Sweet sorrow

We are on our way back to California, and as always I'm feeling a muddle of happy and sad. California's warmer weather will be a nice change from the 40-something temperatures in Fidenza, even if El Cerrito is hardly tropical, and I'll be glad to see our friends and reconnect with my aqua aerobics pals, my chamber music community, and my zumba posse. And it will be great to again be able to express myself like a functioning adult on pretty much any subject.

But there are many things I'm going to miss while on the other side of the world from Fidenza. For example:

Gelato. Gelato isn't has heavy as fatty "premium" ice cream, but it has more body and vastly more flavor than low-end ice creams. No wonder Italians eat a lot of it. There are three gelaterie on our street, including one just across from us, the Borgo dei Golosi (Village of Gluttons, a great name for a gelato purveyor).  

Eugenia dishing up a coppetta.

Eugenia, the proprietor, seems to be there about 18 hours a day, and we first started dropping in mostly out of a desire to support a hard-working local business. But during our 2021 sojourn I seem to have become addicted.  

Heaven in a cup: fondente and walnut gelato.

In particular, I'm obsessed with Eugenia's super-dark-chocolate fondente, which is almost black, not very sweet, and insanely satisfying, especially when paired with walnut or hazelnut or pistachio or amarena (sour cherry) gelato. And a 2-euro coppetta is only a third of a U.S. cup, so I can indulge without overindulging. I'm going to be thinking about Eugenia a lot over the next few months, I suspect.  

Butchers. Here I mean not Republican anti-vax politicians or rampaging white supremacists, but people in white coats who will cut meat up for you to order. Of course this exists in California, too, but it is mostly very artisanal and very pricey, whereas in Fidenza it's still the way a lot of people buy their meat as a matter of course. At the big supermarket down the street the butchers are working in the back, which isn't the same thing, but it's still exciting to see the meat counter stocked with things like rabbit, veal, guinea fowl, pork hearts, and other delectables rare or impossible to find even in foodie California.

Roast guinea fowl with potatoes at our house.

A more one-on-one experience is offered by the halal butcher near our place. We went in on a Tuesday looking for lamb, but the butcher apologized; he only gets lamb in on Friday. When we returned on Friday morning I was disappointed to see no lamb in the case. But when we asked, the butcher said, "I'll get it" and returned a moment later bearing a full lamb carcass. From which he obligingly cut up some shoulder for a stew and then ground us a couple of pounds of leg for meatballs. 

Got agnello?

That seemed almost as satisfying as raising and slaughtering the lamb myself. And the meat was very lamb-y and delicious.  

Compostable bags. Italy, like other civilized countries, is trying to cut down on plastic waste. In California the solution is to have people bring their own shopping bags, but there are still plenty of situations--takeout food, for instance--where we end up with plastic bags we wish we didn't have to deal with.

Guilt-free baggery.

In Italy, many grocery stores and takeout eateries now put your purchases in compostable bags that you can then use to collect your umido--compostable food waste--and drop into the bin. This isn't universal, but it's much more widespread than in California. I hope we in the U.S. catch up to this trend and that this will soon be something I no longer have to wax nostalgic about. 

Italian bars  Bars in America have a louche appeal. Whether they're dives or fancy watering-holes, they are all about alcohol. Because they're sinful, American bars are hidden behind darkened windows. Bars in Italy, on the other hand, are out in the open--particularly in the pandemic era, when many have moved outdoors--and people go there to meet their friends for coffee, pastries, sandwiches, or a quick pasta lunch, as well as for wine, beer, or a cocktail. The vibe is social and relaxed and you only have to show up a few times to become a regular. 

Bar breakfast.

The prices are low for the quality offered. This morning two excellent cappuccini, a croissant, and a brioche (also excellent) came to a total of about $6.00. And in the evening, a beer, a spritz, or a glass of wine that costs $5 or $6 often comes with a free plate of little sandwiches, potato chips, or other snacks

Bar dinner.

True, the Fidenza bar scene became significantly less appealing when the weather turned cold and COVID limitations on indoor seating often meant gulping down your coffee in a plastic tent that gave only minimal protection from the icy rain outside. But I will still be sorry to go back to making my own coffee rather than strolling across the street for a cappuccino with a heart etched in the foam.

Pasta. After three months in Fidenza, Danny says he's sick of pasta. I'm not. If anything, the opposite.  Spaghetti, penne, lasagna, and so on are hardly rarities in the United States, but the omnipresence of pasta in Italy delights me on a daily basis.

Pretty much every restaurant except the kebab places serves it (the kebaberies offer pizza but not noodles), and when I walk around town I see one menu board after another offering tagliatelle with mushrooms, gnocchi with gorgonzola, and dozens of other variations on this lovely theme. In the supermarket, the pasta aisle is three times as long as it is in the U.S., with dozens of additional shapes.

Cavatelli with tomatoes and beans, Trattoria San Giorgio

Not that the pasta in Italy is always that great. Ristorante Ugolini's pasta salad of a couple summers ago (the first photo in this series), which included corn kernels and hot dogs, was an unfortunate experiment, and elsewhere I've had my share of pasta that was underdone, oversalted, or indifferently sauced. 

Orecchiette with broccoli rabe and sausage, Bar Teatro.

But still, it's pasta. And when it's good, as it often is, it's divine. When I'm in Italy, just knowing that most of the people around me eat some form of pasta every day makes me happy. 

Italian fashion. In Northern California's East Bay people are serious about dressing casually. Keen waterproof sandals, "performance" hiking pants, and fleece jackets are dress-up gear. Dirty sweatpants and dirty hair that in other settings might be symptoms of emotional breakdown are, in Berkeley and environs, proud snoot-cocking at bourgeois convention. But in Italy, or at least in Fidenza, a lot of people embrace fashion with gusto. Our street boasts more than a dozen clothing stores, including three for men, and they all change their window displays every week or so, vying with each other to come up with eye-catching combinations of colors and styles. But they are regularly outdone by the people strolling by. I cannot really do justice to this subject because I'm too much of a pussy to take people's pictures head on, but here are a few folks I've captured on the fly over the past couple of years.

Italian men are the bomb.

So are Italian women.

Especially older Italian women.

New arrivals are making the mix even more fascinating.

I spotted this pair at the San Donnino festa. I hope they'll turn up again.

This lady at the festa also caught my eye.

Her sneakers say it all.

An Italian life

Shortly before we arrived in September I learned that Marco Rossetti, the father of our friend, Debora, had passed away. Debora and I had talked about arranging for me to meet him, since I am always looking for Italians who are willing to talk to me and he, according to her, was always eager to meet new people and learn more about the world. We never got around to doing arranging that get-together, though, and I was very sad not only for Debora, who loved her father dearly, but also for my own missed opportunity. 

Marco Rossetti and Debora.

When COVID-19 first swept Northern Italy in early 2020, Marco, who was then 90 years old, was one of the thousands of older people who caught the coronavirus. Unlike most of them he survived, but his bout with the disease left him weaker, and Debora believes it hastened his death. In that sense he was one more casualty of the pandemic.

After he died Debora showed me something she wrote based on stories he'd told her about his youth, a childhood that could have taken place hundreds of years ago, so backward was rural Italy --which was most of Italy--well into the 1950s. He grew up the son of poor tenant farmers, in a house that was always dark and often bitterly cold, where there was never enough food, where there was always worry. He said the crayfish he caught in a nearby stream were often the only good things to eat. He went to school only until he was 11 years old, because he was needed at home. He grew up as hungry for learning, for culture, for knowledge of the wider world, as for bread and meat. 

Little Marco already had a big personality. 

Marco worked the fields, pushing the plow behind an old horse, blind in one eye. As a child he also raised silkworms, feeding them mulberry leaves and, when they matured, taking them to sell at the market in the closest town, riding on his bicycle with the basket of silkworms on his back. "He sat waiting for the merchants who came from distant places," Debora wrote. "Their long beards, their tightly closed black coats with collars of precious furs, their wide-brimmed hats, their deep, dark eyes. their strange and marvelous accents. The silk merchants traveled, they were educated, they were wealthy, they ate. The children who sat in their carriages had new shoes, clean shirts, and a beautiful way of speaking, of telling things." 

The silk merchants were of course Jews, and to little Marco their foreignness was something to admire, even to long for, rather than to fear. "My father was very, very curious all his life long," Debora explained. "So even when he was a child of seven or eight he was not ashamed to ask those merchants where they came from and why they had that hairstyle"--their long forelocks, cernecchi in Italian. "He admired them because of their great culture." Moreover, they were happy to talk to him because "they were as talkative as my father was." 

But then came World War II, and the market and the Jewish silk merchants disappeared. After the war so did the rural life of Marco's childhood, as little by little the country modernized. 

Unlike most of his generation, Marco stayed on the land. Women willing to marry farmers were in short supply after the war, and many other men in the Emilia's small farm towns turned to professional matchmakers to find them brides from Southern Italy. Marco wanted to marry someone more local, however. A cattle dealer who moonlighted as a matchmaker put Marco in touch with a farm family elsewhere in Emilia who had a daughter aged nearly 30--in that era almost too old for marriage. They met and within a year were husband and wife. 

Together they raised a family, and the farm did well. His landlord was the Catholic Church, which had received the land Marco worked as part of a a huge tract left to the Church by a wealthy and childless marchesa. Earlier the Church had not been a particularly charitable landlord, demanding that its tenants hand over most of what they raised. But in the postwar era the Church pursued a less feudal policy, allowing the tenants and their farms to prosper.

Down on the farm.

Debora and her brother grew up with cows, chickens, and pigs, with fields of corn and sugar beets, wheat and alfalfa, and also with clothes to wear and food to eat. Marco did not want his children to work on the land as he had. Instead they went to school and became professionals, while their father remained a tenant farmer until he was in his sixties.

In the 1990s the Church needed to sell some of its lands to raise money for an expansion of the Catholic University campus in nearby Piacenza, and Marco was able to at last buy the land he had been farming for decades. (The Catholic hierarchy didn't mind letting go of some of its holdings. Given Italy's low birth rate, chances seemed good that properties the Church sold now it would someday inherit once more. The attitude was, "Go ahead and buy it. In a hundred years we'll probably get it back again.")

By then Marco was getting too old for the hard work of farming. He leased most of the land for someone else to cultivate. Still hungry for learning, for knowledge, Marco read books, wrote poetry, eagerly sought out debate and discussion. In his later years he was a fixture at a couple of local bars, the kind of places where Italians, especially older men, like to congregate to play cards, gossip, and keep an eye on the life of the town.

Old men are as much a feature of Italian bars as espresso and spritzes.

Marco called his bar friends the "cenacolo literario." Cenacolo is a word meaning a place where people gather to drink and eat and discuss serious things (Leonardo da Vinci's famous Last Supper is known in Italy as Il Cenacolo), and it was typical of Marco's sense of humor that he liked referring to his crew of retired farmers as a "literary salon." 

The nonprofit group that sponsors one of my qi gong classes has a poem hanging on its door that made my think of Marco Rossetti and his generation of Italians, so many of whom died in the COVID pandemic's first wave. Versions of this poem are all over the internet, and it's not clear who wrote it and which is the original version. Here's my rather free translation:

The greatest generation is dying,

The ones who, without any education, educated their children.

Who, deprived of everything, taught them the most important value: dignity.

Those who suffered the most are dying.

The ones who worked like beasts,

Who were resigned to having nothing,

Are dying, after having suffered so much. 

 

After a lifetime of sacrifice and hardship 

They wanted only to grow old with dignity.

Now they are dying alone and afraid.

They are leaving without bother, 

Without a good-bye.

Marco Rossetti survived that terrible first wave of COVID-19 and did not die alone. In his last days his children were with him. Debora was holding his hand when he died. And before he passed away he was able to tell her his last wishes in detail. 

The nuns who had been cruel to him and other poor children during his few years in school, the corrupt priest who long dominated the local parish, and the Church's earlier treatment of him and other tenant farmers had long ago soured him on institutional Catholicism. So he specified: no posting of his death notice, his necrologio, at the church, no mass or saying of the rosary, no church funeral.

Necrologi are a part the Italian townscape. (Note defibrillator in background.)

Instead he wanted to be cremated and his ashes strewn at a favorite fishing spot out in the woods. And he asked that after his death Debora go to his two favorite bars and buy everyone a drink. 

His ashes did indeed end up where he wanted them. But first, on the day he died, Debora went to the two bars and gave the barista at each one 100 euros to buy a round (or two) for all Marco's friends. One put up a sign saying "FREE DRINKS TO CELEBRATE MARCO ROSSETTI'S DEPARTURE." This was how Marco wanted his friends to learn that he was gone. It was the memorial he asked for, and his daughter was happy to give it to him. 

The story of Marco Rossetti's life and his passing says so much about what Italy was and is, about the country's strengths and failings, its deep ties to tradition but also its creativity, its sorrow and its joy.

Marco with his Aunt Imelde, left, and his mother, whose name was Ballerina.

I will close with a poem that Marco wrote in 2002. He was very proud when it was published in a local newspaper. Its grammar is, shall we say, original, like the writer himself, and like him it is full of feeling. Here is my attempt at a rather free translation. 

Remembering my mother (the Devil’s Field)

by Marco Rossetti

Strange name that,

they used to say there were goblins there or something.

Lost in the woods

I almost didn't find it.

The soil is barren,

working it was hard 

when she was young, oh my mother!

All my life, being her son,

I’ve been obsessed with this memory 

when I’m absorbed and alone, 

that damned field. 

I see her lost in thought

with the curls and braids

gathered on her neck,

the sweat trickling down her forehead

her dress crumpled by so much poverty.

A knot of tears chokes me,

A cool evening breeze

feels like her caress. 

I like to think Marco would be pleased that his words, rendered in a new language (however imperfectly), are being read by people (even if only a few) all across the world. I'm grateful to Marco for the life he led and to Debora for sharing a little of him with me, and with you. 

Marco Rossetti, 1930-2021.

Low energy

Privileged snot that I am, I've never paid attention to the size of my electric bill. Even during the years when we were genuinely strapped for cash (Danny out of work, me supporting the family on a freelance writer's pittance, our kids howling for brand-name jeans and various rip-off amusements), our utility bills weren't something we worried about. And now that our golden years are being subsidized by dead parents and the U.S. government, there's even less reason to fret about what we pay per kilowatt.

In Italy, however, we're forced to think about how much power we're using. Not what we pay for it, just how many watts we're sucking out of the system. (Or volts? Amps? I have no idea.) That's because electricity here is billed based on whether you're a frugal ant or a prodigal grasshopper.

Power is much more expensive in Europe than in the United States, and Italy recently saw another dramatic jump in energy prices, despite government attempts to soften the blow to Italian consumers. According to one chart I found, electricity costs last spring were over 60 percent more per kilowatt hour in Italy than in the U.S., and that was before this fall's increases.

Because power is pricey, while average incomes are low, Italians are understandably interested in conserving. Thus the government sets when you're allowed to turn your heat on, and for how long. In Italy's northernmost regions use of heat is unrestricted, but here in Emilia-Romagna we were supposed to wait until Oct. 15 to turn our radiators on and then run them no more than 14 hours a day. After April 15, we'll need to shut them down till the following October. 

However, we were happily unaware of this rule when we snapped the heat on early in October as temperatures started dropping, and I'm still not clear if or how this regulation is enforced. Which seems very Italian.

A long history of power parsimony is also presumably why most of the stores on our street go all dark as soon as they close, and why the lights in our building's hallways are on a timer (and a short one, at that--don't lallygag when going up the stairs!). 

The store across the street is so fancy they keep their Christmas lights on all night.

The same anxiety about cost no doubt also explains why when you sign up for electricity in your new home you're offered a choice between two levels of "potenza," 3 kilowatts or 6. Choosing the lower amount means your base rate is cheaper. But it also means there is a cap on how much power you can use at any one time. And it's not on the honor system.

Since there are only two of us, and since we weren't planning to run a pottery kiln in our Fidenza apartment or mine bitcoin, we sensibly chose the lower-price option. And most of the time that works just fine for us. But every so often we are forcefully reminded that our potenza has its limits. We'll be cooking lunch while finishing up the laundry when suddenly everything turns off--the oven, the dryer, the lights. We have hit our potenza's upper limit and the juice to our whole apartment has cut off.

The first few times this happened we assumed it was a building-wide or neighborhood blackout, because why else would everything shut down all at once? But a glance our the window, and a call to our neighbor, revealed that this was our problem alone. And the solution is to go downstairs and through the courtyard to the older building that is the back half of our little condominium, feel your way down the dark stairs into the cantina, figure out which electric meter is yours, and flip the switch to turn the power back on. 

This way to the cantina.

You'd think we would quickly learn how to avoid this rather dramatic nuisance, but whenever we return here from the free-flowing energy paradise of California we apparently have to relearn all over again which combinations of appliances will cast us into darkness. The dryer and the oven are both offenders, but the induction cooktop, the microwave, and the electric kettle have sometimes been implicated. The truth is we're still not entirely sure what triggers our meter's fits of catatonia.

Guess which meter is ours? Attila, the resident cat, isn't telling.

Now we are talking about adding air-conditioning to our array of modern conveniences. In July and August the weather in Fidenza keeps getting hotter and muggier, and the same man who whines about the cool summers in El Cerrito has decided he can't endure hot summers in Fidenza. So far we've had three different climatizzazione experts come to do lengthy, loquacious surveys of the premises, and after some prodding one of them has actually coughed up an estimate. (The Republicans who are furious that American workers aren't hungry enough to take any job that's offered would have apoplexy in Italy.) This industrious fellow assures us that we'll need to up our potenza to 6 kilowatts if we intend to run the air conditioning.

It took several hours of fumbling my way through our electric company's website and then several attempts to get through to their information line to uncover the difference in price between the 3 and 6 kilowatt options. The monthly cost isn't that much more--approximately 11 euro (about $12.50) for the higher wattage, versus half that for what we have now. However, there's also a hefty 124-euro ($140) charge for making the switch, even though the electric company has to do nothing more than type in a few keystrokes in their office. 

I imagine the real surprise will be what it costs to actually run our new air-conditioning, once we get through having it installed, which promises to be a process rich in expense and inconvenience. But we're looking forward to having the freedom to cool the air in our apartment whenever we want, and as much as we want. At least until we bump into whatever the 6 kilowatt limit turns out to be. 

Various beefs

Faithful reader criticalfart will be glad to hear that the only McDonald's in Fidenza seems to have been one of the town's COVID casualties. It was located on the town's outskirts, and we'd pass by it on our way to and from some of the supermarkets we trek out to every so often for items that aren't available at the one down the street. It never seemed very busy. Now it's an empty shell.

Fidentini craving a Big Mac can still visit the chain's ritzier store at the big tourist-serving outlet mall outside of town. When I looked online to confirm that one was still open, I noticed that Italian-American food celebrity and restaurant titan Joe Bastianich has endorsed the fast-food behemoth's new range of "gli hamburger" made with Italian beef and some industrialized version of Italian cheese. I can't find any evidence that Bastianich is linking himself to McDonald's back in the USA, probably because hawking jumped-up Quarter-Pounders might tarnish the rep of his Michelin-star restaurants in New York and California.

While Fidenza proper is currently McDonald's-free--nor is there any other American fast-food franchise, as far as I know--the local kebaberies are alternative sources of low-cost, high-calorie comestibles. A few years ago we liked a kebab place down the street from us, a spot also favored by local teenagers of all backgrounds.

I don't know if I've become more picky or their food has declined, but I now find the seasoning on their doner meat off-putting (it has that "made in a chemical plant in New Jersey" quality, although I'm sure it was concocted more locally) and I'm not even sure it's actually meat or some kind of soy protein. Worst of all, they--and all the other kebab shops--now add a big handful of french fries to every sandwich.

I didn't say, "Senza patatine, per favore" quickly enough.

Until recently french fries were not a feature of Italian cuisine, but nowadays they seem ubiquitous wherever people go for cheap and satisfying. Kebab places used to all serve rice as part of their platters, but now it's always fries. And french fries are the defining topping of an  "American" pizza. (Can we sue for defamation, or is this something we deserve?) I couldn't imagine who would want to eat such a thing until I repeatedly witnessed Italians doing just that. 

I should note that my food-snob husband still likes going out for doner sandwiches, with or without fries, and looks forward to doing just that whenever my social schedule requires that he eat by himself. Why he enjoys them is one of those mysteries that keep a long-running marriage from becoming too boring, I suppose.

Speaking of meat, last weekend we finally got back to a restaurant out in the countryside that we visited with Pam and Romano some years ago. It was a country trattoria that on Sundays served a bollito misto feast, a bunch of different meats--beef, pork, veal, sausage, tongue--all simmered together. After a first course of little cheese tortelli in the broth the meats had cooked in, two young women with well-developed arm muscles came around with a big cart and carved each patron's meats of choice to order. The dining room was crowded with big multi-generational Italian families enjoying Sunday lunch. Danny ordered roast guinea fowl while the rest of us had the bollito, a decision he quickly came to regret, since the bird was (like many Italian meat courses), simple without being particularly good, while the bollito was both tastier and a lot more fun. He's been talking about going back ever since.

This time we went by ourselves, since Pam and Romano were otherwise engaged. The restaurant had changed its name, and when we got there we saw that its style had changed, too. Although the tables were farther apart (as a COVID precaution), there were still plenty of Italian families in the house. But there was now a written menu that not only listed the offerings but extolled the chef's credentials and expertise--the chef being a man and not someone's grandma--and the cart that brought the bollito misto around was now manned by a fellow wearing a dashing red-and-black chef's outfit with a very tall black toque that made him look like a Shinto priest. 

The clearest evidence that the osteria had moved from down-home to upscale came when the cart arrived at our table and the meats we chose were served to us on...square plates.

Did anyone's Italian grandma have square plates? I think not.

Clockwise from the upper left, that's veal shin, tongue, cotechino (a boiled pork sausage), beef muzzle, mostarda di frutta, a slab of ripieno (literally stuffing, a big dumpling of breadcrumbs and Parmesan boiled in the meat broth), Black Angus shoulder, and a rather gristly piece of beef belly.

Shin, tongue, muzzle, and cotechino all stand up to being boiled. The steak meat, however, was dramatically less tasty than that gigantic bistecca we had in Florence. The appeal of a bollito misto, however, has less to do with the individual items than with the variety and the condiments. At our last visit the restaurant had offered only mostarda di frutta, a traditional but genuinely strange preparation of brightly (artificially) colored, very candied fruit mixed with fiery mustard oil. It tastes like something you'd give an annoying neighbor kid on Halloween to teach him to never trust anyone ever again, yet when eaten with boiled meat it's kind of addictive. The new chef had added another traditional sauce, a tangy mix of anchovies, parsley, garlic, and olive oil, plus a bright orange salsa that tasted exactly like my very WASP-y grandmother's delicious piccalilli relish. For all I know Italian grandmothers make it, too.

It was an enjoyable if not transcendent meal, and the Guttorno we drank along with it was good, too, and our lunch wasn't too costly--they hadn't used their square plates as an excuse to triple their prices. But for us the restaurant had lost the charm of its older self. Also, since we don't have a car we took a taxi there and back, and unlike the meal, the cab fare was shockingly expensive, which made the prospect of returning to the osteria that much less appealing. 

Foreigner that I am, I'm still puzzling over whether the driver brazenly cheated us or I just don't understand how to read an Italian taxi meter. In the normal course of things here I rarely feel the vulnerable helplessness that can be so much a part of trying to live in a country where you don't speak the language very well and don't grasp all kinds of things that everyone else understands automatically. I'm grateful it has happened to us rarely and I surprised myself by how upset I was when it did. 

But not upset enough to reach for the all-American comfort of a Big Mac. Or an "American" pizza. Instead I soothed myself with a big plate of pasta. 

A visit to Firenze

When Italians elsewhere in this country hear that we live part-time in Fidenza, they often mishear (not surprising, given our non-native accents) and think we've said "Firenze." And they nod and smile; of course, where else would people from glamorous California want to be when they're in Italy? And when we correct them and say, more clearly, "No, no, Fidenza," their smiles often fade. "Fidenza? But why?" is a not untypical response.

Firenze--Florence to us English-speakers--is indeed an extraordinary city, picturesque beyond all reason, jammed with masterpieces by da Vinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli, and other household names, with stunning landmarks like the Ponte Vecchio and the famous Brunelleschi dome on every side. But the last time we visited, during a September some years ago, we swore we'd never return. The city was jammed with tourists and people trying to sell them David mugs and Botticelli scarves. We struggled along narrow streets on the city's pitifully narrow sidewalks, barely wide enough for single file, while cars, trucks, and buses ground by inches from our elbows. The lines to see the famous attractions were long, the restaurants mostly overpriced and underwhelming.

In every one of these respects Fidenza is the exact opposite of Firenze, which is one reason we love it. Thank god we have no attractions noteworthy enough for thousands of people to line up for. 

However, having mellowed somewhat with age, and realizing that Florence is only a couple of hours away by train, we decided it was time to give the birthplace of the Renaissance another chance. So last week we met up there with our friend Valerie for a mid-week excursion of a couple of days.

Probably COVID gets much of the credit for how much we enjoyed Florence this time around. The city was hardly deserted, but the line for the Uffizi was only minutes long, rather than hours, and many other things we wanted to see had no lines at all. Moreover, most of the tourists seemed to be Italian or French. If they were saying the kinds of idiotic things that tourists are often guilty of, we were spared understanding them, and hopefully they couldn't understand the stupidities we were uttering either.

My responsibilities as a blogger didn't occur to me until several days after we got back, so if you're hoping for photos of gorgeous Florentine scenery you will have to go elsewhere. But I'll do my best with the few photos I randomly took.

The first nice thing about the trip was that we could make the 125-mile trip by train. A "fast regional" train took about an hour and ten minutes to get us from Fidenza to the Bologna station. There we caught a high-speed train that covered an equal distance twice as fast. 

The "Red Arrow" train arrives in Bologna

Our total travel time of 2 hours and 25 minutes was less than it would have taken to make the trip by car, as well as considerably more pleasant. We agreed that these genuinely fast trains (up to 300 kilometers, or 186 miles, per hour) are vastly preferable to air travel: you only need to get there about 15 minutes ahead of departure, and there's no stripping for security, just a quick Green Pass check. It's shocking that high-speed trains are one of the many features of advanced civilization that the U.S. is too primitive to provide. 

Whenever I take a train here I'm surprised by how lackadaiscal they are about checking tickets. Going back and forth to Parma, I've hardly ever had anyone ask to see if I've actually paid for the trip. Even on these more expensive trains (our round-trip tickets were about $70 each) we saw a conductor only on the Bologna-to-Firenze stretch. I gather the fines for traveling without a ticket are stiff, but I wonder how many people less risk-averse than we are just take their chances.

We stayed in a nice three-star hotel (the Hotel Alba Palace) that Danny found on the internet. It was just ten minutes by foot from the Firenze train station and not much more to places we wanted to visit. Our first stop after we arrived and dropped off our bags was the Uffizi, which none of us had been to in decades because of the lines and crowds. We hadn't bothered to reserve tickets, since we'd heard there weren't many tourists, but we only had to wait about 15 minutes to get in. Once admitted, however, we were sent through a nearly endless labyrinth of windowless corridors and myriad flights of stairs--temporary measures put up, I assume, for anti-COVID traffic control--before we finally emerged into the museum proper. We didn't have it all to ourselves by any means, but we also didn't have to elbow dozens of people aside to see the pictures and read the labels. So I shouldn't complain. But the density of masterpieces was its own kind of oppressive. Room after room after room of exquisite things...it was exhausting. Even the ceilings were astounding.

Danny's bad hip had gotten too much of a workout, so he left early to go back to the hotel and give it a rest. Valerie and I soldiered on, but I took photos of a few pictures to make Danny feel bad about what he was missing, including a very nice Michelangelo:

Unfortunately there was no explanation of who the little whackamoles on the frame are.

and a couple of Caravaggios, including his "Sacrifice of Isaac," which I don't remember seeing before:

Valerie and I stopped for a snack at the rooftop cafe, which had a view of the Palazzo Vecchio and the rest of the cityscape to which my photo does absolutely no justice.

Those white things are folded-up umbrellas.

As you can see, we also had perfect weather, much warmer than up north in Fidenza.

The next morning we visited the San Marco monastery, which all three of us had been to fairly recently but were still happy to see again. It was a Dominican monastery lucky enough to have Fra Angelico as one of its inmates, and this awesomely productive monk painted scenes from Christ's Passion in each of the dozens of cells where his fellow inmates lived. 

Compared to other Florentine museums the San Marco is not terribly popular. Nor is it awash in gilding and marble, like the many palazzi that now house the city's various treasures. So when you walk the halls and peer into the cells where the monks lived and prayed beneath Fra Angelico's frescos, you can still imagine their life of silent contemplation of suffering and redemption. To me the little windows in each cell, with their crude wooden covers, evoked that asceticism.

The Medici also commissioned Fra Angelico to make a graphic-novel version of the life of Christ in a series of small, brilliantly detailed panels that originally decorated a big trunk that held hundreds of silver ex voto offerings from the devout. (More images and interesting details are available at this site: http://www.travelingintuscany.com/art/fraangelico/armadiodegliargenti.htm.) Here are some of the panels, now on display at the San Marco.

Breathtaking paintings created to glorify a chest stuffed with silver seems very on brand for Florence.

From the San Marco we moved on to the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, a recommendation of Pam's. It's a small museum filled with examples of the Florentine art of mosaic using marble and semi-precious stones. This is the kitschier side of the Renaissance, but the workmanship is astonishing and the exhibits showing how it's done made for a pleasant hour. 

That afternoon Valerie and I were heading to the Medici Chapels when we happened on the Medici-Riccardi Palace, a hulking edifice that our all-knowing friend Dana had said was worth a visit. Here the wealth, pomp, and power of Florence, and the Medici family in particular, were on display, culminating in a huge reception hall whose ceiling was frescoed in typical style with dozens of figures in colorful robes posturing gracefully and swirling up toward the heavens. Except this ceiling portrayed not the Virgin Mary's leap into the sky nor Jesus' resurrection, but the apotheosis of the Medici family as the sum of human virtues. The shamelessness of this has its own charm, I guess, and the paintings are wonderful. It's the Renaissance version of our current billionaire assholes sending themselves into space. At least the Medici and the allied Riccardi family left behind lovely things to look at.

And some not so special things, too. Not every painter in Renaissance Florence was a genius, as witness this item from the palazzo's horde. (What's with those noses?) I photographed it for my dog-loving children.

Is there a relevant Bible verse?

What made the visit more than worthwhile, though, was the family chapel. Thanks to COVID, only six people could enter at a time, and getting to see it almost by ourselves was well worth the wait. It's a small space covered with gorgeous frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli depicting the three kings' journey to Bethlehem. With their vivid colors the paintings look like they could have been finished yesterday, but their Renaissance provenance is clear from the fairytale landscape, the plump dumpling-like horses, and the crowds of pungently observed Italian faces. Of all the marvelous things we saw in Florence last week, this was the most marvelous.

Apologies to whoever on the Internet I stole this from.

Then we went on to the Medici Chapels, which are overwhelming in an entirely different way. The Chapel of the Princes, built to house the remains of various Medici, is as bombastic and excessive as Gozzoli's intimate chapel is charming. Every surface in the vast space that isn't gilded or frescoed is covered with inlays of marble and colorful stones. Some are intricate mosaics:

Less delicate expanses of stone cover the floor and walls:

Amid all the vulgarity, poor Jesus on the cross is almost unnoticeable. Ferdinando I de' Medici, at right, is clearly a much more important fellow:

In the chamber above are the famous tombs that Michelangelo designed for yet more Medici. Each of the two sarcophagi is topped by two massive figures representing Day and Night on one, Dawn and Dusk on the other, reportedly a commentary on how time "devours all things," even Medici. (Although not, so far, marbles by Michelangelo.) The kludginess of these figures annoyed me when I first saw them decades ago, and all-devouring time has not yet diminished my dislike. They're massive the way a Stalinist apartment block is, a bullying massiveness expressing anxious self-aggrandizement (or patron-aggrandizement, even worse). And then there are the breasts. Over the years I have been in a lot of locker rooms with a lot of athletic women in a state of undress, and never have I seen anyone with stuck-on titties like Michelangelo gave these ladies. They look like tumors.  

By the time we tottered away from the Medici I had that same overstuffed feeling I get from overeating, only it was my eyes and brain that felt like I'd demanded too much of them. My capacity for enjoying art museums, which used to be nearly bottomless, has shrunk along with my gastrointestinal tract's ability to process large quantities of fat and alcohol. Time may devour all things, but it's leaving me able to devour less and less of them. 

Which I was reminded of after dinner our first night in Florence, at a wonderful traditional place, Ristorante Cafaggi, another of  Dana's recommendations. We had just survived the Uffizi and were in a celebratory mood, so we ordered with abandon: a special Campari-and-prosecco cocktail followed by some fizzy vino bianco, chicken liver crostini (a Florentine specialty), fried artichokes and fried zucchini (ditto), and for me a big dish of trippa alla fiorentina, a stew of book and honeycomb tripe cooked in a tomato-based sauce. It was all wonderful and we enjoyed every mouthful. But later that night I was filled with regret as well as a lot of very rich food, and I vowed to show some restraint the next day.

Somehow I convinced myself that a simple grilled steak would be more or less spa cuisine, so while Danny chastely asked for a salad, Valerie and I ordered up yet another icon of Florentine cucina tipica, a bistecca alla fiorentina. This is a gigantic T-bone steak, cooked rare and served with nothing other than salt, pepper, and a little bread. Valerie and I exclaimed that we'd never be able to eat all this--the steak weighed in at two and a half pounds, including the bone--and then proceeded to do just that, with only a little help from Danny. Strangely, I didn't feel bad afterwards. Perhaps being in Florence was getting me used to excess.

In addition to the sights already mentioned, during our visit we perused the gold and silver jewelry on offer on the Ponte Vecchio, had a drink while admiring the surreally huge and exuberantly decorated Duomo, admired the sunset over the Arno, picked through stalls of "authentic Florentine" leather goods, and strolled through piazzas large and small. And we saw way more paintings, sculptures, and other precious things than it seems possible for one small city to have. 

In its heyday Florence was awash in money, wealth wrung from the misery of the local peasantry and unfortunates farther away, and the Medici and the other elite families couldn't spend it fast enough on building and decorating churches, tombs, palaces, and other tributes to their own importance, while trumpeting their piety and virtue. It's a distasteful spectacle, especially in our new age of extravagant inequality. And yet, and yet...Florence is beautiful and full of beautiful things, and we have those long-ago plutocrats to thank for it. For me that's an uncomfortable tension. So while Firenze was a great place to visit, I'm very glad we don't live there, not even part time.  

Meal planning

The classic Italian meal includes a primo, the pasta course; a secondo of meat; a contorno, a vegetable side; and fruit and coffee to finish. Special occasions--holidays and Sunday dinners at Nonna's house--may call for an additional antipasto of ham, salame, and cheese, fritters, little salads of meat and vegetables, and other delicacies at the beginning of the meal, and perhaps a dolce, a sweet dessert, to bring the meal to a close. 

Two of our favorite restaurants, Trattoria San Giorgio and Ristorante Ugolini, serve a pared-down version of this menu for their fixed-price lunches every weekday: a primo, a secondo, a contorno, water, wine, and a coffee, all for 12 or 13 euros, or about $14 or $15. That still seems like a lot of food (as well as terrific value). These places are full of working folks, mostly men, filling up before they get back to the job, but I've been left wondering how many Italians really eat this way all the time.

The San Giorgio menu--it's different every day.

So I started asking some of my Italian friends what their usual daily meal plan is. My sample skewed heavily older and female, but the answers were very consistent. No one eats that traditional mult-course meal on a daily basis, which didn't surprise me. But the way they do eat did. 

Breakfast (colazione) for most is coffee, or sometimes tea, and toast or one of those not-very-sweet cookies that crowd the breakfast aisle of the supermarkets here. 

Colazione di campioni.

Lunch (pranzo) was universally pasta or occasionally risotto, with a side of salad or other vegetables. Further evidence that this is standard: a lot of the bars around here offer a "Pausa Pranzo," or lunch break, with menus heavy on pasta, and I enjoy walking by and ogling the bowls of pasta their customers are tucking into. Almost always these folks aren't eating pasta with meatballs or sausages or even ragu bolognese, just a simple sauce with perhaps a few cubes of pancetta but more often no meat at all. 

Pasta at San Giorgio.

Dinner (cena), also pretty universally, is meat or fish, vegetables (the latter sometimes including boiled potatoes), and bread. This seems to be the only concentrated protein of the day, and they don't generally get to it until eight or nine at night.

In the interest of fairness, I should note that there was considerably less unanimity about la colazione than about the other meals. While no one admitted to regularly indulging in a cappuccino in the morning, which is the usual thimbleful of espresso coffee with about a third of a cup of hot milk added, a few have yogurt with fruit and perhaps some oats or nuts, or a rice cake with nut butter instead of a cookie. Eggs were never mentioned, and only one person in my unscientific survey, a young woman, has meat for breakfast, specifically ham and cheese with her toast. (Maybe this signals that younger people are eating differently, but I hesitate to generalize based on an n of one.)

 

Now I am not only an American, but an American raised on the precepts of mid-century nutrition guru Adelle Davis, whose preaching about the virtues of consuming handfuls of vitamin and mineral supplements and huge amounts of protein I followed until I was well into my thirties. When we were young, Danny and I often consumed an entire chicken at a sitting, and breakfasts of eggs, bacon, cheese, and yogurt with fruit were pretty standard. (Strangely enough, we weren't particularly fat in those days. Ah youth!) 

Two kids high on life and protein.

Although we now eat relatively normally, compared to our youthful excesses, to me a meal without some kind of serious protein still seems a little too close to starvation. (Those New York Times "main" dishes of spaghetti with zucchini, for instance.) That this whole country is running on no more than a splash of milk at breakfast and maybe a little grated Parmesan at lunch strikes me as baffling, if not alarming.  Why aren't they out cold by the time dinner and some meat finally arrive?

Years ago I started having oats or other cereal for breakfast with fruit and yogurt, plus coffee with a lot of milk, because getting a generous quotient of dairy first thing in the morning makes me feel well nurtured. So I'm not that far off from some Italians in the breakfast department, although I suspect my heaping breakfast bowl is considerably larger than what my friends are having. But at least it's not a plate of eggs, pancakes, sausages, and grits.

I haven't been interested in following suit the rest of the day, though. When we got to Italy this time Danny and I agreed that we'd try having our main meal midday and a light supper in the evening, instead of having a small lunch and a big dinner. I like this new eating pattern a lot, and we've both lost a few pounds, which is maybe why Danny isn't quite so keen on it. Be that as it may, I suppose we could have considered an inverted version of Italian meals by having meat for lunch and pasta for dinner. But as is often observed, nowhere are cultural prejudices more inflexible than in the food arena. I find myself deeply resistant to not having some kind of protein, preferably animal in origin, at every meal.

  

Therefore we usually eat something closer to the traditional Italian primo-secondo-contorno as our main meal of the day, though being Americans we throw it all on the table at once instead of graciously spacing it out. Here's documentary evidence of a recent lunch.

That's bucatini with Danny's tomato sauce upper left; I'm happy to have vegetarian pasta as long as there's meat elsewhere on the table. Also part of the spread: some young (aged 12 months) Parmesan as a table cheese, plus 24-month Parm in the grater; pickled eggplant that we bought in a store and that I don't much like; romano beans with garlic and mint from the Saturday outdoor market; prosciutto crudo and spalla cruda (raw cured ham and pork shoulder) from the Latteria downstairs, plus some salame from the supermarket; and salad, because it's against my religion to have a main meal that doesn't end with salad.  

For the record, we didn't eat all of this. It took us several days to finish off the salumi and the beans, we've still got a lot of the cheese, and the bucatini were already leftovers. And aside from the disappointing eggplant, it was all scrumptious. 

For supper that night I had a little tuna with some pickled vegetables, a piece of bread, and some vegetable minestrone. Light, but with enough animal flesh to get me through to the morning. (That's another thing that surprises me about my Italian friends' eating habits: nobody seems to eat sandwiches. So who's buying the panini I see on offer at all the bars, and when are they eating them?)

Here is yet more evidence that, whatever my citizenship documents say, I am really not very Italian, nor very willing to give up my American ways. But as I write this, I'm starting to wonder if I really need that night-time protein boost, and why I'm so prejudiced against meat for lunch and pasta for dinner. If I load up on protein during the day, easing into the evening with some carbo-loading might be both satisfying and relaxing. 

Maybe I have something new to learn from the Italians, even if I'd be turning their culinary plan a bit upside down. Maybe I'll get up my courage one of these days and give it a try.