The most expensive cookies ever; or how to make a New Yorker happy

Apparently, there is a whole category of foods that are only found in New York city.  I'm not even talking about the foods that New Yorkers claim are only good in New York:  bagels, pizzas, hot dogs, cannoli.  They may be right on that last one.  I've had some good cannoli here (especially the version they sell at Madeleine's), but of the two sublime cannoli experiences of my life, one was in New York city, and the other came thanks to a transplanted New York Italian woman with whom I was an undergraduate. I can't remember her name for the life of me, but I sure do remember her cannoli.  I remember her saying that she formed the shells on a broom handle.  I remember the tiny dots of candied orange peel and chocolate in the ricotta.  I remember being amazed that a non-cream cheese could be used in dessert to such great effect.

I must admit, I am still skeptical about the almost mystical superiority of New York bagels.  My "in-laws" were visiting a few years ago, and headed out one Sunday morning to buy breakfast for us.  They came home with lox, cream cheese, capers, but no bagels, even though we had sent them to Huckleberries with the instructions that they had a selection of the two best bagels in town (Ultimate Bagel and Humble Bagel).  We had warned them that we knew they were not NY bagels, but that this was Spokane.  We had told them that we like to eat these bagels.  And yet, they came home bagel-free, claiming that the bagels they had seen weren't even the same species of food. They explained to us, sad that we were so deprived and ill-informed, that bagels were supposed to be boiled and baked, which they did not believe these were.  (It was unclear to me how they thought they had been made -- perhaps they had been extruded from a faeries' bum?  Wouldn't that make them better?)  So, I had high hopes when they arrived for Thanksgiving with acceptable bagels in tow, and you know what?  They really weren't noticeably different.  Perhaps slightly chewier while still maintaining a certain lightness, but I'm talking nuances of distinction, not a difference of kind.  Undoubtably I just need to go to the city and I will be converted to bagel snobbery, much the way I've been converted to pizza snobbery by Italy.

The point is that bagels exist outside of New York.  What doesn't exist outside of the city (with exceptions, mostly made by transplanted New Yorkers) are crumb cake and rainbow cookies.  Crumb cake is basically a species of coffee cake, about half cake and half crumble and almost all butter.  I found a recipe for crumb cake on-line the first summer Jeremy and I were together, and surprised him with it one Sunday morning.  It's easy to make, messy to eat, and delicious.  I have to admit that I haven't made it in a couple of years, because the crumb is made with an amount of butter that even I found frightening -- a full two sticks!

But crumb cake can be found outside of New York, if you try hard enough.  Notice the recipe I just posted actually comes from a bakery in North Carolina.  Andronico's, a supermarket chain in San Francisco, had some on the occasional Sunday.  What I have never seen before, and Jeremy says he has never seen outside the city, are rainbow cookies (also known as Italian Flag cookies).  He says they are his favorite cookies, and a special Sunday morning treat when he was growing up.  He has described the various ways to eat them in great detail.  His eyes have gotten that misty, far away look of someone remembering an irretrievable childhood experience.  So, obviously, I had at least to try to make them.

First, let me explain that "cookie" is a misnomer.  They are really small petit-fours:  three layers of dense almond cake (dyed red, white, and green with food coloring), separated by a very thing smear of raspberry jam, sliced into small rectangles and given a jacket of chocolate.  There are a number of recipes on-line, and they are all remarkably similar.  I picked this one, which was well-reviewed on Epicurious.   I followed the recipe exactly, right up to the chocolate application and cutting, so I'm only going to link to it rather than illegally claiming it as my own.  Following Jeremy's memories, after layering my cake, I sliced it, shortways, into eight logs about 1 1/2 inches wide.  I covered that in melted chocolate (it took about 8 ounces), and then sliced them about 1/2 inch thick.  It is best to slice them about an hour after you coat them in chocolate, and then keep the logs together while they set up a little more.

My first batch of rainbow cookies must be the most expensive cookies I have ever made, but not because the ingredients were all that expensive.  A full container of marzipan, a full jar of jam, and two bars of good baking chocolate isn't cheap, but the real problem was the pans.  The pans called for were an unusual size (13x9), and I needed three of them.  That is what turned these in forty dollar cookies.  On the up side, I am now equipped to make these cookies anytime I want them, assuming I have five hours to devote to them.  That's the other thing about these cookies.  They are time consuming.  No one step is that difficult, but there are many, many steps, and all of them require a cooling or resting period in-between.  So between the shopping, the baking, the construction, the slicing, it took me pretty much an entire day.

Man oh man are they worth it!  Jeremy's joy in them would have been enough, but I loved them, too.  The flavors of raspberry, almond and chocolate maintain their identity while melding together beautifully.  The cakes are dense and rich, but tender and refined.  The appearance is not so refined, but is joyful.  In short, they are my new favorite Christmas cookie (the colors are supposed to represent the Italian flag, but they are Christmas colors as well).

Turns out that a lot of people feel this way about these cookies.  There is an entire Facebook group devoted to the rainbow cookie.  When I brought some to my friend Liz, who grew up in Connecticut, she said they had been her favorite as well (her family bought them at a nearby Italian bakery).  The three of us ate the entire batch within about two days, and I've promised to make at least one more batch before Christmas.  You should, too.  Why should New York have all the fun?

Italian food worth getting excited about

If you've been reading this blog for more than a month, you know that I am something of a fan of Italian food, and something of a critic of Italian-American food.  Italian food is about simple preparation of excellent ingredients.  Produce is grown on small farms, picked ripe and sold quickly and locally, often in markets by the farmers.  Meat is either cooked very quickly, often grilled, or braised all day in a fairly simple tomato sauce.  We had a terrific secondi in Rome that was simply chicken cutlets sauteed in butter and sage.  That was it -- the entire dish had three ingredients.  I've since recreated it, and the recipe is below, and even I had to add something (mostly garlic).

Italian-American food, and I mean the kind served in restaurants, not the kind made in people's homes following their parents and grandparents recipes, seems to be about volume.  Lots of pasta, lots of sauce, endless salad bowls and breadsticks (not that I'm picking on any chain in particular).  Meat and pasta are mixed together willy-nilly.  The most amazing thing is how they can start with ingredients that have flavor, and end with dishes with no flavor at all.  I believe most Italian-American restaurants in America come standard with some large flavor sucking machine.  Otherwise, I can't explain how garlic and cheese turn into what they serve.

The scene in Spokane has been pretty bleak.  The Italian Kitchen has a standard menu, and what I've had there has been competent, but it is so expensive.  Why would I spend twenty five dollars on a plate that I could make, better, at home, in twenty minutes with a dollar or two worth of ingredients?  Luigi's is worse.  I think many of their dishes have spent a considerable amount of their extended lives in a freezer.  I won't even bother discuss the big chains, and I've already expressed myself about Cassano's restaurant, Mission Bistro.  I had a lovely meal in Coeur D'Alene at Angelo's last year, but even that was safely Italian-American.

All of this is old news.  The new news is that Italia Trattoria, in the old Cafe Marron location in Brown's Addition, is actual Italian food. I've been dragging my feet about trying this place, because I had so little hope that it would be anything but more of the same, bleak Italian-American food.  I was wrong.  The first hint that Bethe and Anna, the owners, get it comes from the menu, which is split into Antipasti, Primi, Secondi, and Contorni (side dishes), although the secondi are much more complete plates than you would find in the vast majority of restaurants in Italy.  The second hint was the food itself.  Nothing about the secondi said "Italian" -- a few sun dried tomatoes, a couple of olives here and there.  What made them Italian, really Italian, was the preparation:  simple and careful, designed to enhance the ingredients rather than mask it.

We started with a charred polpo (octopus) salad.  We first had polpo in Rome, during our first trip last summer.  There, they sliced the octopus very thinly, marinated it in lemon and salt, and served it (I think) over a few greens.  I loved it; Jeremy found it a very intense engagement with octopus.  At Italia Trattoria, the octopus has been grilled and chopped, and is served with thin sliced potatoes, parsley, sun-dried tomatoes and red onion.  It was blissful, both in terms of flavor and texture.  The octopus was chewy and warm and flavorful; the potatoes were creamy and added just a touch of substance; the parsley was fresh and bright; the sun-dried tomatoes added a surprising touch of sweetness that supported the sweetness of the octopus.  Off to a good start.

I ordered the coho salmon special.  The very fact that they had a coho salmon special speaks to the spirit of their Italian cooking.  Salmon is not an Italian ingredient.  Atlantic salmon are a cold-water fish, and much more likely to be found in northern Europe, not in the Mediterranean. But, we have delicious salmon in the Northwest, so it is very Italian to use salmon here.  On any normal night, I would have been thrilled with my dish.  The salmon was beautifully, perfectly underdone, just as I had requested it.  It came with  rich, buttery lentils.  The richness was offset by a bitter, crisp endive salad.  Wonderful.  But Jeremy's secondi was so sublime I found myself jealous.  He ordered the lamb, which was lamby and gamy and beautifully grilled.  He too had a bed of lentils, but what made his dish sing was the lemony yogurt sauce which cut through the gaminess, and the balsamic onions, which intensified the meatiness.  Our meal was rounded out by a lovely bottle of Montefalco, a red wine typical of Umbria, and a decadent chocolate almond torte for dessert.  I even celebrated with a grappa as a digestivo.  Our service was on the casual, friendly side, but highly competent, and we had two chats with Bethe, the partner handling the front of the house.

I was feeling a little down last week.  The end of daylight savings time is not a good time for Spokane.  It's dark by five, and only getting worse.  The weather has turned cold and grey.  My beloved Sapphie has been having weeks of health problems, although I think she is stabilized again.  And, I'm not in Rome, where the air is warm and the light is soft and the pasta is the way the pasta is in Rome.  I became even more down as Jeremy and I were going through our restaurant options.  There are just so few places with food that is worth the money they charge, and you can only go to the same places so many times.  But the dinner we had at Italia Trattoria last night was special:  truly thoughtful food and no restaurant missteps.  I'm excited to see what Anna will prepare next, and I want to take risks with her.  I hope she stays true to her vision, and that Spokane will support her even if she doesn't put the usual Italian suspects on the menu.

As for those usual Italian suspects, there is a spaghetti and meatballs with red sauce on the menu.  Would that be found in any but the most touristy of restaurants in Italy?  Absolutely not.  But, as Bethe said to us, if we need to have spaghetti and meatballs so that people get what they want, then they will be the best possible spaghetti and meatballs.  Bethe and Anna, I wish you the best of luck, and I'm already looking forward to my next dinner with you.  Thank you for giving me a much needed lift, and reminding me that Spokane really is a beautiful place to live.

And now, my recipe for Petto di Pollo con Burre e Salvia:

Start with two boneless, skinless chicken breasts.  Slice them on a long diagonal to form two cutlets (three if the breasts are huge).  Pound them lightly, so that they are a consistent thickness but not thin.  Dredge them lightly in flour seasoned with salt and pepper.

In a small pan, melt half a stick of butter.  Add six or so fresh sage leaves and four cloves of garlic sliced thin.  Keep on medium heat until the butter is lightly browned and the garlic is well caramelized.  Turn off the heat.

In a different large, non-stick pan, heat olive oil until it is smoking hot.  Carefully add the chicken breasts.  After about two minutes, turn.  After two minutes more, both sides should be lightly golden, and the chicken should be cooked through -- if either of these things hasn't happened, leave them in for a minute or two longer.  Put them on a plate with a couple of spoonfuls of the brown butter sauce and serve.   Now, could anything be easier than that?

Potatoes!

Early this summer, my friend Ellen (who writes a fascinating Spokane-based food blog, Ethical Eating), gave me four seed potatoes for my garden.  They didn't look like much.  In fact, they looked like garbage.  They were sprouted (which I suppose is a good thing in a seed potato) and very soft.  I can't say I had much hope for them, especially as I've never planted potatoes before.  Still, I plopped them in the ground, whole, and didn't touch them until last week.  I declare they were some of the easiest and most satisfying vegetables I've planted.  Within a couple of weeks they sent up thick, vigorous sprouts.  A few weeks after that, they flowered surprisingly pretty purple and white flowers.  Last week, I dug up all of my potato plants, and my four squishy bits of garbage turned into a bonanza of food.  I had thought that Ellen had only given me two varieties, so I was surprised to discover I had three:  a deep purple, a small white, and what looked like a red skinned potato.  The red skinned were the most prolific, giving me both the largest potatoes and the most potatoes per plant.    

I have something of a romantic attachment to potatoes.  During one of our first evenings together, Jeremy told me all about the summer he worked for a plant breeding project in the Entomology department at Cornell.  They were trying to breed a species of potato that was naturally resistant to the dreaded potato beetle without requiring being doused with pesticides.  The project lasted for years, and was a complete success, but for one small hitch.  They developed a plant whose leaves had a lot of little hairs which, when chewed, released polyphenol oxidase.  Polyphenol oxidase acted like an epoxy on the mouths of the poor hungry potato beetles, thus rendering them harmless to the plants.  It doesn't even kill the beetles.  They just spend so much time trying to cleaning themselves that they couldn't create successful potato beetle families.  Thus, there was no time for the insects even to develop resistance to the plants.   Jeremy's job was to count and sex the potato beetles used in the experiment.  I knew I was falling hard for him when two hours of stories about sexing potato beetles had kept me as riveted as any nature documentary.

The hitch, you ask?  Polyphenol oxidase turns black when you deep fry it.  They created a potato that could be grown without pesticides, but no one would buy it because you couldn't turn it into chips or fries.  

Turns out that potatoes are surprisingly interesting plants.  They are members of the deadly nightshade family, and cousins of the tomato.  Like the tomato, they were a New World crop introduced to Europe in the sixteenth century.  Just think of Italian food with no gnocchi or tomato sauce!  The part we eat is neither fruit nor root, but technically part of the stem.  There are literally thousands of different species of potatoes.  In the mountains of South America, where they were first cultivated, the farmers used a different variety for each micro-climate:  each change in elevation, each exposure on a slope, each new longitude had its own type of potato.  Just think how different that is from modern agriculture, where we develop one crop and them bulldoze, irrigate, and douse the land in pesticide until we can grow that one crop, even though that process destroys the land for long term productivity and invites the myriad problems associated with a monoculture.  This episode of Diary of a Foodie has a fascinating vignette about a Chilean woman trying to save ancient varieties of potatoes.  She finds most of her new types in cemeteries, since traditionally her people were buried with food for their next life.

The problem with my beautiful potatoes is that I had no idea how to cook them.  Different types of potatoes lend themselves to different applications.  Russets bake well, and Yukon Golds make the best mashed potatoes, (and almost everything else.  Almost every new issue of Cook's Illustrated has some potato recipe that begins with them testing all sorts of potatoes, and I think they have all ended up using Yukon Golds.)  Fingerlings are amazing roasted.  Since I was pretty sure my white potatoes were fingerlings, and because I thought that most potatoes respond well to roasting, I decided to roast some of my treasure trove.  I used my usual technique:  I cut them into large chunks and par-boiled them until about half cooked.  Then I drained them, cut them into smaller chunks, and tossed with a good deal of olive oil and salt.  Cook's Illustrated has a great tip for oven-roasting potatoes this way:  they suggest that stirring them roughly with a fork, so that the surface breaks up a little bit, leads to increased crispness.  It usually does, too.  Then, onto a cookie sheet in a hot oven for about thirty minutes, stirring occasionally, until brown and yummy.

I have used this technique countless times, with Yukon Golds, fingerlings, thin-skinned new potatoes, and it always works great.  Until this time.  They just never got crispy.  They got a little hard on the outside from all the heat and all the trying to crisp them.  They were okay, but nothing special.  Also, the browning process masked the pretty colors, so you couldn't really tell the beautiful purple potatoes were purple and not just black.  Sad.

Fortunately, I had a good number of the red potatoes left, and they were in fact far from your run of the mill red-skinned, white fleshed fellows.  Their flesh was a beautiful pink color, slightly mottled like pink marble.  So, the other night, I made pink mashed potatoes.  The color was beautiful, and they had a lovely, earthy, potato-y flavor that was definitely more pronounced than your store bought varieties have.

I love my mashed potatoes.  They aren't healthy, and I don't follow the rules, but they are rich and creamy and luscious.  I think they are a little closer to french-style mashed potatoes than what you normally find next to American meatloaf.  I begin, of course, by boiling them.  When they are very soft, I drain them extra carefully, and put them in the bowl of my KitchenAid with a good deal of butter (at least half a stick).  I use the paddle to break up the potatoes and incorporate the butter.  I know you aren't supposed to use a machine to mash potatoes.  I know the conventional wisdom says that this leads to gummy potatoes.  I don't know what to say, except that I have never, ever ended up with gummy potatoes this way.  Regardless of what method you use to mash your potatoes, I do think mixing the butter in first, before the dairy and while the potatoes are still hot, helps the final product.

Once the butter is melted and the potatoes are basically mashed, I add either half and half or cream (or milk if it is all I have) until they are basically mashed potato consistency.  Then, the secret ingredient:  a big dollop of sour cream.  It ups the creaminess without making the potatoes runny, and it gives the flavor just a little tang.  Then, lots of salt, some pepper, and often some garlic powder.  I promise, these are good enough that you don't need gravy.  I even sometimes make a meal out of them by adding chunks of other stuff:  sauteed mushrooms, bacon, different cheeses, shrimp.  Whatever you have that you think goes well together and well with creaminess.  The chef at the Heathman Restaurant in Portland back in the 90's had a whole series of mashed potato with stuff dishes that were all pretty phenomenal, and I stole the idea from him.

I saved a few of my pink beauties, hoping that they will turn all soft and sprout so that I can plant them again next year.  If you have any interesting potato varieties, perhaps we could organize a potato swap?

Partiramo domani

Tomorrow, we leave Roma.  Of course, I am looking forward to being home, seeing my cat (who has been to the vet twice since I left, poor thing), sleeping in my own bed, showering in a shower large enough that I can shave my legs without either banging my elbows or suffocating in the shower curtain, and all the other comforts of home.  But, I can't say I'm ready for this trip to be over.  Usually, I am ready to be home at the end of a long trip, but I feel like I'm only getting my Italian legs under me.  I had several good Italian interactions today:  we stopped by what we thought was a store that sold prints, only to discover it was the tiny studio of a collective of print artists.  The master printer, Frank Martinangeli, was there, and started showing us how he makes the prints, the press, the various materials he uses.  He spoke almost no English, but Jeremy and I were able to follow him just fine, and even ask some questions in Italian.  The best part was that he wasn't trying to sell us anything (although, of course, we did buy something -- how could we not, especially given that his work is very, very cool!) The image above is from the same series as the print we bought.

Then, we went back into Testacchio, to return both to Volpetti and the market, where a guy sells t-shirts with prints designed by his wife.  Jeremy had bought a t-shirt from him last week, and wanted to get another for his brother before we left.  The Testacchio market is very large, and very serious, and very not-touristy.  In fact, it is by far my favorite of the four Roman markets we visited.  Campo di Fiori is very touristy.  Trastevere is good, but quite small.  Still, I went there enough that the butcher recognized me, and even cracked a smile once or twice.  The market in Esquilino is ginormous, even compared to Testacchio, and has a lot of foreign and exotic ingredients, but feels a little like Stockton Street in San Francisco.  Testacchio market is the kind of place where traditional Italian women do their daily shopping, and probably buy most of their kitchenware and their shoes.  For some reason, there are a lot of stalls selling a lot of shoes there.  A lot. While we were there, I bought a Roma soccer scarf for my friend Pat, and the old woman manning the stall asked me if Jeremy was an actor.  I asked why, and she said it was because he was so handsome.  Then she said (roughly) "E bella, ma e pui bello!" (there should be several accents in that sentence, but I don't know where accents are in the blogspot interface).  It was a little thing, but it happened entirely in Italian, and I understood what was happening while it was happening, which certainly would not have happened at the beginning of the trip.

We went to Volpetti, and alas were not helped by the delightful Claudio, so I had to get stuff entirely in Italian.  It was basic Italian, sure, but I was able to get the prosciutto, cheese, and bread I wanted for dinner (we are going to picnic on our roof terrace with a bottle of prosecco).  Then, we had lunch at Dar Poeta, the greatest pizza I have ever tasted.  Perhaps my memory of the great Pizzaiolo in Florence is fading (Jeremy maintains that he prefers that pizza), but I think the crust at Dar Poeta is superior.  Chewy, yeasty, ever so slightly sweet, crisp on the bottom but not the usual cracker-thin Roman style, and at least some actually burnt pieces.  The toppings seem restrained by American standards, but are actually abundant by Italian standards.  We had some last week, and I wanted another one before we left.  And, the highlight was that I handled the table getting process well enough that the waitress gave me the Italian menu, and I was able to add tomatoes to Jeremy's pizza, which I count as an Italian victory.

 (Clever window display on Via Condotti -- if you can't tell, those boxers are inverted totes)

Yesterday, we went shopping in the hard core fashion district around Piazza di Spagna (the Spanish steps).  Jeremy bought an unbelievably beautiful pair of shoes.  As I tried to explain to my friend Liz, it was hard for me to act with any decorum in this store.  First of all, Jeremy bought just about the least expensive thing in the store, and it was still more than either of us have ever paid on a single item of clothing -- more even than my Fluevog boots if I hadn't gotten them on sale.  I, on the other hand, was wearing a black tank top I bought at the Rack in Spokane for less than ten dollars. I definitely felt underdressed for the store.  Second, the shoes were so incredibly beautiful I had the strongest desire to lick them.  I restrained myself, both from the licking and the buying, but I did buy some gifts for friends in the area.  I feel as if I've been fairly restrained in my shopping, but I'm still worried that I won't be able to zip my suitcase up tomorrow.  And, of course, I'm worried about getting the Perugia plate home.  Thanks for the packing tip, Laura!

All of these things make me feel as if I'm just on the verge of cracking this city, of moving beyond being just a tourist and starting to have different kinds of interactions -- meet people, find the places that aren't in the guidebook, get more out of the places I do go.  Honestly, I haven't been able to do that in the two weeks I was here, at least, not that often.  I'm only now beginning to be able to follow simple spoken Italian, and I have some confidence in my ability to communicate in Italian, if badly.  I think if we could spend a few more weeks, either in a different part of Rome or even somewhere in rural Italy . . . But, no, it is time to return to Spokane and friends and more serious writing.

It will take me a while to digest all of this trip, if I ever do.  Here, however, are random thoughts and observations haven't yet found their way into the blog:

-- Rome is a palimpset.  In America, when we are done using something, we either throw it away or preserve it in amber.  Florence has history, but it is a single layer of history.  Rome has layer on layer, and it isn't afraid to re-use and re-purpose the highlights of the past.  The Elephantino (also called the Pulcino) in front of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva is, I think, a good example.  The obelisk is Egyptian, probably 6th century BC, brought over by Diocletian in the third century AD.  He used it in his gardens.  In the 17th century, a Pope asked Bernini to create a new base for it so that it could be mounted in front of a Christian church, which itself stands over the site of a classical temple dedicated to Minerva. Legend has it that Bernini placed the butt of the elephant -- tail slightly elevated --  facing the office of one of his enemies.  Now, of course, the statue is a tourist attraction, a pit stop on the way to the pantheon.  It is because of this that I think the Capitoline wolf is such a great emblem of Rome.  Sure, it is a pre-classical Roman statue of a wolf, but did you know that the Remus and Romulus babies were added in the 17th century?

-- Roman traffic is not nearly as insane as it initially feels.  For the most part, pedestrians have the right of way on all but the main streets.  They have the right of way in all unlighted crosswalks, all the time, and Roman drivers honor that.  The really busy intersections have pedestrian lights, which makes things really clear.  It's just that Americans are used to pedestrians being on sidewalks, and cars being in lanes, and neither of those things work here.  None of this means that I didn't often feel that thrill of adrenaline crossing Piazza Venezia!

-- Italians have found more ingenious ways to latch bathroom doors than I would have thought possible.  They also have a variety of methods for flushing their toilets and turning on their faucets.  I think I have spent at least five percent of this trip trying to manipulate bathroom fixtures and free myself from locked toilet stalls.  I wonder how long I would have to be gone before Jeremy would know to come rescue me?

-- Claritin (spelled, here, Clarityn) solves the mosquito problem.  I've been taking one a day, and I am only normally reactant to mosquito bites.  I get bitten still, and they itch, but not badly, and then they go away.  I even survived a bite on my left eyelid.

A Cheese Plate Does Not Make a Meal

I love the food in Italy.  I love the food in Rome.  I love the pizza.  I love the simple pasta dishes:  amatriciana, carbonara, cacio e pepe.  I love the salami and the prosciutto and the cheeses.  But, I'll be honest with you.  I do not love restaurants in Rome.

Now, much like the nightlife, I suspect strongly that Rome is designed to keep tourists away from good restaurants.  But I also think that the combination of tourists, a strong traditionalist bias, and the fact that the best cooking in Italy happens in people's houses (or people's grandmother's houses) means that the bar has been set pretty low for most Roman restaurants.  Serve the three staple pasta dishes, and a couple of small, equally hide-bound secondi, and that's a menu.  The pasta is likely to be really, really good, but is it worth the price of a restaurant meal?

Take tonight as a case in point.  Jeremy and I spent the day scooting, which meant we saw many cool sights, like the completely bizarre EUR, a neighborhood?  business park?  fascist fantasy?  in southern Rome.  Initially commissioned by Mussolini, this neighborhood is a modernist palate cleanser after classical and baroque central Rome.  We also went to the lido (seaside), which was all closed up for the season, and hence a tad dreary.  Still, the scooting was fun, and got my adrenaline up (see the facebook video).  But, because we were out all day, I didn't go to the market in the morning, so we had nothing for dinner.

That is why, tonight, we headed out to the upscale and highly rated restaurant, Enoteca Ferrara.  Zagat used expressions like "one of the best, most innovative restaurants in Italy, not just Rome."  The menu looked promising, and the wine list was encyclopedic (and included labels.  I love a wine list that includes labels.  So much easier to remember wines you have had or seen when you have a visual reminder).  It started off well.  We had a superb, terrific, stupendous cheese plate, and our bottle of wine was equally top notch, especially for a 25 E bottle.  I also appreciated the decor: the walls were hung with cured meat instead of art.

Things started to head south with the salads.  Jeremy and I both ordered interesting sounding salads, only to get staunchly mediocre fare.  Mine was a Piedmontese salad of pickled vegetables and diced veal tongue.  How could that be bland?  It wasn't bland, exactly, but the vinegar in the vegetables killed any other flavors, and the whole salad was strictly one note.  Jeremy's Sicilian couscous was similarly unimpressive.  Fine, but no stand out flavors.  Our main courses (perhaps we should have been concerned when the menu wasn't split into the standard primi and secondi offerings) were both suggested  by the waitress.  My ox-tail was fine.  Just fine.  Well-braised and tender, with a bright tomato sauce.  But did it have anything special?  No.  Jeremy's lamb chops were also fine.  Tender and well seasoned and perfectly fine.  All in all, a fine dinner, and if we hadn't paid so damn much for it, I would be perfectly content.

So, the question of the evening is, why go out to eat?  It is much more expensive than staying at home, and most of the time I'm pretty sure I can cook whatever they have on the menu at least as well as they can.  I have a lot of reasons why I go out:  sometimes I'm too tired or busy or lazy to cook, and I am willing to pay a premium -- both in cost and taste -- to have someone else take that chore off my hands.  Sometimes I go out for the experience.  It is romantic to have someone else cater to me, so that I can spend all of my time and energy  looking deeply into Jeremy's eyes.  But for a meal to be really great, I want it to show me something I can't do at home, or (even better) wouldn't have thought of doing.  Not many restaurants can give me that.  Sometimes Santes does, and certainly the food I had in Portland recently did -- I wouldn't even begin to try to recreate the bacon foie gras from Le Pigeon!

Here in Rome, I think the answer to the "why go out to eat?" question is always either a) because I have to, because I'm a tourist locked in a hotel and can't cook for myself or b) to get a well-made amatriciana, carbonara, or cacio e pepe while having a good time with friends.  I don't think they are looking for innovation.  Rather, they are looking for comfort food done comfortably.  And that is fine -- but I am going to reset my expectations, and I probably won't be spending 100E on any more Italian dinners.

Quiet days

(Random picture of the 1901 Neptune fountain in Piazza Repubblica, which I like a lot even if it isn't by Bernini)

A couple of quiet days for us here in Rome.  Sunday was quiet, because I am a very, very old woman, and it took me a full day to recover from Saturday night's antics, even though I didn't drink all that much.  I was clearly within my father's one drink per hour guidelines.  I think just being around that many desperate attempts to be shocking and/or cool was exhausting.  Plus, it is hard for me to even find my groove, let alone get it on.  Monday, we (blissfully) switched apartments.  Our landlady offered us the move when we were having the initial internet problems, and we jumped at the chance, perhaps a little faster than she was expecting.  It's a good thing we did, too, because in addition to the internet problem, the not-really-a-one-bedroom problem, the on-display-like-a-whore-in-Amsterdam problem, the noise issues and the fact that that apartment was never cooler than 100 degrees, it developed a particularly nasty odor in the bathroom.  At first we thought it was the wet mop the cleaning guy left wedged behind the washing machine.  Eventually, Jeremy ascribed to my theory that something had died behind the washing machine, and was slowly decomposing.

So, as of Monday morning, we are happily ensconced in Vicolo del Cedro 5, a true one bedroom on the third floor.  The kitchen isn't quite as new, and the entire apartment lists heavily to port. I guess the listing is a side effect of living in a medieval neighborhood.  I put a dinner plate with sauce down on the table, and had to shim it before the sauce landed in my chair.  Still, all in all, a wonderland of cross-ventilation and clean air.  Yeah!

Monday was quiet because Jeremy had to work, and because everything is closed on Monday in Italy.  I tried to make reservations at a little restaurant we had walked by the day before, but it was closed.  I tried to buy a bottle of water at our local store, but it was closed (although, mysteriously, it was open in the evening.  It is a recurring theme, perhaps even a leit motif, of me in Italy that I do not understand when things are and are not open).  I looked for a Pope-ener for Erik.  I found a Vatican-ener, but nothing with the actual pope, alas.

Today, we were planning on going to Florence, but last night I figured out that the train tickets would cost us 190E, which seemed way, way too much for lunch with Pat and seeing Megan's baby.  I would love to see Megan's baby, and it is always good to see Pat, but my frugality kicked in.  Good thing, too, because Jeremy woke up this morning with a vicious sore throat and general malaise.  I'm hoping a quiet day in the apartment, with a lot of tea, sleeping, and good food, will have him feeling better tomorrow.  I spent my day shopping at the market in the morning, and trying to see Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa in the afternoon.  I totally navigated the Roman transit system and arrived at the church to discover it was -- wait for it -- closed.  Even though I had checked the hours both in our guide book and on line.  Drat.  Tomorrow we have reservations for the Borghese Gallery, so maybe we can hit the Bernini on the way home.

What I did accomplish today was a pretty great dinner, which Jeremy and I ate before I remembered to take any pictures.  I purchased a strange cut of chicken at the market this morning.  It was half a chicken, but the back half, rather than a side.  It had two legs, two thighs, and part of the back bone.  I seared it in some olive oil, then braised it in water and red wine for an hour and a half or so.  I finished it by reducing the braising liquid, and adding it to some sauteed zucchini, cherry tomatoes, and spinach gnocchi, and topping the whole think with parmesan.  It was sort of Italian-flavored coq-au-vin, and if not quite chicken soup for Jeremy's cold, then perhaps it contained the healing essence of chicken soup.

(As I am writing, about three different church bells have started ringing.  It's 8:26, so I don't have a clue why they are ringing, but it is beautiful.  I love the way the church bells here start in one area, and then play tag across the neighborhood until there is a full cacophony, and then die out until there is one lone bell in the distance. )

(Equally random picture of a wedding in Piazza Santa Maria de Trastevere.  Because all blogs need photos, and I really don't have any for this one.  Besides, the fiat looks great, doesn't it?)

So, due to the overall quiet days, not a lot to report.  We had a very casual dinner at a place around the corner called Da Olindo.  There were about five tables in the whole place, which was decorated with pictures of Roma soccer and (bizarrely) Tony Soprano.  Excellent house wine, and perfectly acceptable if over-sauced pasta, which I didn't think was possible here.  We split a super simple secondi, chicken with butter and sage, which was just as it sounds -- a breast, split and (I think) slightly pounded, sauted in butter and sage, finished with a spritz of lemon.   It was surprisingly tasty, largely because it was perfectly seasoned. Tomorrow we see art, and maybe on Thursday we rent scooters and see what is outside walking distance.  I promise to remember I have a camera.

Thongs and keylime-green bikini tops

This entry by guest author, Jeremy.

Saturday night we decided to venture back into Testaccio, Rome's meatpacking district, for some food, music, and jigging. Our destination was Via Monte di Testaccio, a horseshoe shaped road of supposed hot and hipstery nightclubs. Our Lonely planet guide had warned us of how late these clubs get going, around 1am, as well as the fickle entry polices of the bouncers. Fortunately for us we forgot to bring a map and ate up some of our time repeatedly trying to guess which dark street a Roman hipster would turn down, until miraculously (really I'd put this up against stigmata), we wound up exactly at the street we wanted. We settled down at a restaurant called “Aqua and Farina,” for some appetizers and pizza. The real standout at dinner was a layered appetizer of cheese, spec, and thinly sliced zucchini.

Even after finishing dinner and chasing the waiter around for a check, it was still only 10:30, so Linda and I decided to just walk the horseshoe to get the lay of the land. As expected, each club we passed -- Alibi, Big Bang, Coyote Club, Charro -- were all pretty empty. To give you an idea, Charro actually had people with baby carriages and a family sing-along lead by the DJ. Only one place, a bar called “Rome on the Rox” had people in it, actually a lot of people, drinking pretty much american style, with no accompanying food, drinks followed by drinks. We saddled up to the bar where Linda had a prosecco and I had a well-intentioned Manhattan. The bartender seemed to be excited to actually mix a drink in a bar where almost everyone was drinking beer, and focussed intently as she mixed the whiskey, vermouth, and worcestershire sauce! Topped with a cherry. The highlight of the Rox was when the Train song, Soul Sister, came on the sound system and I got to hear a whole Bar of Italians sing along in English (my friend Jerry is actually in the band, which made it a little weirder).

The second time we walked the club loop it was just getting going. The strip reminded me a lot of 11^th and Folsom area of San Francisco, once known for its live music, only to become lazer shooting, dry ice billowing dance clubs. We couldn't find live music, so we followed the loudest thumping bass, and the oddest looking occupants, which brought us to Alibi, a mixed/gay club. There was already a small crowd gathered in an unorderly mass outside the front door and after a couple of minutes of observation we were completely baffled as to how people were being admitted to the club. I asked a bouncer how we get into the club, he asked if it was the two of us, and then said, “wait one moment,” and pointed us to another small chained entrance 10 feet to the left (I assumed it was the exit since everyone was standing in front of the other entrance). True to his word, we were in in a minute or so, leaving a mass of helpless others outside.

After paying 20 euro a piece to get in, we were greeted by men in thongs, and women in key-lime green bikini tops, and the host of the the evening, Bambi, “like a disney character in the woods.” It had the vibe of a Anon-Salon or Laughing Squid party, more than a dance club. There was an upstairs dance-floor playing popular music, like Lady Gaga, and remixes of popular music. Downstairs, with the smoke machines and strobe-lights, had some pretty decent Deep House with breaks. I liked that they had multiple DJs and although the bass never stopped thumping (except for the breaks of course), you could definitely hear the difference in styles (otherwise why have a DJ?). The dance scene might have been a whole lot better if Linda and I weren't the best dancers in the club. Most people dancing seemed to personify a confusion of rhythm and style, as if 80's dance moves were being overlayed on top trip-hop beats. It seems like a perfectly valid thing to do, take one style of dance that you are familiar with and expand it into a new set of beats. Their complete failure reminds me of my attempts to shoehorn their language into my brain and then squawk it out again in an attempt at communication.

So, was this the hipster Rome experience we were expecting? Are these young Romans that hip? Or are we just assuming anything that starts happening at 1:00am must be cool? I'd have to say, for a city full of people who talk as loud as they do, there was very little attitude, and very few successful attempts at getting attention in all the crowds we wandered through. Roman “style” seems to be solidly 10 years behind the US, and a leather jacket and a T-shirt (god forbid, not a button down washed by their mother), is acceptably rebellious to be considered cool. I'd have to argue that anything that is acceptable cool removes it from the realm of really being hip. Club Alibi actually highlights the point really well -- most of the men were wearing white collared shirts with one button too many undone (very risky) and the women wore sparkly tank-tops and tights. A couple of weeks ago Linda and I had a conversation with a man in one of our language classes about his T-shirt, which said “Pretty Fly” on it. We surprised how hard it was to explain to him what “fly” meant in the US. I guess some part of hip also gets lost in translation.

Volpetti

I know, feast or famine with the blog posts these days!  Nothing for a week, and then two in one day.  But, today I found heaven:  Volpetti, in Testaccio.  It is the most amazing deli I have ever seen.  The gentleman in the picture is, I believe, Claudio Volpetti himself.  He insisted we try every thing in the store -- at least five different salami, we stopped him after four cheeses, a surprisingly good dessert made from fresh ricotta and whole spelt grains.  Because what says dessert like spelt?  He was insistent and kind and patient with our English/Italian pidgeon, and I think I may have to go back there everyday of my life.

Next door is Piu Volpetti, a self-service tavolo caldo.  Think cafeteria, but with good food.  Quite the spread, no?

Jeremy and I have had some excellent Roma the last twenty four hours.  Yesterday afternoon, we did some hardcore clothes shopping -- not a ton of buying, but a lot of looking. We found a couple of streets in the centro with tons of tiny stores with beautiful, expensive clothes in them.  Also, we have discovered the secret to shopping in Rome is the timing.  You shop from six to eight in the evening.  Streets that look boring and shuttered suddenly open up into glittering jewel boxes filled with clothes, antiques, antique clothes (Romans seem to love vintage) and, as one would expect in a jewel box, jewels.   I am, horrifyingly, a large in Italian sizes.  But, what can I do?  Not eat when I'm in Italy?  As if!

Today we went through Testaccio and Aventino (I think we have now been up five of the seven hills).  I think, when I come back, I might want to stay in Testaccio next time. The market was hard core, and filled with everything -- food, clothing, kitchenwares, t-shirts, books.  It is near a lot more transportation options, and really close to a lot of the Roman ruins.

Tonight, the hunt for live music continues. . . Maybe I'll ask Jeremy to write a guest blog about the process!

In Which the Author Becomes Philosophical a Little Drunk (but not at the same time)

(Piazza Trilussa, outside Freni and Frizzioni during aperitivo)

Aperitivo:  This is a wonderful Italian tradition that apparently has been popular in Northern Italy (it has been around in Florence for years, at least) for a long time and is only now making its way to Rome.  Here’s the idea:  Italians eat dinner late.  8:30 is really the earliest you can show your face in a restaurant and not be immediately marked as touristi.  But, bars and enotece (wine bars) open after the afternoon siesta, around five.  But, no Italian drinks without eating.  Doing so leads to unseemly drunkenness, another sure sign of being a touristi.  In order to solve this problem, drinking establishments put out food.  Some places just put out some bruschetta and some olives; some put out elaborate spreads, including pastas and slices of pizza, little savory baked things, salads, etc.  You can eat as much as you want after you buy a drink (often drink prices are slightly elevated when the food is out). 

On Tuesday, Jeremy and I did a Trastevere aperitivo crawl, going from bar to bar until we had eaten enough for the night.  We started out at a very hip place halfway up the Gioncolo hill, called Il Barreto.  Great music, and a gorgeous terrace that would have had a terrific view if the vegetation had been trimmed a little.  I suspect in the summer, that place is just about the coolest around, but it was pretty empty the night we went in, and a truly lackluster aperitivo:  only bruschetta, and no plates.  Also, the walk up the hill included a quarter of a mile of narrow, twisty road with no side-walks, which felt like imminent death.  A lot of Roman traffic feels like imminent death; it makes you appreciate the drink that much more.

Back down the road of death, and on to a unmarked wine bar which our guidebook tells us is called Il Meschita.  Great, great wine selection, and a spare, minimalist feel that keeps the tiny space feeling cool.  But, again, a lackluster aperitivo, nothing but a mozzarella salad.  Finally, we hit the jackpot:  Freni and Frizzioni (Clutches and Brakes – it’s in an old garage), a large bar on a hoppin piazza (Piazza Trilussa) with the single largest aperitivo I have ever seen.  An interesting tuna and tomato penne (that I think caused Jeremy’s eyes to cross in horror), three or four rice dishes, three or four different couscous (does couscous have a plural?), five or six vegetable dishes, salads, crudités, even a sauce bar.  We sat outside on the square with all the people, watching a magic show and talking with an American ex-pat who said he had created a new economic system called “ethical capitalism” that didn’t involve exploitation.  Funny how he stopped talking to me when I asked him if he agreed with Marx that all profit was exploitation – or was it that that was when Jeremy joined me? 

I really think my single favorite thing about Italy, better than the art, better than the food, is the outdoor nightlife.  In Florence, I loved San’Ambrosio bar and square.  When we visited Rome last summer, we had an amazing night here in Trastevere, in which the entire neighborhood felt like one big piazza, with everyone eating, drinking, walking, talking outside, wandering from place to place listening to music and people watching.  It’s the reason we wanted to return to this neighborhood.  It is a little touristy, or to be more accurate, a little too studenty (the big John Cabot campus is just around the corner, and I think there are other campus in the area as well).  There are a number of “american style bars,” which means cocktails, and one heinous place called either Deejay Bar or DJ bar, depending on which window you read, which actually has a Wednesday night special, all you can drink fro 20 E.  This is a wholly un-Italian idea.  Only Americans drink to get drunk in Italy.  The central square in Trastevere is Santa Maria, and at night it has all the trappings of Piazza Signoria or Repubblica in Florence:  Africans selling light up geegaws, martian spray paint art, people pretending to be statues, horribly deformed beggars, restaurants with menus in five languages and big pictures of their food.  It’s a real zoo. 

But, get out of Piazza Santa Maria, even 50m, and it can start feeling really Roman again.  There’s a bar I like, Santa Calisto, that serves cheap Italian beer (which makes Budweiser taste good) and seems to always have soccer on, and I’ve yet to hear English there.  And there’s Piazza Trilusso, where Freni and Frizzioni is, which feels like a more urban San’Ambrogio. 

Of course, it isn’t all bad being a tourist in Rome.  Wednesday, I donned my best tourist gear, complete with sneakers, and did the Vatican Museums, which are totally overwhelming.  Will someone kindly explain why I entered St. Peter’s with bare shoulders last summer, but had to borrow a sweatshirt from a nice German woman to enter the Sistene chapel?  I understand about respecting sacred spaces, but the chapel is more sacred than the place where the Pope says mass?  So, thank you, nice German woman.  Brian, if you are reading this, you are totally right about the Sistene Chapel.  The ceiling is so far away, the room is dark, the crowd is overwhelming – it doesn’t have much impact.  The Last Judgment has far more impact in person than the ceiling.  That human-skin with the self-portrait is surprisingly powerful in a way that never hit me in reproductions.

The Vatican Museums have a lot of stuff.  It isn’t a particularly thoughtfully set up museum; every room is crammed with objects, any one of which would be the focus of a room in a lesser museum.  The result is that each individual object is subordinated to the experience of the whole, which I suppose is part of the purpose of these palaces – to impress with the wealth, power, and taste of the popes rather than to showcase individual art items.  The same with the frescoes.  The Raphael rooms are astounding – I actually much preferred them to the Chapel (but then, those rooms didn’t imply my shoulders were offensive to God) – but it was really hard work to make out individual scenes and effects.  My eyes wanted to slide over the details, because every room has so many too many details to take in. 

The other thing I noticed was how well the classical and Egyptian statuary stood up to this effect.  Sure, the mile long hallway of classical heads was too much, but a lot of the marbles had a coherence and presence that draws the eye in and around the piece, so that you don’t get distracted by the surroundings.  Even the busy pieces, like the Laocoon or the Nile (both of which I thought were great, great, great), seemed to give my eyes places to rest.  Or, perhaps the Popes just had better taste in statuary than they did in paintings.  How awful is the contemporary art section? 

A final observation on being touristy in Rome:  no on is ever happy in a tour group.  Whenever you are near the Campadoglio or St. Peter’s, you encounter these groups, twenty people wearing ear pieces following someone holding an umbrella aloft.  To a person, everyone in those groups looks tired, bored, harried, and unhappy.  I feel horrible for them.  You know that for a lot of them, this is the trip of a lifetime, something they have saved for and planned for years.  They signed up for a tour so that they wouldn’t miss anything, or because they were intimidated by making the arrangements themselves, or a host of other reasons.  They were excited.  But there is something about being herded around from one great sight to another, not being able to sit down when you need to or pause when you want to or blow by something that I think must suck the life out of the experience.  Plus, I guess many of these groups don’t’ stay in Rome, so they are bussed in from cruise ships or the suburbs, so everyone is tired.  That is just no way to travel. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the traveling experience.  I used to teach a provocative essay by Walker Percy called “The Loss of the Creature,” in which he talked about how our pre-packaged expectations keep us from every really coming into contact with the outside world.  We look at the Grand Canyon and see the post card, or are disappointed when we see something that doesn’t look like a post card.  We reduce other people to types – I met a real Roman today, or a Jew (see how it’s a slippery slope from here to racial profiling) – and experiences to, well, to blog entries, I suppose.  Even when we have a completely unexpected, unpredictable experience, we are so worried that it is “authentic” that we miss what is really going on around us.  I see this problem here in Rome a lot, particularly in museums.  People walk up, take a picture, and leave without every once looking at the object not through their camera screen.  I think Percy is right, and that they are missing something.  The individuals in the tourist groups have handed over their sovereignty, their ownership of their experience in Rome to a tour guide, and it leaves them with not much for their time and money. 

But I also think Percy is wrong.  I don’t think our expectations are the problem.  I think many people don’t know how to look at something, or that their situation keeps them from being able to really look at something.  If anything, it’s our expectations that make us slow down.  Take the Sistene Chapel.  Yes, not my favorite, but for so many people, it is the only thing they saw in the entire museum complex, because it is the only thing they had enough context about for them to want to understand it.  There is no such thing as an “authentic” experience of the Sistene Chapel – there is just looking at it and having it mean something to you at that moment.  Or having it not mean something to you at that moment, which is also a real and meaningful experience.  Context, expectations, pre-conceptions that turn out to feel right or wrong, these are necessary mental apparatus that allow us to process our experience, as necessary as our sense organs.  Are they distorting?  Of course, but so are our eyes and ears (as any good empiricist will tell you).  In the end, they are what we have, and it is only our fetishization of an “authentic” experience that gets in our way.

I want to say that I don’t think I’m a particularly good traveler.  I’m easily intimidated socially, and even in English I am bad at striking up conversation with strangers.  I don’t like being lost, and I get stressed out when things don’t go according to plan.  I follow guide book recommendations slavishly.  Really, my only strengths as a traveler are my willingness to eat anything and my ability to walk happily for hours and hours.  The question remains, what does make a good traveler?  I wouldn’t want to be the Texan out to get him some real spaghetti and meatballs (Italians never eat the two together – meatballs  are a secondi, while pasta is a primi), but if he gets what he wants and enjoys it, then clearly his dinner is a success.  I want good Italian food, but even I’m not racing out to try the grilled milk-fed calf intestines (amusing translated on one menu I saw simply as “typical Roman food”), even though Rome is famous for eating offal.  So, really, how am I different from the Texan?  As I mentioned in an earlier post, a lot of the pure joy of being in Rome – and there is a lot of pure joy to being in Rome – comes from being near highly recognizable sights.  Would it mean as much for me to be at the Spanish Steps, or Trevi fountain (which, Danielle, really is breathtakingly cool, especially at night) if I had never seen Roman Holiday?  Certainly they would have meant something very different, and I suspect they would have meant less. 

Sorry for the pretentious rambling, especially since I have no great new insights or conclusions.  Traveling does this to people – or, at least, it does it to me. 

We are against war and tourist menu

(The title of this post comes from a sign outside a restaurant in the heart of Trastevere.)

I’m in Rome!

The transfer between the Perugia and the Rome apartment went surprisingly smoothly; we navigated the train and the Roman bus system like old hands, and found our landlady’s apartment quickly.  Then, we hit some choppy waters.  Our apartment is in a fabulous location, on a fairly quiet street just blocks from the center of Trastevere, the very neighborhood we wanted to be in.  We are close to the Ancient part of Rome, the centro, and an easy block to the Vatican.  And, our landlady, Sabrina, seems to be one of the nicest and most patient souls on earth.

So far, so good.  But, the apartment was advertised as a one bedroom, with the living space on the ground floor and the bedroom in the basement.  As odd as it sounds, the basement was a selling point for us.  We figured it would be quieter, and it is a cool looking space, with an uneven medieval brick ceiling.  When we arrived, we discovered that the basement is uninhabitably damp.  It reeks of mold, and the landlady had rearranged the apartment into a studio (telling us that we can use the basement room as much as we want.  To do what?  Grow mushrooms?)  The apartment is beautifully decorated, very Italian modern chic, and would be perfectly spacious as a one bedroom, but as a studio, it is piccolo piccolo.  And, somehow, I wasn’t picturing quite so literally a street level apartment.  The door is straight onto the street, as are the only three windows.  It is a quiet street, but not that quiet, and every car that goes by, every conversation, we are right there.  Jeremy and I were sitting on the bed last night eating strawberries, and I felt like we were some sort of Amsterdam window display. 

And then there is the saga of the internet.  The apartment was promised with internet, and I believe Sabrina bought a DSL hub especially for us.  If only it worked.  She and Jeremy spent hours Sunday trying to get it to work.  She spent so much time on the phone with Vodafone on Monday that she killed her battery.  She has been determined and tireless, patient and good humored.  Finally, this morning, Vodafone admitted that there has been an outage in Trastevere DSL for a while now, which Jeremy suspects means that they have never gotten it working.  So, he and Sabrina jury-rigged and internet key that works just outside the apartment, or if we run a cable up to a window.  Jeremy is, in fact, sitting out front, on the street, writing code and looking incredibly Roman.  Since half the street is doing the same thing (the other half is hanging out their window talking on their cellphones), he fits right in.  And, it lets him keep an eye on our laundry, because there is no room for a rack of clothing inside!

Rome still has mosquitoes, even though it is October.  I am being eaten alive, since it never occurred to me to bring bug spray.  If I’m going to die of malaria in Rome, shouldn’t I at least have an awakening to the joy of a liberated life, one outside the strict confines of American decency?  That sounds like fun and all, but  for my life to get any more liberated, I would have to start taking opium, or having multiple lovers, or some such nonsense.  So, all in all, I think I will skip both the liberation and the malaria, please. 

And yet, and yet, and yet.  I am so amazingly, stunningly, wonderfully happy to be here.   I’m going to risk joining the hordes of bad writers writing bad prose about the magic of the eternal city for a while, because there really is something about being here that makes my heart sing.  I remember the first time I was in Florence, and I stepped out of the hotel, turned a corner, and there, perfectly framed by the street, was the dome of the Duomo.  It felt both unreal and surreal to be looking at the three dimensional reality of an image I had seen my whole life, or at least since Art 101.  That feeling happens here all the time, and instead of seeing the Duomo or Palazzo Vecchio, you are seeing the Coliseum, the Spanish Steps, St. Peters, and on, and on, and on.  Plus, the streets tend to be wider and the city generally more open than Florence, so you get far more of those views.  It makes walking to buy milk feel like a pivotal scene in a live-celebrating movie. 

Jeremy and I have been walking since we arrived.  We walked to the top of Giancolo hill, to the Spanish steps, to the Pantheon – which is so big – through the shopping districts.  Today, we did the Capitoline Museum, which is also really big.  Good sculpture, bad paintings, great spot for lunch on the third floor terrace.  We haven’t yet done any particularly noteworthy eating, although I have discovered that our apartment is in between the enormous market at Campo di Fiori and a smaller, more used market here in Trastevere.   I went to the later yesterday, and it was about half open (because it was Monday, I suspect), but it was still big enough to get some zucchini romanesco (like zucchini fiorentini, but slightly firmer and a touch less sweet) and some pesto for dinner.  Tonight, we are planning on going aperitivo hopping. 

And now, I have to go outside to upload this entry.

Farewell, Perugia!

It is time to say goodbye to Perugia and head to Rome.  I really like this city, and would love to figure out a way to teach here sometime, but it is time to go.  First of all, while there is a lot of suburban sprawl around Perugia, the centro is quite small, and there isn’t the density of attractions that Florence has, so I’m not sure I would need to stay here a full two weeks if I didn’t have something to do, like the language classes.  Second, they have already started setting up for Euro-chocolate fest, even though that doesn’t start until next weekend.  It looks insane.  Every piazza is lined with tents and display cases.  I think I don’t need to be here to see Perugia turn into Chocolate Disneyland.  Also, I’m very confused about this year’s chocolate theme:  Zip.  Here’s the rational for the theme, as helpfully(?) translated by Google.

It will take 15 to 24 October 2010 in Perugia Eurochocolate the seventeenth edition of which will claim as Zip, Travel and Chocolate Thunder in the logo as a world-that of chocolate, just-closed (or open, depending on your point of view ...) from a zip. A world to discover and preserve, in which travel to know.  Zip, however, is also a way to compress files to make them lighter and faster to transmit. That is a way to communicate ... in a flash! Chocolate, therefore, also in 2010 choose a language young, modern, immediate with which to discover and enjoy the best the pleasures of chocolate.

See my problem?

So, just a few random Perugia notes before we go:

Sandri.  I love this place.  It’s been selling chocolate and coffee and grappa since the nineteenth-century, and is able to handle hordes of tourists while still remaining completely Italian.  You can eat their beautiful little chocolate noshes there, or take them with you.  If you do the latter, they insist on wrapping whatever it is in this beautiful red paper.  Hint to the American tourists:  no, you cannot just take your plate out to the piazza and sit down.  I mean, you can, but if you do, you will be charged a coperto.  Which may be worth it – it is a lovely square, and Sandri has nice table clothes and umbrellas.  Just don’t yell at the waiters when they hand you the bill.  It’s not their fault you don’t know the customs and didn’t ask. 

Old Man Pizza (otherwise known as Pizzeria Toscano), which I described in an earlier post.  Jeremy finally admitted that it isn’t the best pizza, but it is the cheapest, and I just love the idea of one guy running the whole shop – making the pizza, baking the pizza, running the counter. 

The minimetro, which I still love.  Couldn’t we have one of these in Spokane, to get us up the South Hill?  I know I would be much more likely to bike to campus if there were one of these to whisk me through the hard parts.  It’s not like I’m asking for a funicular or anything.  (Sorry it isn’t the most exciting video.   Hopefully it is enough to give you the idea).

Perugia is famous for two things:  chocolate, and ceramics.  Sandri has been taking care of chocolate, but surprisingly, it's been harder to come by ceramics.  I came to town with the plan to buy something ceramic, and was very surprised to find only a few stores selling the local stuff, and the only store selling more than obvious made-for-tourists stuff was incredibly expensive – in the hundred of euros range.  Our guidebook suggested we go to Deruta, a small nearby town where most of the Umbrian pottery is made, but we drove through it on the way to the cooking class, and it didn’t look so appealing.  I just about given up on the idea of getting any ceramics, and then today, our last day, there were two trucks from Deruta in one of the smaller piazze.  Jeremy and I quickly bought two little macchiato-sized coffee cups, and then spent about 45 minutes trying to figure out if there was anyway to get something bigger home in our luggage.  The craftsman who made the platter was there doing some of the selling, and we talked with him (in our very basic Italian, even) about the designs and how he did the painting.  We eventually decided we had to try to get something (and if we have to glue it back together, so be it), and then promptly bought the biggest one there.  Not really, but almost.

Tomorrow morning, we head to Rome.  I’m excited, and honestly a little intimidated.  It’s just such a big city, and while it is clearly tourist heaven, it is primarily a working, living city, which means that unlike Florence, it isn’t designed to make life easy for Americans.  But, we have a good map, some Italian, and a basic idea how the public transit works.  What else could we possibly need, right?

Converse and Cook

Tomorrow is the last day of class.  Ack!  How did two weeks go by so quickly?  I’m not sure I’ve learned enough to be done with class.  I am definitely more comfortable listening to and understanding Italian, but that only means that I can understand about a quarter of what is being said to me, when someone is talking very slowly and using very simple words.  Real speed Italian, I can get maybe one word out of ten, which is not really enough to do anyone any good.  It’s going to be worse in Rome, where people speak in a dialect.  It’s going to take a small miracle to find someone patient enough to speak Italian to us while we are there. 

But, we aren’t there yet, and the last few days here in Perugia have been pretty full.  On Tuesday, we had our first sit-down pizza.  We’ve been getting slices to go for lunch quite a bit, from this very tiny place in a very tiny road.   In Perugia, even more than in Florence, what constitutes a road seems pretty loose.  One of the main streets, Via dei Priori, is a covered alleyway.  You go two blocks before you see even a sliver of sky above you.  We found our little pizza shop when we noticed a number of people emerging into the piazza from a small crack in a wall, holding slices of pizza.  On closer investigation, the crack was a road (it’s about two and a half feet at it’s widest), and halfway down that road is Pizzeria Toscana, which is a hallway with an old man and a pizza oven.  He bakes one rectangular pizza at a time, although often there are several types of pizza per rack.  It’s a very thick crust, by Italian standards, but it is good and hot and very, very cheap: 1 Euro a slice.  The zucchini is my favorite; Jeremy likes the pomodorini (cherry tomatoes).  I tried to ask what kind of meat was on a slice once, and ended up buying “wurtzel,” which is sliced hot dog.  Which is better than it sounds, but still isn’t good.  Really?  Italians are surrounded by the best sausage and cured meat in the world, and they use hot dogs on their pizza?  They eat hot dogs at all?  And yet, it is very common.

So, that’s lunch pizza.  Tuesday, we had dinner pizza at Pizzeria Mediterraneo, which was written up very favorably by Lonely Planet.  The pizza was excellent, but the clientele definitely slanted toward the American.  We spent most of the evening listening to one American student bore another to tears with a non-stop monologue about her roommate problems.  We sided with the roommates.  The pizza was Napolitano-style, as is our beloved Pizzaoula in Florence, which means a medium thick crust.  Jeremy had a delicate prosciutto crudo e funghi, while I had a diavolo – in this case, pepperoni-like salami and olives.  The crust was chewy, the toppings were flavorful and plentiful, there was plenty of good olive oil, and the house white wine was apple-y and cheap.  Very, very satisfying.

Yesterday was the cooking class.  We were picked up by Angela Pitteri and her husband (who, it was later revealed, is an Economics professor at the University here in Perugia), and off we went to Todi.  The landscape was gorgeous, and typically Umbrian:  hills, vineyards, olive orchards.  Did you know Italian differentiates the words for the fruit of a plant from the plant itself using gender?  An olive is oliva (feminine), while an olive tree is olivo (masculine).  Same with apple:  mela and melo.  Clever, and economical! Communque (anyway), the driving was a little rough, as were the roads, so I was very happy to reach the house.   I think I need one.  It was a beautiful farm house, surrounded by orchards and gardens.  Angela has a pet goat, two dogs, and two cats, an outdoor wood-burning stove and grill, and a view to die for. 

After a brief tour and time to soak in the landscape, Angela moved us to her kitchen and started us cooking right away.  First up, pears stuffed with a mixture of chopped walnuts, honey, and red wine, baked in red wine and sugar.  Then we moved on to tasting different olive oils.  She kept saying the Umbrian was the most delicate, and the Tuscan was the strongest, but I swear it was the other way around.  We made four different bruschetta toppings:  oil with garlic, pomodorini with basil, ricotta with poppy seeds, and a delicious precursor to pesto, made from pinenuts, pecorino and mint.  Pour copious amounts of olive oil, and presto.  She showed us the chickens that her husband would be grilling for our secundo, beautiful, tiny little birds that had been marinating in white wine and peppercorns overnight, and we prepared a sauce made of chopped thyme, marjoram, parsley, lemon juice and olive oil.  Finally, for our primi, we made risotto with saffron.  She kept the heat up high the whole cooking time, way higher than I ever have, and the texture was amazing.  The saffron taste was good, but she modified the original Milanese recipe, leaving out the marrow, using olive oil instead of butter, and using a vegetable stock.  It was, to my taste, a little bland in taste.

(Angela helping Frank, with Julia watching them, and Jeremy watching me)

After a lot of cooking and tasting and talking, we ate the fruits of our labor.  It was a great dinner.  We were with Julia, Tanya, Sophia, and Frank, all of whom are native German speakers, so every now and then, Jeremy and I felt a little left out.  Sophia, the youngest of the group (she’s in her gap year before college) is apparently a riot in German, reducing poor Tanya to tears a couple of times.  She’s pretty funny even in English.  Here is her description of Macbeth (which is taught in English in German high schools):  “A guy meets some witches, who say he will be king.  Then some things happen and everyone is dying.”  That pretty much sums it up, don’t you think?  I’m not sure I learned much new about cooking, but the language practice was excellent, as were the food, the people, and the context. 

Today, the school arranged for us to tour the studio of a local glass artist and restorer.  The studio is in a house that has been in the family (I think) since before the Pope decided to level most of Perugia to build himself a new fortress/residence, and was the studio of a famous stained glass artist.  I think our host is the grand-daughter of said famous artist’s niece, but I’m probably wrong about that, because she spoke only in Italian and very quickly.  Certainly she and her family lived upstairs in the palazzo, and certainly her mother and nonni taught her the business.  The building was fascinating, as was what I could understand of the process, both of making and of restoring the work.  But, honestly, I was only getting about a third of what was going on, and I could have been making some of that up.  You too can look at the pretty and make up what you think was going on as well! 

(No, really, this is a working stained glass studio.  Unless I really don't understand Italian.)

On Sunday, we decamp for Rome.  We are supposed to have internet there, but I am none too certain of its quality, or for that matter that we will really have it.  It took many, many promptings before our landlady said she could give us some device that would give us internet, so . . . . I’ll try to write one more Perugia post, but if I go silent after Sunday, you’ll know why.