Saturday, September 18, 2010

Friday Night

Yesterday was my last day of school.  I knew I would enjoy myself here, but I had no idea that by the last day, I would be aching to stay in Verona, that I would spend the day lamenting, “This is the last class!  This is the last coffee break at this bar!”  I didn’t think I would have gotten so attached to the people, either.  I know that many of us, myself included, are wont to complain about social networking sites, but really, today I all I can think is thank goodness for Facebook, through which we all actually have a chance at remaining in contact.  I feel I’ve made real friends here, not just acquaintances, and I don’t want to lose them.

After class I got my certificate:


There are six levels of proficiency certification: Elementary (A1-2), Intermediate (B1-2), and Post-Intermediate/Advanced (C1-2).  I received my certificate in level C1.  Hurray!

To celebrate (and mourn) our last day in Verona, B. and I had come up with quite a social program: gelato, then a movie, then dinner, then drinks in Piazza Erbe, organized by the marvelous H., who has been living here for five months and seems to know just about everyone in town.

First stop was the Boutique del Gelato.  It was easily the best gelato I’ve had on this trip.  Even better than Grom, which was pretty excellent.


B. chose fresh almond and red currant-ginger.  I had date and cinnamon.  The proprietor, Roberto, came out for his cigarette break while we were eating, and chatted with us for a while.  About gelato, about his and B.’s mutual friend, about motorbikes. 

We met up with H. at the movie theater.  Playing that day was a little flick called Mangia Prega Ama.  Yes, dear readers—we actually went to see the movie adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat Pray Love, the first third of which is set in Rome, and we saw it dubbed into Italian.

This isn’t the place to be a move critic, so I’ll spare you a review.  But I will say that I am not at all accustomed to watching dubbed films, and it was a little weird.  The most disorienting thing was not the different language, but the different voices.  Julia Roberts, who plays the protagonist, has a very distinctive voice and an even more distinctive laugh.  I mean, come on, we all know that voice!  But whenever she opened her mouth, the voice that spoke was totally not her voice.  But she’s probably had the same Italian actress doing her voice-over work for years, so for the Italian audience that voice actually is the voice of Julia Roberts.  So strange.  And I had been very curious to see how the dubbed film would deal with the issue of the protagonist learning to speak Italian and exploring Italian culture.  It is stated explicitly that she’s American, but for example, when she visits the Balinese medicine man, he doesn’t ask her to teach him English, but to teach him “your language.”  When in Rome, her friends explain to her that this is how things are done in Rome, not in Italy generally—for example, the vocabulary of hand gestures.  But all Italians gesticulate.  Northerners, southerners, they all share a sign language that is more mutually intelligible than their various dialects.  And in the scene of the protagonist’s language lesson with an Italian friend, she’s asking him to explain phrases in Latin.  You know, because they’re in Rome.  And all the lovely things she would, in English, be saying about the luscious musicality of the Italian language—the rolling Rs and so forth—she is saying, in Italian, about Latin.  I didn’t believe for a moment that this character was so hungry to learn the meaning of stock phrases like carpe diem and amor omnia vincit.

I totally thought I could get away with being a girl traveling alone to Italy and chronicling my experiences and never mention Eat Pray Love.  But then we saw the movie and I feel compelled to talk about it, even if with a little disagio, unease.  There’s this trope, you understand—because of the success of Ms. Gilbert’s book it seems like it’s very much of our pop-cultural moment, but it’s at least a hundred years old—of the young woman who goes to Italy and discovers herself, or discovers love or pleasure or how to let go of her inhibitions, or something like that.  It’s happened to everyone from the fictional Lucy Honeychurch to the nonfictional Ms. Gilbert, and then there’s that Bertolucci film where the American chick goes to Tuscany, and a dozen others like it.  Then that dreadful movie that came out a few years ago, which took a perfectly lovely memoir about a poet’s new house, and reshaped it into one of these female-"empowerment"-self-discovery narratives (the author was in a happy, stable partnership, so of course her cinematic counterpart had to be divorced and lovelorn, because that’s all audiences want to see).  Sono stufa di queste storie!

Obviously, I have nothing against female empowerment or self-discovery.  But it bothers me that there is one major archetype of narrative that culturally (in the contemporary US at least) is assumed or expected to fit a multitude of experiences.  Someone very close to me—whom I love, and whose opinion I value enormously—said to me often as I was getting ready to leave on this trip, “You know, I have a feeling—I know this is going to be an amazing time for you.  You’re going to have an incredible experience and come back a whole new person.”  She is tremendously wise, and I have never yet heard her saying anything that has proven untrue; but her prediction for this trip, I fear, was somewhat exaggerated.  Yes, I have had an amazing time and incredible experiences.  But…I am hardly feeling like a whole new person.  I just feel like myself, only here.  I am proud of how my grasp of Italian has improved over the last weeks, but on the other hand, I see more clearly than ever how much farther I have to go before I attain anything like a deep knowledge of the language.  I was actually hoping for an intellectual epiphany, a breakthrough, a light bulb to illuminate the future path of my academic research.  But in real life, illumination doesn’t usually come in sudden brilliant flashes; it tends to build slowly, accruing in increments until we are eventually able to see more clearly where we're going.  We gather knowledge, we gather experiences, and this is what makes us who we are.  I’m a little sorry to have nothing groundbreaking to report to my dear, wise friend who hoped for a life-changing experience for me.  On the other hand, maybe others will see changes in me that I don’t see in myself, or maybe those changes have yet to become manifest.

After the movie we had dinner at la Pigna, a local eatery recommended by one of our teachers.  “The tourists don’t know about it,” she said, “and it’s typically Veronese, the kind of place we always go.”  The menu was simple, just the local classics: gnocchi, pasta with shrimp or clams, bigoli (a fresh wheat noodle shaped kind of like spaghetti) with ragù d’asino—yes, you read that right, they eat donkey in the Veneto, usually in ragù, and horse, usually in the form of a stew, though I’ve seen it in the markets as steaks and roasts, too.  Somehow pasta with "donkey sauce" doesn’t seem fit to print, and I dare you to say "donkey sauce" aloud with a straight face.  And the secondi were also typical Veneto dishes like baccalà (salt cod) and bollito misto (boiled meats with a variety of sauces).  To start we shared an antipasto of soft polenta topped with porcini mushrooms—exquisite.  H. and B. both had the ravioli with spinach and ricotta; I ordered the pappardelle with duck.  When they chose the ravioli, I admit that I thought to myself, “Oh, spinach and cheese, so predictable.”  Then I tasted one.  It was airy and supple and though it appeared light it was richly flavored, dressed simply with butter and sage.  My pappardelle were fantastic.  We didn’t have room for a secondo or dessert, but lingered over a caffè corretto (grappa).

When we finally got to Piazza Erbe, our crowd was packed around a full table, and by the time I left, at half-past midnight, the piazza was so full of people that you could hardly move; typical for a Friday or Saturday summer night.  We drank spritz and beer, talked and laughed, met new people, said goodbye to friends.  C. and V. walked me home so I could give them—as a gift to share with their brothers—a bottle of Prosecco which I’d bought a couple weeks earlier and hadn’t gotten around to opening.  I couldn’t carry it home with me and I didn’t want to waste it.  It was a very small way of thanking them for their hospitality.  I could have kept partying all night, thank to that after-dinner coffee, but since I’d planned to set out for Vicenza early this morning, I thought it wiser to go home.  But as I write this, a torrent of rain is coming down; it’s miserable out there, not a day for walking and being outdoors, and taxi fares between home, stations and museum would cost five times as much as the train tickets.  It looks like I’m staying in Verona today.  I fly out very early tomorrow (Sunday) morning.  I'm sorry to miss out on the Teatro Olimpico, but I will see it on my next trip.

We’d invited all our teachers to meet us for drinks but only one was able to make it, the fabulous G. who led our conversation group.  Even though we weren’t in school, we kept asking her questions about language.  As members of our party scattered homeward, C. wanted to know how to say they were “dispersing,” so we learned a new word, sparpagliarsi.

There are many truly delightful words and idioms in Italian, and one of the ones I love is trovarsi bene—literally, to find oneself well.  It is used to describe a person in a new situation or location.  Ti trovi bene al nuovo lavoro?  Do you feel comfortable in your new job?  Vi trovate bene alla nuova casa?  Do you like your new house?  Mi trovo bene a Verona: I am happy in Verona.  There are rich possibilities, were I inclined to spin them out, in the notion of “finding oneself” in a place or a situation; many of us have “found ourselves” at college, in a new city, at a fulfilling job, in a relationship, in where we live, in parenthood, in traveling, in standing still, in friendship, in solitude.  As for me, I can confidently say, Mi trovo bene a Verona; mi trovo bene in ItaliaMi sono trovata bene back home, too.  But trovarmi bene a Verona, trovarmi bene adesso e nel futuro, does not, for me at least, carry the sense of finding something new.  Trovarmi bene means finding something that may have been temporarily hidden or misplaced, but that was there all along.

Monastery

I’ve mentioned that I have some classmates who happen to be monks.  They live in the convent of San Bernardino, right around the corner from school.  And they invited a few of us to dinner at the monastery on Tuesday night.

Only B. and I were able to go that night.  I thought it would be pleasant to have dinner with friends, see the monastery, e basta.  We ended up staying until after 10pm, and it was a marvelous and memorable evening.

Our friend V. met us in front of the school at 7:30 and walked us into the convent.  C. was waiting in the first cloister and the four of us walked in together to the refectory.

I don’t know if I can explain the layout of the religious complex without a picture, but I will try.  The central building is the church of San Bernardino, built in the fifteenth century.  There are three cloisters around the church.  The first, the Cloister of St. Anthony, is the largest, and is at the entrance to the grounds; south of the church, I think.  This first cloister and the church are open to the public.  On the west side of the church are two more cloisters: toward the back (north?), the Cloister of St. Francis, which runs alongside the church, and toward the front, the Cloister of St. Bernardino, which runs alongside the first cloister.  Are you with me so far?


The first cloister is public, but to get into the other two, you have to either live there or know someone who does.  The Franciscan brothers, naturally, live around the Cloister of St. Francis.  They have their own small chapel, separate from the church, which they use for their daily prayers.  Upstairs are the dormitories, which we were of course not able to visit; downstairs, the kitchen, the refectory (dining hall), and the breakfast room.  The monastery also runs a soup kitchen, daily if I understood correctly, and two or three times a week they open up showers for the homeless.

 The brothers were just sitting down to dinner as we arrived.  C. and V. were gracious hosts and barely let us lift a finger, insisting on carrying the water and all the place settings to our table, and bringing us each our plate of pasta.

Dinner was simple but hearty, exactly as you’d expect monastery food to be.  There was, of course, pasta to start, short twisted noodles in a spicy tomato sauce with ham and black olives.  For the secondo there was an airy ham-and-cheese frittata, salad, bread, coldcuts and cheeses.  Dessert was fresh fruit and a fabulous cake, hazelnut cake layered with berry jam.  The monastery employs a cook who makes lunches and dinners Monday-Friday.  She has weekends off, so then the brothers take turns cooking.  Everyone is on his own for breakfast.

While we were eating C. asked me if I knew the technical word for a monastery’s dining hall.  I remembered that it was “refectory” (refettorio) because, I confessed, The Name of the Rose was one of my favorite novels.  Fortunately, there was no murder mystery at this Italian monastery; unfortunately, there was also no Sean Connery playing a monastic Sherlock Holmes.

After dinner, the brothers all stood—so did B. and I—and the guardian (I think that is what he's called?) said grace, and publicly welcomed us, C. and V.’s classmates from Germany and the United States, and thanked us for sharing their meal.  We in turn thanked them.  As the brothers started to clear the tables, he came over and shook hands.  So did several others who were curious about why we were studying Italian, what we thought of their home.  “Which one of you is the American?” was often the first question, which made me feel a little self-conscious, but then again, Germany is right next door but America is far away--they probably get German visitors on a regular basis, and Americans once in a blue moon.  And while most of these men will have lived in several countries by the ends of their careers, the US is not likely to be one of them.  There are only two Franciscan monasteries in the whole country, I was told, in Chicago and New York (or was it Washington?).  But I encouraged them all to visit California, if for no other reason than to visit the chain of Franciscan missions up and down the coast…including one that’s practically in my backyard.

We offered to help with the dishes—the brothers do all their own cleaning—but C. and V. gently refused and steered us into the breakfast room, where C. whipped up a couple of superb cappuccinos.  (When B. and I went to grab our purses, the boys said, don’t worry about those, we’ll come back in this room in a bit.  We both hesitated, but then realized that a monastery was probably the safest place in the world to leave one’s bag unattended.)  Another brother joined us for coffee.  We talked about the history of cappuccino.  B. and I gawked at the five-kilogram barrel of Nutella on one of the breakfast tables:


We were encouraged to have a second helping of cake, with Nutella on top.  It was ridiculously good, and rather decadent.  (I can't resist pointing out that the joys of the palate are among the few sensual pleasures allowed to those who have taken a vow of chastity.  But the monastery does not purchase luxuries even for the kitchen; the tub of Nutella, like the restaurant-quality espresso machine, was a gift.)

After more chatting and more cake and coffee, we wandered back into the refectory, now empty, and offering superb acoustics to those who, like us, loved to sing.  The problem was trying to come up with songs that all of us knew!  We thought of melodies we all knew, but no one knew the lyrics.  We all knew “Silent Night,” which we sang even though it’s nowhere near Christmas, and the four of us sang in three languages at once, English, German and Russian, none of us knowing the others’ lyrics.  I wanted to sing a medieval Tuscan hymn to San Francesco but couldn’t remember any of the lyrics past the first couple lines.  The Beatles were suggested, and Green Day.  Then someone suggested Blowing in the Wind and C. actually had a copy of the lyrics, so he went and got them and we sang it together.  I remembered the first time I learned that song; I was in sixth grade and we had to sing it in a school play.  Since then, I’ve sung it around campfires, at college parties (oh, those freshman boys and their guitars…), in the car on road trips across the state.  If someone had told my eleven-year-old self that I would one day be singing it in a Veronese monastery…

We had so much fun that the next day, we were invited back during our coffee break with two more classmates in tow.  We had more excellent cappuccinos by C., more Nutella (on biscuits—the cake was all gone), and took advantage of the daylight by taking photos.

I know it sounds like the monastery excursion was about nothing except chocolate and socializing.  That’s not really true.  As we were waiting to be picked up for dinner, B. and I wondered to each other what had made these men choose this path—there are ways to express religious faith without making it one’s sole career.  To enter a monastery, it seems, one has to cut oneself off from the world: you can’t live with your family or friends, you can’t have a private home or private anything really, you can’t have a romantic relationship, you can’t start your own family.  But once we had caught a glimpse of their life—of its rhythms, its peaceful harmony, its contemplativeness, its fellowship—I think we began to understand a little better what drew them in.  I even begin to think that I could live as a monk!  (We’ll ignore that little issue of gender.  Frankly, I don’t imagine that nuns have nearly as much fun.)  When V. asked me what I thought of my visit, I told him how much I liked the sense of community—“It’s almost like a family,” I said.  He replied solemnly, “It is a family.”

Vicenza

As with Ferrara, I had very specific reasons for wanting to go to Vicenza.  Yes, it is a beautiful city, with wonderful architecture, gorgeous art and interesting food.  More importantly for me, though, home to the Teatro Olimpico, which I wrote about in my master’s thesis and therefore absolutely had to visit.  I won’t bore you right now with a lecture on why the Teatro Olimpico is important.  I can’t promise that I won’t bore you with it later, though.

I’d mentioned at school that I was thinking of going to Vicenza on Sunday, and my fabulous friend B. suggested that we go together—she had a car, and could drive us.  Which would be fantastic, not just for the company, but because traveling by car gives so much more flexibility.  We planned to set out for Vicenza around noon, and try to squeeze in excursions to Bassano del Grappa and Marostica, where there was to be a live chess game in the castle square at 9pm: performers in full medieval dress, and the “knights” actually riding horses!  B. had heard about it from one of the American exchange students in her class, who was going with the others from her university.

A couple times on this trip I’d thought about renting a car.  The regional trains are very inexpensive, but can be slow, and then you’re tied down to schedules and stations and so forth.  There’s never the autonomy of the automobile.  But I couldn’t bring myself to do it.  For one thing, it can get expensive; I would find myself reckoning how many books I could buy for a weekend’s car rental and gas, and decide I’d rather have the books, and the time to read them on the train.  Also, I’ve never learned how to drive stick shift; I’d have to pay more and reserve farther ahead to get an automatic.  But the real reason I never thought seriously about renting a car in Italy is that I’m just plain scared to drive here!  Italian drivers operate by their own peculiar set of rules, which I’m sure makes sense to them, but is alien to me, and I’m just too much of a chicken to venture onto their roadways.

In fact, Sunday was the first time this trip that I’d been a passenger in a car other than a taxi, and the first time I’d paid any attention to directions and signage.  I was a little baffled by it all, but B. did brilliantly.

We arrived in Vicenza in the gloriously sunny midday, and ambled through the historic center, taking detours off the Corso Palladio to wander into the piazzas as we slowly wended our way toward the Teatro Olimpico.

You’re going to see the name Palladio a lot in this post, so let me give you the short-short biography: Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) was the preeminent neoclassical architect of the Renaissance, a native of the Veneto.  The streets of Vicenza are filled with Palladio buildings, and they are fantastic.  There is beautiful and interesting architecture all over Italy, but Vicenza, with its bright gleaming palazzi lining the long avenues, just might win the prize.


Along the way we saw a sign for a modern design exhibit inside a Palladian palazzo—lots of unusual and attractive objects, and I loved seeing these twenty-first century artifacts, sharp-edged or globular, stark black and white and metal with the occasional blaring neon, balanced on these massive oak tables with Baroque oil paintings fanned out along the walls behind them.  You wouldn’t think it would work, but it does.

There was an outdoor antiques market, with furniture and paintings and Venetian glassware and vintage jewelry and about a million things I wanted to take home with me if I’d had room in my suitcase or my budget.


In the middle of the Piazza dei Signori was an enormous painted wooden sculpture, resembling a fountain with a water wheel in the middle.  It is called the Rua (wheel), which was used in a procession to celebrate the day of Corpus Domini in early September.  A form of the Rua was carried in the streets of Vicenza from the fifteenth century until the twentieth; what we saw on Sunday was a reconstruction of the eighteenth-century Rua.  The original had been destroyed in WWII and the replica was made in 2007.  For two weeks after Corpus Domini, the Rua is on display in the piazza.


There also happened to be a cultural exhibition, sort of a fair of medieval arts and crafts.  The participants were all dressed in costumes.  There were booths offering snacks: grilled salame slices served in little buns (good), and apple fritters (excellent).



In others, artisans demonstrated their crafts, and everywhere, goods were for sale.


In a little gallery was a display of costumes, done in the style, we were told, of fifteenth-century Venice:


But before we got to the Teatro Olimpico, my camera batteries died!  (And they were only two days old.  Yeah, I definitely need to get a new camera.)  I didn’t know if photos would be allowed inside the theater and museum, but there was no way I could go in unprepared.  Unfortunately, it was still lunchtime and all the shops, even the tabaccherie, would be closed until 3:30.  So B. and I turned back up the Corso Palladio, visited the beautiful Duomo and had a lovely, leisurely coffee until the stores reopened.  But after I got my batteries I was distracted by more photo opportunities—now there were whole parades of Vicenza’s citizens in fifteenth-century costume!  There were teenagers carrying banners and drums, adults dressed as noblemen and women (mostly men). 


There were still the folks working the fair booths.  In the courtyard of a palazzo a performer was juggling fire, I think—I was too short to see over the crowd, but whatever he was doing, there was a lot of smoke and flames and the spectators were hooked.  There was a troupe of street performers:



And there was even a band of musicians wandering around the center of town.  (Sadly, when they wandered by us I was camera-less.)  Their costumes were not so exciting, but they played period instruments, and played them pretty well.  Oddly, they played a bunch of English tunes—“Greensleeves,” “Past-time with good company”—which surprised me since there’s such a wealth of Italian music from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the whole point of this fair was to celebrate local cultural history.  But who am I to criticize?  It was fabulous to sit out in the sunshine, drinking coffee and chatting and people-watching and listening to a band play…

So fabulous, in fact, that when we finally got back to the Teatro Olimpico it had already closed for the day!  I was a little sad, but honestly, I was also a little museumed-out after the long day in Ferrara, so I didn’t mind.  I had one last Saturday left, the day before my flight home, and so I could make a quick trip to Vicenza that morning to see the theatre.  But I took a couple quick snaps of the exterior:


From Vicenza we took a beautiful drive to the small, picturesque town of Bassano del Grappa, which is famous for—you guessed it—grappa.  We parked facing this gorgeous church:


My guidebook, which devoted less than a page to Bassano del Grappa, did not even mention the Duomo, figuring that visitors were more interested in beverages than architecture.

Since B. was driving, she made me the designated drinker, and steered us toward Nardini, one of the premier grappa manufacturers.  The tasting room was packed, but as we edged slowly up toward the bar, we realized that pretty much everyone in there was local—hardly another tourist, a welcome surprise.  They were nearly all ordering the same thing, little tumblers of a deep brown liquid, slightly fizzy, with a lemon slice floating on top.  “What is that?” inquired B. of a customer.  “A mezzo e mezzo,” he replied, then squeezed himself through the crowd and disappeared out the door.  Half and half of what, we wondered?  Once back online, I did a little research and discovered that a mezzo e mezzo is made of equal parts Nardini Rabarbaro (grain alcohol infused with rhubarb) and Nardini Rosso (grain alcohol and sweet vermouth), topped off with soda water.

But since this was my first time, I was not going to bother with a cocktail, but take my grappa straight up.  And it actually was my first grappa.  I think I may have had it once in a caffè corretto, but you can’t taste it that way.  B. advised me to sample the riserva, aged 15 years.  So I did.  And it was wonderful.  Smooth, hot, the pale color of amber.  The location, on a bridge designed by Palladio with a stunning view of the Dolomites, didn’t hurt either.

Across the way from Nardini is the Poli Museo del Grappa.  Yes, a museum devoted to grappa.  Do you know how many kilos of grapes it takes to produce a single bottle of grappa?  I would tell you, but I forgot to write it down.  It was a boggling number, I can tell you that.  And check out these beautiful antique stills:


This one was built according to a 1565 design:


A little after 8PM we arrived in Marostica to see if we could find the other students and try to see the chess game.  I expected a public spectacle like we’d just seen in Vicenza: out in an open square where anyone could watch.  In fact, it was a formal performance.  Bleachers had been erected in the courtyard of Marostica’s imposing medieval fortress, and a temporary wall was put up so that those who hadn’t paid for their seats wouldn’t be able to see anything.  The show was nearly sold out; all that remained were floor seats, for €45 each, which was a bit much for us. B. and I would have to content ourselves with reading about it.  So we headed back to Verona and finished up the night with a delicious dinner at the best pizzeria in town. 

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Ferrara: Foodie Edition

In the square behind the Castello Estense there appeared to be a marketplace, with vendors’ stalls under white tents; naturally I wandered over to investigate.  It wasn’t a market exactly, but a fair to showcase the best of Ferrara, an afternoon program of speeches and music performances, a public dinner, and to cap it all off, a pageant to select this year’s Miss Padania.  (In case you who need to brush up on your geography, Ferrara is in the Emilia-Romagna region, in the Po valley; the Po is the longest river in Italy.  In Latin the Po is called Padanus—things that come from the Po valley are called padano, like grana padano cheese, and Padania is the area around and along the Po.  According to ancient myth, Phaethon fell into the Po after he took his dad’s chariot on a joyride, but that’s a story for another time.)

It was only noon and the fair wouldn’t be getting underway for another few hours, but a few stalls were already set up.  I caught a whiff of something seductive on the wind—something porky and savory, no mistaking it—and followed my nose to this glorious pile of deliciousness:


Garlic salame.  Oh, baby.  I go weak in the knees for every kind of garlicky sausage, from burnished maroon salametti to delectable rosy-pink saucisson à l’ail.  Even more enticing, they were produced locally in small handmade batches using organic ingredients, slow food all the way.  These hefty sausages weighed over a kilo each but cost only €10 apiece, a veritable steal, and if I had the faintest hope of being able to smuggle it home with me, I would totally have bought one…but the thought of having this gorgeous hunk of meat confiscated by customs officials was too sad for words.  Instead, I bought a small portion of a Ferrarese specialty called salama da sugo.  I’d never heard of it, and the women running the booth eagerly explained how to prepare it.  First, the sausage is made of ground pork (shoulder or some other fatty, sausage-suitable cut), guanciale, tongue and/or offal, red wine, salt, and black pepper.  It’s aged for several months and then simmered in water for many, many hours.  This is the stage at which I found it for sale, vacuum-packed in foil.  Then, the ladies instructed me, I was to boil it for thirty or forty minutes in plain water, and when it was done, slice it and serve it over a potato puree, and it would be very good, and very classic.  You could also eat the cooked sausage on bread.  The ladies were excited that I was excited, and impressed that I’d come all the way from California.  I think we chatted for almost half an hour, about food, language, and travel; they offered me complimenti on my Italian and wished me tanti auguri for my studies and travels—in bocca al lupo!

There was also a vegetable stand with some very beautiful squashes and pears and apples, and late-summer plums and tomatoes.


But then there was this perplexing object at the end of the table:


Perplexed, I asked the gentleman behind the table, “Is this a melon (melone) or a squash (zucca)?”  He replied, “It’s a cocomero, for making jam (marmellata).”

Cocomero?” I repeated blankly.  I had certainly encountered the word before, but I think that I never bothered to look it up because it looks like cucumber so I assumed that’s what it was.  I also had a vague sense that I’d seen it in Renaissance cookery texts and not much in modern Italian.  The modern Italian word for cucumber is cetriolo.  The Pocket Oxford Italian Dictionary defines cocomero as “watermelon.”  The watermelons I’ve seen in the markets have been labeled anguria.  Besides, the guy had just said it wasn't a melon.  Figuratevi.

Now, of course, I’m away from my library so I can’t look up every reference, but thanks to the Internet, I can do a little digging into this knotty nomenclature.  Since the modern dictionary wasn’t much help, I turned to John Florio’s Italian-English dictionary (1611):
“Angúria, a kind of cucumber good to eat raw.”  (I’ll spare you a long digression on why early modern people preferred to cook their cucumbers, but basically it had to do with the balance of bodily humors…humans are warm, but cucumbers are cold, so in order to not be harmful to consume they have to be heated by cooking or by the application of hot spices like black pepper.  Perfectly logical, right?)
“Cedriólo, a little Cedar-tree.  Also a little Cytron.  Also a little Coucumber.”
“Cetruólo, a little Pomecitron.”
“Cocómero, a Cucumber.  Also a Citron.”
“Mellóne, a Mellone.  Also rowels in the mouth of a horses bit.  Also a kind of play that children use in Italie.  Also a grosse-headed gull.”
“Melóne d’acqua, a Cucumber.”  (But melone d’acqua literally means “water melon”!)
“Zúcca, any kind of Gourd or Pumpion. Vsed also metaphorically for a mans head, sconce, nole pate or scull.  Also a scull or a head-piece or steele-cap.  Also a kind of wine measure of about a pottle of oures.  Also a kind of drinking-glasse.  Also a salt-box, a bottle, or a Lanthorne.  For in Italy they make such of the dried rindes of Pumpions.  Also a casting bottle for sweet water.”

Er, that was not as helpful as I’d hoped it would be.  If anything, it confused things further.  A melon is a melon and a gourd is a gourd, but cucumbers appear under a dozen names, sometimes interchangeable with citron.  Or cedar.  Seriously?

I also had access to Giacomo Castelvetro’s 1614 treatise, Brieve racconto di tutte le radici, di tutte l’erbe e di tutti i frutti che crudi or cotti in Italia si mangiano, that is, "A brief account of all the roots, vegetables and fruits that are eaten in Italy, raw or cooked."  It’s a pretty fascinating, often mouthwatering piece of work.  Anyway, here’s what he has to say about cocomeri:

De’ cedruoli o cocumeri. Nel medesimo tempo son buoni i cedruoli, che cocumeri qui chiamano, li quali, per esser essi assai freddi, seco mangiam la cipolla e ’l  pepe, e ne facciamo ancora minestre con l’uva spina o con grani d’uva accerba, né usiam noi mai i grossi e gialli per insalata, come qui usano, ma i piccioli e tutti verdi. De’ più grossi ne facciamo un buon cibo, aprendogli pel mezzo e tutto quel tenerume cavato; e con buone erbette ben tagliate vi mettiamo un uovo e pan grattugiato con cacio e olio o butiro; il tutto impastiamo e il vòto del citriuolo ne empiamo, e ad arrostire su la graticola lo mettiamo, o in una teggiuzza di terra o di rame stagnata col suo coperto lo lasciamo adagio cuocere. Vi si può ancora aggiungere pepe o spezie forti.

About cedruoli or cocumeri.  At the same time [that is, in summer] the cedruoli are good, which are called cocumeri here [that is, in England, where he wrote this, fondly remembering the veggies of his Italian boyhood], which, because they are rather cold [remember what I said about humors?] we eat together with pepper and onion.  We also make them into a minestra [kind of a thick soup] with gooseberries or with sour grapes.  Nor do we ever use the large yellow ones for salad, as they are used here, but the ones that are small and green all over.  Of the largest ones we make a good dish, opening them through the middle and taking out all the soft part inside; and with good herbs, finely chopped, we put an egg and breadcrumbs with cheese and oil or butter; we mix it all together and fill the hollow of the citriuolo with it, and we put it to roast on the grill, or we leave it to cook slowly in a covered pot of earthenware or tinned copper.  You can also add pepper or strong spices.

Well, according to Castelvetro, cocomeri and cetrioli are the same thing—cucumber.  Or maybe cetrioli are cetrioli but the English call them cocomero, which they aren't?   But this monster at the Ferrarese farm stand was clearly not a cucumber.  And honestly, it didn't much look like a melon either.

When I first did an Internet search for “cocomero,” every page I could see was about watermelon.  So then I tried “cocomero marmellata,” and I finally got something that made sense: marmellata di cocomero bianco, which is made from a pale-fleshed, pale-skinned watermelon that looks more like what I saw on the table.  The idea of watermelon jam is a little odd to me, though, I’ll admit…I’m curious to taste it.

Because the nice fruit vendors let me ask questions and take photos, I didn’t want to leave without buying something from them.  I picked a couple of beautiful red apples, which unlike most of the other fruits would be sturdy enough to survive the trip home if I didn’t eat them that day.  The proprietress was helping another customer so I patiently waited my turn and then reached to hand her the apples to weigh.  She waved me off.  “Take them!” she commanded.  But…didn’t I have to pay?  She scoffed and winked.  “Are you sure?”  I asked timidly.  She huffed goodnaturedly.  “Am I sure, she asks!  Prendi, prendi!  Mangia, mangia!” and shooed me away.

Mid-afternoon I was starting to run out of steam, so I popped into a bar for a quick coffee.  And lo and behold, I had stumbled into yet another sumptuous display of sausagey goodness:


I am pretty sure the expression “hog heaven” was coined to describe just this.

By the time I was done museum-hopping, it was late in the day and my feet felt like bricks.  So then I turned to a very important task: finding dinner!

A travel guidebook had promised a good, fairly priced meal at a wine bar called Messisbugo.  Now, really, with that name, how could I not go there?  But when I got to the address, there was no sign of it—a hip, trendy-looking bar with a hip, trendy-sounding name had taken over the space, and I didn’t trust it to have good eats.  It looked far too slick.  Messisbugo’s was the only address I’d copied down out of the guidebook, but I figured I could nose out something on my own.  It was still too early for dinner, so I wandered around the city center, reading menus and poking around, till I finally found a place that looked interesting, Cusina e Butega.  I think I would have gone in even if it didn’t look that interesting, because by then I had been on the move and on my feet for the better part of twelve hours, and I needed to sit down.  Which I did, with a glass of Sangiovese and this lovely platter of salumi and cheeses:

Clockwise from top: coppa di testa (headcheese); a kind of cheese whose name, sadly, I didn't catch, but it was very good; prosciutto di Parma; mortadella di Bologna; and salame di Ferrara, strong and garlicky and very delicious.  Center, grana padano.
It came with a basket of little bread puffs, like pizza dough cut into small squares and fried.  Decadent and wonderful.  I got to chat a bit with the barista, who had been to California and thought it was great.  Some bar snacks had already been set out, peanuts and pumpkin seeds and potato chips, but then he pulled at this huge bowl of bright yellow lupini beans and I got so excited I almost jumped out of my chair.  “Lupini!” I said.  “You know these?” he asked.  “I love them!” I replied.  So he brought me my very own little bowl.  Yum yum.  Sorry, I should say that in Italian.  Gnam gnam!


Well, all that was supposed to just be the antipasto, but I was so full of fried bread and headcheese that I couldn’t even contemplate ordering a meal.  Which was too bad, because the menu offered such temptations as quail with grapes, and roast goose with green apples, not to mention the traditional primo, a baked pasta dish called pasticcio di maccheroni.  I guess those delights will just have to wait until my next visit.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Ferrara



Saturday was my first solo excursion to a new city.  I may have gone a little overboard, leaving the house at 6:30AM and not returning till well past midnight.  When I told my classmates I was going all the way to Ferrara, they wondered why.  It’s not a major tourist destination, and it’s two to three hours by train from Verona—not even a direct train, you have to change in Bologna or Padova.  What’s so special about Ferrara?

Many things, it turns out.  While an MA student, I spent a whole semester doing an independent study on Ludovico Ariosto’s masterpiece sixteenth-century romance, the Orlando furioso.  It’s an absolutely splendid work and if you haven’t read it, you must.  Believe me, there’s nothing dusty or academic about it—it’s a rollicking adventure story, with a mad hero, knights-errant (two of whom are girls!), enchanted islands, epic battles, naked princesses sacrificed to sea-monsters, a hippogriff  (better than Rowling’s), a magic ring (MUCH better than Tolkien’s), and a trip to the moon.  There’s even a decent prose translation out there if you don’t feel like grappling with verse.  But you should definitely read it, and I should get back to my main topic.

So: The reason I mention Ariosto is because he lived and worked in Ferrara, under the patronage of the Este dukes, and as I read the poem, I began to slowly uncover the history of the city and its ruling dynasty.  But then I left Ferrara behind, and I didn’t get to take another Italian class before embarking on my thesis project, which ended up being mostly about Florence and Venice with a cameo appearance by Vicenza.  Ferrara didn’t come back on the radar until I was preparing to re-apply to grad school after a little hiatus from academia.  I was reading and translating some culinary history texts for fun and got my greedy little hands on a copy of Cristoforo di Messisbugo’s mid-16th century treatise on banquets.  Messisbugo, it turns out, had actually been the majordomo of the Este court, contemporary with Ariosto.  His treatise includes descriptions of the entertainments at the banquets: musical and theatrical performances, which turned out to be very relevant to my research interests, and, to my delight, a way for me to sneak some foodie tidbits into my academic work.  Finally, I learned that in the late sixteenth century the Este court had been the first to create positions for professional female singers, the famous concerto delle donne.  So, you see, it just so happens that Ferrara has a history of fundamental importance to my three greatest passions: literature, music, and food (with a little feminism on the side).


I left home obscenely early in the morning so I could be in Ferrara by the time the museums opened.  (Note to future travelers: Early morning regional trains run almost as fast as the high-speed trains because they make fewer stops, but at maybe a third of the cost.)  It was a beautiful day.  The historic town center is quite a short walk from the train station; I even had time to pause for a cappuccino on my way to the first stop: Ariosto’s house.


Like many museums, the Casa dell’Ariosto forbids photography, even in the gardens.  Which is a shame, because it’s quite pretty—not luxurious, but simple, open and airy.  It would make a very comfortable living space even today.  The downstairs rooms are empty; they get used for temporary exhibitions, lectures and concerts.  There is a small courtyard and beyond it a larger yard with trees and a well.  The large back room, which has a covered brick hearth, a drain in a sloping corner of the floor, and easy access to the well, must have been the kitchen.  Upstairs (the stairs and wrought-iron railing are original to the house, which was built in the early sixteenth century) are a large-ish main room, with original ceiling and red tile floor, and the two bedrooms.  One of them has oil paintings and furniture from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the other has Ariostean paraphernalia, like commemorative medals, special editions of the Furioso, and a museum guest-book signed by Giuseppe Verdi—all of these dating from the nineteenth century.  (I signed the guest book too; maybe when I’m famous they’ll put it on display.  Just kidding.)

The house was charming.  I turned back to the main road that would lead me to my next destination, the Castello Estense.

Here is the wonderful but slightly disconcerting thing about Italian cities.  You’re walking down along a broad, modern avenue, with cars whizzing by, televisions and radios blaring, neon signs inviting you to buy ice cream or coffee or lottery tickets, and then all of a sudden you look up and you are confronted by something like this:


It’s a little storybookish to talk about castles suddenly looming up in front of one, but it does happen.

Fortunately, the castle museum allowed photography!  Hooray!  (No flash, though, so some of these are a little blurry--sorry.)

Also, I must say that one thing I really loved about the castle museum was that it was extremely well organized, beautifully designed, not overcrowded; everything was well labeled, and there was tons of information all over the castle about what visitors were seeing and why it was important.  Very clean and very user-friendly--I'd venture to say the layout was the best of any museum I've seen on this trip.

The tour of the castle goes as low as the dungeons:


and as high as the rooftop gardens:


(more accurately, it goes as high as the towers, but there is a separate entrance for that, and I chose not to visit since I had such a full itinerary for the day already--I was worried I wouldn't have time for everything).

Many of the rooms had gorgeous fresco-decorated ceilings, and enormous mirrors were set up so that visitors could see the frescoes in detail:




But my favorite room, as you can well imagine, was the kitchen.  A kitchen Messisbugo himself might have worked in!  This is where the culinary magic happened:



Just imagine fires in all those ovens, a team of cooks tending those stovetops while others worked at large tables around the room...getting the picture?  Pretty extraordinary.  I'd be in heaven in a kitchen that size!

After the castle, I took a break for lunch; I’d brought a sandwich from home and I ate it under a statue of Savonarola.  I love this pose:


Next stop was the Duomo, the main cathedral.  It has a beautiful Gothic exterior:


I must confess, though, I wasn’t thrilled with the interior.  It looked to me like it had been redone in the eighteenth or nineteenth century; very ornate, luxurious, but somehow soft and unengaging, and utterly disconnected from the church façade or, for that matter, from the architectural aesthetic of the whole city.  (I looked this up after I got home and, indeed, the interior was re-painted in the eighteenth century after a fire destroyed the original artwork.)  The cathedral museum, though, was lovely, with some beautiful silver reliquaries (though I have to admit that I find relics pretty creepy…I was completely taken aback to see Ariosto’s finger on display in his house!! And don’t even get me started on Galileo’s finger in the science museum in Florence), as well as stunning vestments with intricately worked lace and painstakingly detailed embroidery done in silver and gold threads.  There was a collection of twelfth- and thirteenth-century marble statues that was really beautiful, and a stunning set of tapestries by a Flemish weaver working in Ferrara, a cycle depicting the martyrdom of St. George, the city’s patron saint.

Next stop, Palazzo Schifanoia, one of the Este court palaces.  On the way there I passed by an interesting-looking bookshop and ducked in to see what they had.  It’s called Sognalibro, “book dream,” and it was a dream of a little shop.  They had a lot of scholarly texts, used as well as new, and a lot of rare and out-of-print books.  I started poking around but, not finding what I was looking for, asked the proprietors for assistance.  I still didn’t find what I was looking for, but I found some other wonderful things, and had a great chat—being both Ferrarese and literary-minded, they knew exactly why I was looking for what I was looking for.  They even showed me, proudly, a study of Ariosto by an American scholar—“He comes here when he is in Ferrara, you know”—which I was familiar with, and would have bought if it weren’t twice as much as it would be back home!  I came away with Machiavelli’s Il Principe and Tasso’s Aminta, a little volume of dialogues and letters by Pietro Aretino, and a facsimile of the 1559 edition of Giovanni della Casa’s etiquette guide Il Galateo.  There were about a dozen more books I wanted to take home with me, but they were all too expensive or too big or both, so I settled for these four, which turned out to be a bargain, really. 

The Palazzo was another marvel (and again, sadly, no photos).  Empty, probably because the weather was so beautiful, why would anyone want to be shut up inside a museum?  During most of my visit, I was the sole visitor in a given room, and this was wonderful and leisurely.  I felt almost as if I had the palace to myself!  (And after experiencing the mad crush of tourists in Venice, a blessed relief.)  The docents were knowledgeable and happy to talk about the artwork with an interested visitor.  On the upper floor of the Palazzo is a room called the Salone dei Mesi, which is a grand hall, originally decorated with paintings of each month of the year, with their Zodiac signs, all around the walls of the room.  The last room before you get there has a nineteenth-century copy of one of the walls.  The docent gave me a lesson in the history of the room: after the Este dynasty collapsed, the Papacy took political control of Ferrara.  When Vatican officials arrived, they deemed the walls of pagan designs inappropriate, and had them covered with several layers of paint and plaster.  They underlying artwork was not rediscovered until the nineteenth century, and then an effort was made to restore it.  Two of the walls were frescoes, that is, pigment mixed in with wet plaster; those have survived mostly intact.   But on the other two the paint was applied directly to a dry wall, and it could not be recovered.  But even only half-complete, the room is stunning.

It was a fabulous day but utterly exhausting; my train left after 9PM (of course, I had to leave myself time to have dinner in town--though that's another post) and was due to get me to Verona sometime after midnight, with a change in Bologna.  Well, wouldn’t you know it, the train got to Bologna late, leaving literally two minutes for me to make my connection.  By the time I got to the signboard that listed departure platforms, the my train already had a blinking light next to it, and by the time I dashed to the platform itself, it was too late.  The next train left an hour later, at 11PM.  I was exhausted and my feet hurt and I had to sit outside in the cold--no way was I going to risk not being at the platform when my train came.  I was, to put it mildly, very grouchy.  Then the train finally showed up—and it was a sleeper car!  Obviously I had not made a reservation, and the thought of hassling my way into one of the bunks for such a short trip was too painful to contemplate.  So instead I plunked myself down in the dining car.  It was full of Germans (the train was going to Munich) and they were all drinking beer.  So I had a beer too, chatted with other passengers, and overall had a much more interesting time than I probably would’ve on my first train.  And, best of all, because there were no other stops between Bologna and Verona, it got me home at about the same time the first one would have.  Everything did indeed work out for the best...

Frutti di Mare

Les poissons, les poissons,
Hee hee hee, hah hah hah!
With the cleaver I hack them in two!
I pull out what's inside
and I serve it up fried.
God, I love little fishes, don't you?
            -- Howard Ashman, The Little Mermaid

When I was in Venice (and I’m sorry for the tease because I haven’t actually posted anything from Venice yet, but I will, really) everyone was eating spaghetti con le vongole.  It was on every restaurant menu.  We were surrounded by it.  I LOVE spaghetti con le vongole.  But I really couldn’t justify ordering it, because it’s so ridiculously easy to make.  In fact, I make it on a fairly regular basis at home, especially since clams are pretty inexpensive.  So I decided I wouldn’t have spaghetti con le vongole in Venice, but when I got back to my own kitchen in Verona, I would make it for myself.

Well, because I got a little overenthusiastic with the pasta e fagioli, I didn’t really get an opportunity to do any interesting cooking again until today, Friday.  After school I went to the market to pick up some clams.  I was SO excited for my spaghetti con le vongole, especially after eating beans for a week!  But I was disappointed to find that the market was out of clams.

I had my heart set on seafood, so I just figured I would pick something else.  Here’s the problem.  The seafood counter at my local supermarket looks like this:


It’s easy to get overwhelmed.  And when you have your mind set on cooking and eating something particular, when you can practically taste it already, and you find you can’t make that particular thing, well, it can be a little hard to adjust your thinking.

So I ended up picking things almost at random.  I made a point of only choosing critters fished in Italian waters, but beyond that, I just asked for whatever struck my fancy.

Here’s what I came home with:


I should have written down their names, which fled from my brain during the hours that elapsed between shopping and blogging.  The little fishies are called something that I think translates roughly as “mud trout.”  Each one is about as long as my index finger, and as wide as two fingers together.  The big pink shrimp are called scampi, and the long grey ones…I forget.  But aren’t they wild?  Their eyes are on their heads with teeny antennae and teeny claws, but their tails are marked with these double spots that look like eyes.  I didn’t even realize till I got them home that I was looking at them upside-down, as it were.

"Are you really going to eat me?!"
I still wanted spaghetti, but I didn’t want to put the cute little fishies in a sauce because I thought they would fall apart.  So I had the crustaceans over the spaghetti, and the fishes as a toy-sized secondo.

Here’s what went into the spaghetti, aside from the fish.  I forgot to put the olive oil in the photo, but by now it should be obvious that there’s olive oil in pretty much everything I make.


I heated up the oil and added a generous portion of chopped garlic.  Then I added a lot of wine—I mean, really a lot.  Even though I was only making one serving, I used maybe two-thirds of the bottle, and then let it reduce for a long time until I had less than a cup of liquid.  You don’t really need to use that much.  I did because when I opened the bottle, I thoughtlessly threw away the cork, so I realized too late that the wine wouldn’t keep well, and at the moment I have no one to help me drink it.  So I put most of it in the pot.  I don’t think it hurt!

When the liquid has boiled down, add the chopped (peeled, if you like) tomato.  Then the shrimp or prawns or whatever we are calling them today.  Put the lid on for about five minutes, or until the shells are dark rosy-pink and opaque.  If you don’t already know how to tell when your shrimp is cooked, I’m afraid I cannot give any more detailed instruction than that…

To serve: Take your crustaceans out of the sauce.  Throw in the chopped parsley, and toss the sauce together with your cooked spaghetti, which you have of course remembered to dose with a splash of olive oil so it doesn’t stick together as it cools.  Then plate it, and lay the shrimpies decoratively across the top.  There is no polite way to eat these critters, so don’t be shy about using your hands, and make sure you have some good crusty bread on hand to soak up all that delicious sauce.  And, by the way, I know this looks like an enormous amount of food, but in reality, each of those crustaceans contains only a bite or two of meat.  There’s just a lot of decorative packaging.


The teeny fishies were just sautéed in olive oil, salted and peppered and spritzed with lemon juice.


The meal left quite an aftermath:


At least I own up to my gluttony.