Talk to Me of Italy · Mar 11, 02:00 PM by James Martin
Fun times. Our new Canon EOS 7D come yesterday (The price has finally come down off suggested retail at Amazon: Canon EOS 7D 18 MP CMOS Digital SLR Camera with 3-inch LCD (Body Only)
Nice piece of kit. Blazing fast focus. I’m still playing with the High Def Movie mode.
At the same time I’m playing with this camera, I’ve been busy at work on the Wandering Italy Facebook Page. I figure since I travel a lot and have comments turned off in the blog, the facebook thing would be for a way for me to interact with you. So head on over if you want to tell me to write more about attending the 2010 Giro d’Italia or you’d like to see more videos of Italy or something. Or you can just say “Hi” and ask me about my new toy.
I’ll also be posting some shorter comments on things I see on the net that I like, or I’ll talk about the weather in the Lunigiana when I’m there (less than a month, stay tuned).
Let’s have some fun with this.
Filed in: General Italy Travel
Italy Travel Toolbox
- All About Italy Rail Passes
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- Italy Autostrada Map
- Cinque Terre Hiking Map
Delta of Italy Exotica · Mar 5, 10:20 AM by James Martin
Martha and I have just celebrated the wondrously arcane task of cobbling together her Italy Travel Fan Page by spending an evening listening to a cd of Italian music called Putumayo Presents: Italian Café
Yes, the era spawned paparazzi, men who took snaps of celebrities from the shadows, mostly women attached to the arms of handsome and nouveau-wealthy men. It was a time of machismo. Men were in.
But something changed, maybe around the time Italy had its “economic miracle” in the 80s. The edge seems to have suddenly come off the machismo, as if we noticed all of a sudden that the prosciutto was pink and feminine, unlike the ruddy redness of the cured hams of Spain, for example.
I got thinking about the people I follow on twitter who talk about Italy with passion. Mostly women. Then, too, there are women writing books about travel in Italy for women, like Susan Van Allen in her 100 Places in Italy Every Woman Should Go (Travelers’ Tales)
Why, there’s even special parking now in the autostrada rest stops. Lady park. Nice.
Get yourself gussied up and head over to the Lady Park some day. Change is good, isn’t it? (But paper money is worth more.)
I wish they hadn’t changed the music though.
Filed in: Italy Travel General
Italian Food | Italian American Food · Mar 2, 04:53 PM by James Martin
Last Sunday night we headed over to Joe and Eddies in San Francisco. Joe and Eddies offers “Italian Cuisine” like they used to serve in the ’70s. Maybe the ’60s, too.
The thing is, we didn’t expect great, traditional “Italian” food; the draw was the rat pack impersonators, especially Matt Helm as Dean Martin (warning, “Italian” music).
Ok, so the crowd was mostly old farts our age, people who remember Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Joey Bishop, and Sammy Davis Junior with particular (or perhaps peculiar) fondness. We sat in rapt attention as “Dean” crooned the old songs, his “cigarette” glowing with LED redness while the two olives in his “Martini” seemed glued to the glass.
(I likely have used up my quota of quotation marks. When you bring back the dead, expect some virtuosity in manufacturing the “props” (oops).)
So there we were in front of some of what folks used to call Italian food. You know, huge, heaping platters of all manner of meats troweled with tomato sauce so thick you could use what’s left over for Spackle, providing your walls didn’t mind the phosphorescent redness of it.
To be sure what was in front of us was Italian-American food. Now, there’s the rub. How do you review something which, like the performers, was brought back from the dead in an interesting way?
Surely you’d never find a thick, unctuous tomato sauce redolent—NO! REEKING of—garlic in Italy. (If you’ve never been, don’t be disappointed if your taste buds don’t get assaulted by the over-concentrated fumes of such a sauce; this kinda thing is virtually unknown these days in Italy).
On the other hand, we’re not reviewing “real” or “traditional” Italian food here. We’re looking at a reproduction of what Americans did to the thought of Italian food. They jazzed it up. They boosted the flavors to “heights unknown” as some tarnished TV chef might say. It’s the characteristic that sets America apart, this idea of cramming all manner of food ingredients together until the whole shebang doesn’t just sit placidly on your tongue while you contemplate its honesty and freshness; we feel compelled to transform most food into a goddam buzzbomb going off and rattling your senses. It’s not food, it’s an experience: you can’t taste the pork ribs under that sauce, or differentiate them from the hunk of pork shoulder; blanketed by all that sauce there are simply lumps of different texture, some still with bones. But you know you’ve eaten when you’re done. So does every one else. There’s that raw garlic we love and think the Italians do, too.
So, you know what? I sorta liked it. I wouldn’t want to eat it every day. It would mangle my taste buds into a useless clot within the month. But it was honest, authentic and true to its roots. The concept was clear, unlike places like the Olive Garden, where the food advertises itself as authentic while it’s almost pure American or at least badly tarted-up Italian.
But that’s the thing, isn’t it? In Italy, the cuisine is codified through social controls that allow only for the minuscule modification of traditional recipes. What I’m sayin’ is this: Italians will refuse to eat food you’ve cooked for them if you haven’t salted it right or you’ve let the gnocchi cook a half a millisecond too long. Don’t try this at home if your feelings are easily hurt.
In America, however, the sky is the limit. You can cook just about any damn thing with just about any number of other odd ingredients and folks will say, “golly, that’s, well, interesting!” They will even have a second course if you force it on them. Folks are easy.
Which is why we don’t have a national, codified cuisine. At least we don’t have one not put on our platters by immigrants anyway.
Or maybe the 70s were just a superior time when minimum wage was enough to live on and we went out in our cars with their 400 cubic inch engines just waiting to burn the tread clear offa the tires because tires were cheap and so was gas.
Those were the days, eh? No candy-ass buckling up of them seat belt thingies either.
Which reminds me of Dean Martin:
When I die I want to die peacefully in my sleep just like my father did. I don’t want to go kicking and screaming at the top of my lungs like those other people in the car he was driving.
(There are other ideas of Authenticity in Italian cuisine floating about in the web-o-sphere these days. Try: Food For Thought: Evolving Ideas About Italian Cuisine)
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Italian Music: Creuza de Mä and Roof Tile Rabbits · Feb 18, 03:15 PM by James Martin
Odd what connections come up when you blog about beloved and furry pets masquerading as food for the down and out (see On Tuscans Eating Cat if you can stomach it). Mike, a reader who keeps me from reasonable hours of sleep by twisting together new paths in my neural network (or something), brings up the song Creuza de Ma by the Genoese cantautore Fabrizio De Andre. It’s a beautiful song in Genoa dialect that mentions going into a tavern to eat a dish characterized by “an apparently widely known phrase (in Italian), ‘Lepre di Tegole’ – rabbit of the roof tiles, i.e. cat.”
Whatever you think of De Andre’s pasticcio in agrodolce di lepre di tegole—baked tubes of pasta with sweet-sour “hare of the roof tiles” or cat—the song is a fabulously meaty one about those odd intersections—between the sea and land, between the normal and the odd, between the endless voyages of the mariner and “normal folk”. So the food the mariner imagines sitting down to at the casa dell’Andrea alternates between normal and odd:
fried little fishes
sheep brains
lasagna with 4 sauces
baked pasta with cat
which reflect the oddness of the life of the mariner, the endless traveler trying to return to his roots, or trying, at least, to ferret out what is normal about those imagined roots. I go through it every time I return to my ancestral home, Illinois, from Italy. The food is certainly a bit different there. And white. Very, very white. And the meals are wineless. All very odd.
In any case, hear the song sung in the Genoese dialect: italian music: creuza de mä
YoGen: Get a Charge Out of Pulling a Ripcord on Your Vacation · Feb 14, 04:07 PM by James Martin
This is the time I usually start thinking of equipment for my spring jaunt to Italy. By equipment I mean the electronic things one needs to get information onto the web.
You see, I’ve just gotten back from 10 days in Palm Springs, doing some research for the nascent Wandering Palm Springs, a sort of sister site for when the temperatures in Italy fall and you need a place to go with your rat pack.
Anyway, while listening to other travelers in Palm Springs, I heard a lot about all the crap the average connected tourist has to carry. The battery chargers alone will give you a hernia.
So what if you could just pull hard on a ripcord and WHAM! your electronic doodads are charged?
(Then again, what if you did this on a plane?)
Anyway, that seems like the principle behind YoGen, which sounds to me like a Star Trek character who is cute as all get out but carries some odd thoughts about sexual relations with female robots stuffed in the bowels of a spaceship heading for Uranus…
Anyway, if you’ve been out in the field and your iPad is drained and your iPod is sagging, you might want to check out YoGen. It’s got that see-through plastic thing going that’s all the rage—-and lots of gears. Tell me how it works fer ya, willya?
Filed in: Italy Travel Tips General
Perfect Scrambled Eggs? · Feb 8, 08:57 AM by James Martin
This recipe for Perfect Scrambled Eggs is getting lots of play among internet foodies these days. It involves a cobbled together double boiler.
This is a pretty fussy way to do it I think. The double boiler is really just a crutch to ensure that the temperature of the pan in which you cook the eggs doesn’t get hotter than the boiling point of water.
Here’s my recipe for perfect scrambled eggs.
Gently whisk eggs with a little water and set aside. Jab a toe of garlic with a fork, so that it sticks in the tines. Jab it lots before it sticks if you want more than a tiny hint of garlic in your eggs. Meanwhile, heat a saute pan under a very gentle heat. If you have an electric stove this should be easy. When the pan is warm add a tablespoon of butter, which should melt luxuriously but not bubble furiously or darken in color—throw it out if it does and start over.
Then tip your bowl of eggs and let them gently slide into the warm pan. After a few seconds start gently forking your eggs. See? The tines of the fork can’t do any damage because they’re covered with the garlic. Clever, no?
Just before the eggs are “done”—they should still glisten wetly, tip them into the plate and let them set a bit so that they finish cooking.
Then season and eat. (You don’t add milk or salt to the eggs before cooking because it toughens them.)
That’s how I do it. Except for the times I chop some pancetta in the eggs before cooking that is.
TSA and Excess Baggage: Hiring Convicts Is Good · Feb 5, 09:12 AM by James Martin
I’ve always wondered how long an outfit like UPS or FedEx would last if they “lost” packages with the regularity of the airlines. Nobody seems to care that airline luggage seems to go missing, least off all the US government agencies in charge of looking into such things. I wonder why that is. Could be the TSAs fixation on shoes, but who knows for sure? The thing is, if nobody cares about missing baggage, can that fact be exploited in an effort to kick-start the economy?
If recent news of the TSA’s insistence that an new hire with a conviction for stealing get full access to your baggage is any indication, I’m suspecting that the Feds have determined that not enough baggage has gone missing in recent times and they have a clever fix in mind. (see: TSA Tells Richmond Airport to Give Convict Full Airport Access)
Before you call me an my idiotic ramblings ridiculous, let’s do something different. Sure, the media is picking up the TSA story and clucking their tongues over it with the fervor of jolly religious dingbats convinced of their own moral superiority while running off with a random selection of foreign children. But, I’m always trying to think along the lines of my anthropology mentor Marvin Harris. Marv wrote a bunch of books analyzing apparent cultural oddities. He could explain, for example why Indians don’t eat cows and why it was good for Indian society as a whole that they didn’t—even when protein was scarce (Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches; you should read it). Let’s put on our Marvin Harris Thinking Caps ($29.95 at geeks-r-us).
The economy is in a slump. New products aren’t moving. American jails are bulging at the seams, threatening to explode. The unemployment rate is high.
So, it is entirely logical and good that we hire convicts, especially if we can get them at bargain-basement salaries. It relieves the pressure on the US crack prison system (few countries can come even remotely close to the participation level of US prisons) and employs the unemployable.
Now, if you can travel today, especially to a foreign country like Italy, you are, by definition, flush with cash—mainly because so few people outside of Goldman Sachs execs have any. What if we hired convicts, pay them little, but allow them authorized access to all the cool stuff we’re smuggling into the country from Europe, like our Salame Toscana?
So, despite the fact that the pay is so low that the newly hired folks can’t afford food, we can rely on the fact that the resourcefull among them can get boundless energy from the prime preserved pork that nobody could reasonably expect to get into the country anyway.
As we know and many have experienced, every once in a while a whole bag is stolen for its cash value. You can’t get around that.
But that’s good for the economy, too. You lose your bags. You need new luggage. You buy it. The economy jerks spasmodically into action. People in China start stitching for a nickel an hour, making $400 bags by the boatload. Travelers buy bags they lack. Corporate baggage barons buy yachts. Middlemen head back to their “offices” and start stuffing countless dollars into pole dancers’ bras again! Money flows, especially to crack pushers. Good times are here la-di-da!
So, to summarize: low TSA pay to convicts with cost-free benefits is a cheap way to move the bowels of a stuttering economy while at the same time giving travelers the warm and cozy feeling of increased security. Relieving the economy of excess baggage creates demand for same and renewed economic strength.
You’ll think my analysis is pretty amazing when the good times start rolling. Soon.
Filed in: Italy News General
Those Dirty Hotels · Feb 4, 08:20 AM by James Martin
TripAdvisor, the travel site that’s gained fame and fortune from using unpaid content from users to create an online travel empire, is in trouble for a list of the UKs dirtiest hotels it published recently. Turns out hotel owners want an EU commission to start looking into limiting anonymous reviews. Hotel owners would like make sure that “reviews are posted by genuine guests and not by rivals or people simply out to cause mischief.”
I’d have to agree. Anonymous reviews are pretty worthless unless there’s a critical mass of them. Sure, eventually you can learn enough to spot a clunker with pretty good accuracy, or at least you think you can.
The difference between (good) professional writing and anonymous drivel is in the details—no matter if the subject is pornography or hotel reviews. A pro can’t say “the room was too small” without defining exactly how many square feet too small is. A porn pro can’t say “it was gargantuan” without a ruler and…well, you get the picture.
It’s odd reading reviews that trumpet the idea that “service was not up to snuff” when we don’t know what snuff is, or what level of “service” the reviewer expects. Is “service” what’s provided by information gleaned from the staff? Or is bad service defined by the fact that nobody carried your 2700 pounds of luggage up to the room with a smile the minute you arrived? The degree of goodness or badness is always related to expectations, and a good reviewer has to be a slave to that fact. An anonymous unpaid reviewer isn’t necessarily a slave to any facts, and there’s the rub.
Besides, cleanliness isn’t the half of it. One of the memorably bad hotels I’ve ever stayed at was one of the cleanest. It cost more per night than I usually spend for a week in a self catering apartment. It had two bathrooms and a little office with a sofa. Every day the maid came in an rearranged my stuff on the desk so I had little chance of finding or making use of it, then turned on each of the 37 lights so that when I came home at midnight, stanco, or “tired as all get out” as we say in America, and pushed my card key into the wall I was greeted with an explosion of light. If I my tired eyes didn’t snap wide open from all that, I was certainly wide awake hours later when I had finally managed to extinguish all but the one light I’d need to turn on at night—what little was left by then of the darkness of it.
I don’t need a gargantuan room. Just a quiet place and a comfy bed without critters, a bathroom that works right and a staff that leaves me and my stuff alone. Now you know.
Here’s how I find hotels. (Hint: good companies limit reviews to folks who’ve stayed in those hotels, it’s not rocket science to program this stuff.)
Here’s the article which inspired this post.
Filed in: Italy Travel Tips General