from my fabulous Sicilian landlady. It goes something like this:

Heat a lot of olive oil in a large pot. Like enough to cover the bottom of the pot, and then some. Put in a lot of chopped garlic. No, a lot of chopped garlic! You shouldn’t be able to see the bottom of the pan, that’s how much chopped garlic you need to put in. [Tip: Buy garlic in bulk, and chop it all at once and keep in your fridge packed in jars of olive oil. Then you never have to spend time chopping garlic at the last minute, because when you’re starving that’s the last thing you feel like doing.] When the garlic smells good and is turning golden, add your vegetables. Usually broccoli, but any green vegetable is good—kale, broccoli rabe, fava beans. Whatever you like, whatever’s fresh. In a separate pot heat up chicken broth, it should be boiling, and cook broken-up spaghetti noodles in it. When the noodles are cooked, carefully pour the broth and noodles into the garlic and vegetable pot. Make sure it’s really hot, stir in a couple handfuls of Locatelli cheese, and serve hot with more cheese on top. And pepper.

Our instructor also made sure we knew that there were certain pasta dishes that people make at home, but that you can’t order in a restaurant. She described pasta al burro as one of the ultimate comfort foods. You cook your macaroni, and then you toss it with equal amounts of butter and olive oil, a generous handful of grated Parmesan cheese, and black pepper. Rigatoni is best for this one because it is one of the largest types of macaroni, and the cheese gets inside the pasta tubes and it is extra delicious that way.

After all that pasta talk, I absolutely had to have pasta for dinner tonight. I kept an eye out for grocery stores on my walk home from school but didn’t see any. The school guide lists a couple of supermarkets near our campus but I didn’t get a chance to look up directions to any—that’ll be later this week, I guess. Instead, after the fruit and vegetable market, I wandered into the salumeria-formaggeria across the street from my apartment, thinking that they surely must have something I could throw together for dinner. I grabbed a bottle of nice olive oil and some excellent prosciutto cotto for sandwiches. As for pasta, well, they only had one line of fancy artisanal pastas for €3,50 per package. I recognized the brand, which is sold in fancy grocery stores at home. In what universe does a pound of dried pasta cost more than that lovely assortment of market vegetables? I decided to splurge anyway, because a) I’ve eaten it and I know it’s good, b) €3,50 is still better than $6.99, and c) I was not about to go wandering the streets in search of a better deal. I was thinking about bucatini all’ amatriciana since it had come up in class, but I balked at the price of the fancy jarred tomato sauce, which anyway seemed like a silly purchase at the height of tomato season. So I went home sans tomato sauce, but with bucatini (basically, spaghetti with a hole in the middle) and guanciale (a key ingredient in the amatriciana—kind of like bacon, only a million times better, and made from the jowls of the pig); a small wedge of Parmesan; and a sampling of gioncata (fresh cheese) because the woman in front of me bought some and it looked delicious. And two little bread rolls. And then I realized I couldn’t make an amatriciana anyway because I didn’t have access to a recipe, and it’s not a dish I know well enough to recreate without guidance.

So instead I threw together a green salad and a pasta dish that I’m calling bucatini imprevisti:

While the water for the pasta is boiling, crisp up a few slices of guanciale. (The guy at the salumeria sliced it paper-thin, and it practically melted on contact with the hot pan. Beautiful.) When crisp, set aside on a small plate to keep warm; cut the zucchini blossoms off the zucchini and place them whole in the pan. Cook a few minutes on each side until crisp. Set blossoms aside with the guanciale, add a little olive oil to the pan, and toss in the zucchini, sliced into thin rounds. By now your water should have boiled; make sure it is well salted and add the pasta. When the zucchini is browned, add about half a cup of the pasta water and reduce until thick. When the bucatini are cooked al dente, drain them, and return to the pot; drizzle in a little more olive oil so they don’t stick. Then add the zucchini and liquid, a generous sprinkling of grated Parmesan, and some ground black pepper. Toss well. Crumble in the crisped guanciale and toss again. Transfer to a warm plate; top with the zucchini blossoms and a little more Parmesan. Buon appetito!

Iam mens praetrepidans avet vagari...

iam mens praetrepidans auet uagari.
iam laeti studio pedes uigescunt.
o dulces comitum ualete coetus.
longe quos simul a domo profectos
diuersae uarie uiae reportant.
Now my mind shivers with anticipation,
Wishing to wander out into the world—
Now my eager feet are quick to move.
Farewell, my gathering of dearest friends;
Various roads will always lead us back
When we have traveled far from our homes.
--Gaius Valerius Catullus, carmen xlvi

I keep forgetting that Verona is the ancestral home of my favorite poet. Well, one of my favorite poets. My favorite Roman poet, at any rate—not counting Ovid or Vergil. Catullus is perhaps my sentimental favorite, my earliest introduction to Latin poetics, my first foray into poetry translation, my favorite source of salacious witticisms. Catullus may be best known for dirty epigrams, political jabs, and an unceasingly painful love affair with a woman he called Lesbia, but he’s far more sentimental than his reputation usually allows. His poems are populated by bitter jilted lovers, whores and corrupt politicians (one can’t always tell the difference!), but also by chirping sparrows, blushing maidens and laughing, generous friends. The most tender and loving verses, though, are those that evoke a sense of place, describing a homecoming or a departure—even the voyage to his brother’s funeral is infused with sweetness. Trace a geography of the Catullan corpus and you’ll find spokes radiating outward to the Roman provinces, but always returning to Italy, both spatially and emotionally its heart.

I landed at my sentimental favorite Roman poet’s namesake airport Sunday evening, my feet eager and my mind beyond shivery. I’ll be spending the next four weeks in Verona for an intensive language study course, and I expect I’ll be getting to know the city quite well. Already I got better acquainted with it this morning than planned—missed a turn on my way to school and walked almost a kilometer further than needed before I realized I was getting myself lost. On the way back I took the more scenic route, through Piazza Brà and around the Arena. Behind the Arena I spotted a grove of spears and pennants, a Sphinx head and miniature pyramid peeking up from behind makeshift walls: sets for the opera! Clearly the Egyptian bits belong to the Aida production, and I’m guessing the weaponry is from Il Trovatore. This is the last week of the summer season; I hope I’ll be able to see a show before it ends.



I’m subletting a darling apartment on Via Stella, which runs behind the Arena. It’s an old building, but recently renovated and very nice. And extremely secure—I need three keys to get in! It has an elevator and air conditioning, both blessings—but the air is only in the dining room, not the bedroom, and the elevator was barely big enough for me to squeeze into with my small carry-on suitcase and backpack. While crammed in there, I was congratulating myself on not having succumbed to the temptation of bringing a larger suitcase. On the other hand, even this morning I felt like complaining that I had nothing to wear… My apartment consists of a small kitchen/dining room, an amply sized bedroom, and a small, spotless, shiny-new bathroom, with dark wood fixtures against white tiles. The bathtub is absurdly small, though. I’m only 5’2” and yet to take a proper bath I would have to sit with my knees scrunched up to my chin! The kitchen is pretty well equipped—just enough pots and pans, cute mismatched tableware, cheerful linens, and a four-burner gas range. No oven, but I couldn’t stand to use one in this heat anyway. There’s also a TV that I will probably never turn on, and stereo speakers that I might use if I can figure out how to connect them to my iPod.

(this is not supposed to be sideways!)

Two angles of the view from my bedroom window. The first was taken at sunset, the next early the following morning.