No Eating Near Rome's Monuments · 11 hours ago by James Martin
You’ve probably heard of the new regulation prohibiting snacking near Rome’s ancient monuments. It’s in place now, so don’t think of chowing down on a panino near the Pantheon unless you have 50 Euro burning a hole in your travel pouch.
The reactions coming from around the web are fascinating. The largest group of folks, as usual, are the people who think everyone is out to rip them off, and every government (except their own) involves itself in passing petty laws designed to make folks spend more money where they don’t want to spend it. In this case, you’ll have to spend a pretty penny at a cafe if you insist on eating in the shadow of the ruins of a civilization long exhausted—where the crap you generate will be cleaned up by someone in charge.
Jacy Meyer, in Foodie Alerts, asks:
But is this the best way to deal with the issue? Why not place more trash cans around the city and increase the fines for littering? And how exactly will police enforce this new rule; considering the number of not only tourists, but historic sites the city has?
I snapped to attention when I read these words. Suddenly it occured to me: that’s what I like about Rome, the lack of a thousand overflowing trash cans around the monuments.
You have to admit, pictures with trash cans in the borders aren’t the most attractive way to capture the timelessness of Roman architecture.
And the Police, bless their Barettas, will do just fine. I like the personal touch. Rather than placing a sign with the picture of a tourist eating some nasty bit of fast food and throwing the thirteen pounds of paper that come with each sandwich in a mound that obscures just about everything within a thirty kilometer radius, someone in a spiffy uniform comes up to you and politely informs you of your infraction while tapping his enormous pistol with a manicured index finger. What’s wrong with that?
When I went to my first ardia di San Costantino horse race in Sardinia, held at the Sanctuario di San Costantino in Sedilo, I was looking for a trash can in which to throw the paper my grilled eel had come wrapped in. My friend Antonio kept saying, “Just toss it. Toss it on the ground. There are no garbage cans. They hire people to clean it up! You’ll see!”
Like no way man.
But sure enough, come Tuesday, I sauntered over to the Sanctuario outside of Sedilo.
It was spotless. There wasn’t the tiniest bit of paper. No eel heads. Nada. Niente. It was as if the event never happened.
The results were far better than the trashy honor system that 87% of people follow in the U.S. It was better than overflowing rusty barrels, too.
But really, why do people insist on eating near monuments? Is it some ancient substitute for usurping your enemy’s strengths by consuming him? I mean, do we secretly desire a paunch similar to the dome of the Pantheon? Or are we so bored while we eat we look for diversions to make it all bearable?
It’s a conundrum. Here’s my solution. It doesn’t matter how expensive that outdoor cafe is, a carafe of the local vino will cost about 10 times less than it does in a restaurant in the U.S.
I wonder if Roman folks come unglued when they see a bottle of wine they’d pay 2 Euros for in Italy priced at $35 in a restaurant in Des Moines?
And just try to take that sucker out onto the sidewalk!
Italian Property Prices · 3 days ago by James Martin
After looking at one bedroom condos in San Francisco and finding the prices more absurdly inflated than ever ($700,000 for one bedroom in a crime-ridden neighborhood! Such a deal!), we are no longer in the market for a bit of the city life. Yes, prices are falling precipitously, yet not enough to bring prices towards anything resembling reality. There was a day not too long ago where you couldn’t spend more than 25% of your gross earnings on housing. Recently, greedy investors have erased the limits—and it shows in inflated housing cost.
It turns out that Italian prices aren’t exactly falling like a rock. Italy has evidently kept a tight rein on mortgages, not letting the rich make gambling instruments out of them like the US so graciously has. So house prices haven’t really decreased except in the biggest cities, they’re just not going up any more.
“We foresee nominal prices will remain stable in 2008, and therefore real prices will decline by the same amount as the inflation rate,” states the report. ~ Italian property prices grind to a (soft) halt
Maybe it’s time to buy in Italy. Who can know?
Padula and the Certosa di Padula · 8 days ago by James Martin
As a travel writer, I hear a lot of reasons not to get off the beaten track these days. “Oh, I won’t go to Campania because of the garbage thing.” “
“I know I’ll save money by going in the off season, but the weather is cool and some rain clouds might form!”
OK, so here’s the thing. You’ve probably never heard of Padula, yet there’s plenty of reason to visit. Here is a picture of its famous, world heritage Certosa, or charterhouse:
The picture was taken in early spring. Rain threatens. Beautiful, no?
The Certosa has an incredible kitchen. It also sports the biggest cloister in the world. It’s the second largest Charterhouse in Italy after the one in Parma. You still haven’t heard of it, have you?
So we’re driving to Campania from Sicily, and encounter this massive traffic jam in the mountains. It takes three hours to go 30km. We’re going to be late to the hotel we’ve reserved in Padula. I get out the mobile phone and call them to tell them we’re going to be late. Perhaps we’ll arrive at 9 in the evening.
It’s no problem. When we get to Padula we check in, go to our room to clean up, then hit the restaurant. A clay pitcher of house wine awaits us, and the appetizer is laid on the table moments later.
Ahhhh.
The hotel is extraordinary. When you walk over the transom, you’re stepping on a thick Plexiglas sheet, a window onto an exposed Roman drain pipe.
The restaurant is in a medieval hall, stone-built with lots of nooks and crannies to peer into, one of them featuring a nativity scene called a presepe. It’s dramatically lighted.
Hell on the road becomes bliss; the food is simple and wonderful, the essence of Campania cuisine.
There is one other couple in the four star hotel, which sits at the edge of the world heritage Cilento National Park.
We’ve paid 80 Euro for the night. Dinner was 25 each with all the wine we could drink.
You can’t get luxury bargains like this in Rome or Florence. Check out the Hotel Villa Cosilinvm – Padula if you want to experience the bliss of getting off the beaten track. And goodness gracious, go when there are clouds and lower prices around, ya hear?
(Need to see and learn more about this amazing place? see the Padula Map on Mapping Europe.)
What Does a Hamburger Cost at MacDario's in Tuscany? · 9 days ago by James Martin
Some of the most popular blog posts on Wandering Italy have to do with the cost of food in the touristy corners of the boot. (See: Food in Italy – Is it expensive? for an example.) You’re really rabid to know what to expect on your vacation. I don’t blame you. Good food in Italy is a bargain to me. Still.
In any case, if you know Italian pop culture, you know Dario Cecchini, the “Dante Quoting Butcher of Panzano” or some such. Yes, there are few places in the world a butcher can become and stay famous, especially after Bill Buford got done with him.
Dario recently started a restaurant known pretty much for its carne, as you might expect. Well, he’s added a hamburger to his menu. With fries, onions and tomatoes, ten euro.
Be aware that a hamburger in the bar of the Hotel Eden in Rome will cost you 38 Euro. Just so you know.
At Dario’s place, you can bring a bottle of wine and they’ll open it free. So lunch is a bargain, even by San Francisco standards.
How do I know about this new celebrity butcher hamburger? I read about it on Under a Tuscan Stove. Now I need to clean my keyboard. There are pictures to fare acqua nella bocca.
How Do You Say Privacy in Italian? · 11 days ago by James Martin
There is something Italians seem to always do when they enter a restaurant. Most of the time they’ll look around a bit, then take the table nearest other Italians. It’s not unusual to see a restaurant with 5 tables filled out of 30, and they’re all stuffed into the same corner.
How tables at a restaurant are populated by Italians is in direct opposition to the course taken by Americans, who will look for the biggest amount of open space they can find and choose a table smack in the middle of it.
Face it, we seem to need “privacy” at every moment of our lives, in private and in public.
Here’s the thing: you might be surprised to know that there is no word for “privacy” in Italian, according to cross-cultural guru Elizabeth Abbot.
Even from what I’ve observed in Italy, that revelation sort of stunned me. So I checked. Yes, The Italian Institute for Privacy is really Instituto Italiano Privacy.
And the Instituto is new.
Much of Italian life takes place in the public sphere, where “privacy” isn’t what you came for. Cafes, restaurants, and other Italian institutions facilitate interaction. Sure you can make coffee at home, but it won’t—or really can’t—taste better than the cup you get standing at a cafe surrounded by your friends and neighbors.
When I was living in Sedilo, Sardinia, I looked out at the landscape outside of town and asked someone why there weren’t houses built to exploit this natural beauty and the privacy that would come from houses set apart from each other.
“But there’s no one out here! I’d be afraid to live out here! Everybody would!” came the reply.
In some ways, this is one of the big reasons I like the European life. While there is certainly a whole lot of distrust of “the other” in Italian society, there is also the inherent belief that if enough people are around, the majority of them will be decent enough to help someone who might need it. It’s about balance. It’s also about recognizing the common good that can be achieved without nasty government intervention.
So you can walk in a big city ‘round midnight by following the glow of light from the bars and cafes where good people, no doubt, will be sitting outside, nursing a glass of wine. You don’t worry (excessively) about the couple of thuggery-looking kids on the corner because people have an eye out, and most petty thugs just don’t like a big audience.
There’s a lot going on in the example above—but in some ways it points out the differences between attitudes in the US and Europe. In the US, bars are bad, because the only people who frequent them want to drink to excess and then either drive home or kill someone by other means. So, the supply of bars that families or other “good people” can go to becomes limited, and the prophesy becomes self-fulfilling.
In Italy you can get a sandwich, coffee or an ice cream in most bars. Families go there. And where good people congregate, bad things are certainly less likely to happen.
Perhaps the problem is that the English word “privacy” has come to be applied to all conditions. We want privacy from our neighbors, from strangers, from the government and from institutions. From everybody under all conditions. (People ask me, “where is the best place to go in Europe?” When I ask them their preferences so that I may answer the question logically and personally, they usually take this to be an invasion of privacy and never write back.)
Italians, on the other hand, have already taken the time to erect huge barriers between themselves and Government. This construction wasn’t about “privacy”, it was about distrust of agents most likely to harm them in a big way if too much became known about them. It was simply “the way things are done and will always be done.”
And there’s a little bit of frontier justice to it all. In Italy the tax man carries a gun. There is probably need to do so.
(I have an Italian checking account. There are lines I’m supposed to fill in on the checks I don’t understand. You see, I don’t ever write checks because no one takes them. Paper trail? Bad.)
Despite the loss of personal freedom that comes with social responsibility, I like the Italian way. Privacy should be the barrier between you and the government that you have responsibility as a good citizen to distrust. It should also be the barrier between you and the big businesses who finance and benefit from the illicit corporate state.
I figure the latter is the growing problem that made Italians go fishing for a word to use. It’s that globalization thing.
The Pasta alla Norma Tree · 12 days ago by James Martin
What do you get when you graft together a tomato plant, and eggplant plant, and the devil’s fig (tree)? A 5 foot tall tree that grows both huge eggplants and tomatoes, a “creation” of Sicilian amateur botanist Giuseppe Marinoin.
Imagine, you no longer have to bend down to pick the stuff for your Pasta alla Norma.
Can this plant take over the world? Should you mess with God’s work, especially using the devil’s fig?
Marino said the shrub is resistant to disease and thrives in difficult conditions with little water, adding that his invention could be ‘‘an answer for the G8 to the problem of world hunger’‘.
Hold on to your hats! Food for everyone!
The problem now, of course, is that we’ll have to teach Namibians how to make a proper pasta alla Norma, which, I’ve just discovered, was named after Sicilian composer Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini’s opera “Norma”.
There’s always a hitch when you’re trying to end world hunger, although usually that hitch is Monsanto.
Read: Italian grows tomato-eggplant tree
Wine! He Said, and Make it Bolgheri Superiore · 14 days ago by James Martin
It’s a good time to think about wine. Well, not where I live right now, which is northern California, with its 800 wildfires making the air smell like when a leftover smoked ham hock rolls under the couch and gets forgotten for a while. It hit something like 110 today. The red wine is in the fridge. I’ve hung the back leg of a pig outside, hoping to have Speck by morning.
Anyway, what I wanted to tell you is that you could win some mighty fancy Italian wine if you were inclined to write a bit. Yes, just leave a comment and your email address under this Italian Wine Blog post: Tenuta dell’Ornellaia Bolgheri Superiore Ornellaia and you’ll be entered. Do it before Friday, OK?
But here’s the kicker. You have to be in Europe—or have an address there it can be shipped to. Sorry. You could always ship it to my humble abode in the Lunigiana. No one will drink it. Promise.
At least the Italians aren’t in the position the French are in, where they gotta dumb down their wine and sophisticate up their marketing in order to beat Spain in the International Competition to Sell More Wine to Americans Who Don’t Like Foreign Tasting Wines.
Mmmm, globalization is soooo nice.
Language and Obnoxious Tourists · 16 days ago by James Martin
Time reports on a survey that was taken by employees in 4,000 hotels in Germany, the U.K., Italy, France, Canada and the U.S. for the French travel website Expedia.fr. The French have moved into the top slot as the Most Obnoxious Tourists, according to hotel employees.
Hidden away is the fact that Americans seem to have come a long way in the language department:
American tourists fared well in some surprising ways. Despite being notoriously language-limited, for example, they top the list of tourists credited with trying to speak local languages the most, with the French, Chinese, Japanese, Italians and Russians coming in last in the local-language rankings.
Timothe de Roux poo-poos the notion by explaining that most hotel staffs speak English, which doesn’t explain the results at all.
In my experience, it’s true that most folks from the US I see on my travels do actually speak a little Italian when in Italy. This contrasts greatly with my experience in the 70s, when speaking English loudly was considered the same as being fluent in any foreign language by the average US tourist. It got so bad for a while that in every country I traveled to I learned the local lingo for “I don’t speak English” and practiced it until it sounded convincing so that these louts wouldn’t be associated with me by the natives, who probably weren’t fooled in the slightest.
So, pat yourselves on the back, American travelers, you’ve come a long way.
Ice Cream - A Focal Point for Our Indulgence · 21 days ago by James Martin
I used to think that vacationing for a living was the coolest thing a guy could do.
Now I’m not sure any more. You see, I’ve just met Bruce Weinstein, who happened to be in California for the kick-off of National Ice Cream Month for the California Milk Advisory Board. Bruce is the smiling food guy over there on the right. He’s the author of “The Ultimate Ice Cream Book: Over 500 Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas, Drinks, And More”
Yes, Bruce makes, tastes, and practically lives ice cream for a living. How cool izat?
Bruce has written lots of “Ultimate” cook books, but “The Ultimate Ice Cream Book” tops the list. A quarter of a million folks have it on their shelves.
“Ice cream is the one big indulgence we won’t give up,” Bruce told me.
And how. Even though cooking “lite” is all the rage—and Bruce has filled hundreds of magazine pages with recipes that wring the calories out of both common and fancy food—all that sacrifice gets negated by our penchant for desiring fancy ice cream dishes. Americans eat 25 pints of the stuff annually. California produced 130 million gallons of ice cream in 2007 to meet the demand. Yup, we’re number one.
Personally, I’m all for indulgence. It’s even better when an expert on ice cream makes you something to indulge in. In this case, it was a Cable “Car”-a-mel Sundae. Bruce scooped some vanilla and some dulce de leche ice cream into a dish, then let a generous stream of caramel sauce find its to a soft landing on the ice cream and finally topped the whole thing off with handful of salted peanuts and a maraschino cherry.
Yeah, not bad.
Ok, so you’re thinking, “what’s this got to do with Italy and Gelato?”
Well, here’s the thing: Bruce did write a book that focused on such topics as ice milk concoctions—which is what Italian gelato is, really. That book carries the unweildy title of “The Ultimate Frozen Dessert Book” and doesn’t sell as well as the ice cream book.
Bruce sees a couple of reasons for this. One is the title, which doesn’t really mention concoctions like gelato except in the longer title. The other is that he found he had to add just a little cream to the gelato to make it taste like gelato.
Turns out that Italian cows produce milk with more fat content naturally.
But when you think about it, the difference between Italian Gelato and American Ice Cream—both symbols of the democratic pursuit of happiness in their respective countries—is the same difference you see in the pizza. Italians love a few, distinct flavors, with every element contributing to the whole. Americans like that pile-it-on thing. The more stuff on the pizza (enough so that you have to bolster the dough) the better. Who cares if you need a fork lift to get the sucker outta the oven!
You know what? I’ll let you in on a little secret. I like it all.
I leave you with one of those only-in-America stories that will warm the cockles of your heart. QVC (one of America’s shopping channels) once offered The Ultimate Ice Cream Book on its network. The book started selling slowly, until a couple folks called in and asked, “Does the book have any low fat recipes?”
Bruce mimics flipping the pages. “Yeah, there are a couple.”
After that question was answered the book took off. They sold 7500 copies in four minutes.
Ok, so promise you won’t blame me for your indulgent hunger. Remember: there are low fat recipes in The Ultimate Ice Cream Book. Just like the copy of War and Peace you have on your shelf that you haven’t read yet, it’ll make you feel good that you own such an object with such valorous recipes in it, even as you make yourself a creamy, gooey, sundae…
The California Milk Advisory Board has free recipes from Bruce Weinstein and others. Search for Ice Cream over at: Real California Milk
Bruce Weinstein’s Books
How Wine Should Be Served · 23 days ago by James Martin
Those of you who read this blog more than once in a blue moon know that I am not a fan of formal wine service. I like the cork popped and the bottle plunked down on the table and left for me to handle.
But what if I find myself in a restaurant with a Sommelier? What if the restaurant insists I order the wine through the Sommelier?
I still don’t like it. But sometimes I want to get the most value out of the meal and the wine, and if I’m reviewing the restaurant I want to know how good the staff really is. So, I test them. I tell the Sommelier exactly the kind of wine I’m thinking of, or exactly the place I want it to come from.
Believe me, I’ve been quite disappointed at times. In Ragusa the sommelier was tardy on several occasions, so folks didn’t get wine until after the first course was at the table. When I mentioned local wines, the Sommelier simply pointed to a section of the list, shrugged, and walked away, leaving us to fend for ourselves.
Of course, there are good Sommeliers and bad. But what of the best? What kind of competition do they have to endure to get a reputation as someone who knows every little thing about a bottle of any wine?
Here’s a very interesting article on the Best World Sommelier Competition of the WSA
Interesting. But I wonder, is the detail a master Sommelier is expected to know going to make you really enjoy the wine picked for you?
I dunno. I’m still way too much of a heathen. Get me some local stuff. Put it on the table. Back away slowly….
