Padula and the Certosa di Padula · Jul 16, 11:56 AM 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? · Jul 14, 05:15 PM 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.
Taking Trains in the Lunigiana · Apr 29, 10:48 AM by James Martin
Robert Bishop offers up some great Tips for traveling in Italy by train for visitors who are looking to buy point to point train tickets in Italy. (Many tourists really, really want to buy tickets in advance and many have a great deal of trouble doing so. It isn’t very difficult, really.)
But please, whatever you do, use the yellow machines and validate your ticket before you board your train. It’ll save you lots of money. Here in the Lunigiana, and in Liguria, they’ve cracked down; there is an instant fine payable on the spot issued to violators no matter how much you grovel. The only concession I’ve seen is on our little Aulla-to-Lucca motorino, where the conductor sent four British tourists back to the station to validate their tickets while the train waited and the rest of us looked on accusingly. They returned sheepishly, the wool of ignorance no longer pulled over their eyes.
Last spring we were even required to show a tax official the receipt we got from buying a couple of items at a bread store. We’ve never had to do that before.
From the timing, I’m wondering if this cracking down wasn’t part of Prodi’s economic reforms—reforms that really appeared to be working to return some money to government coffers after Italy’s deficit widened a few years ago. Will these sorts of things relax as the new administration concentrates on ways to gift the rich with tax cuts? Stay tuned.
Castello di Poppiano - Why Not Pretend You Live in Italy? · Apr 12, 10:59 AM by James Martin
Down below, in a post entitled Poppiano Castle and the Colli Fiorentini, I wrote about the experience I had in Chiant Colli Fiorentini. Since then, I’ve been looking at the pictures and turning the whole experience around in my mind. Here’s what I’ve come up with.
Let’s say you want to take your sweet honey on a vacation. Let’s say you have to sense not to envision the kind of vacation where you trudge around all day looking at beautiful buildings full of art or artifacts of ages past while stopping every once in a while to spend a major fortune on food at a restaurant.
Let’s say you promise him a week of living like an Italian. Furthermore, I promise it won’t cost as much as that other, more hectic kind of vacation that everyone seems to expect today.
First off, you want to stay in a place that reflects the style of Tuscan vernacular architecture. We’re talking about living in a stone building with big, old, chestnut roof beams, tiled floors, crazy angles and steps everywhere—with a good view, of course. It should be close to things Italians would want to be close to. It should be rural—preferably in the midst of vineyards—but not boringly so.
We found that Le Torri Vacation Apartments fit the bill nicely. We stayed in an apartment there that had everything—from television to dishwasher—that that Italian with a bit of money might have. But there was an added bonus. On Saturday, the day you probably arrive, they lay out a big buffet a dinner time, made up of traditional foods cooked by an Italian mom. Imagine. Well, you can’t if you don’t have an Italian mom. Trust me then, it’s an experience you won’t want to miss.
So suddenly instead of being in a dreary hotel, you have an apartment in a building that functions kind of like a rooming house of the type that pre-war Brits in old, black and white movies might have favored. There were enough Brits at the dinner to set the tone. And they were a group of some of the most interesting people I’ve met. There were musicians, painters, professors, and even an ancient manuscript photographer (I’m kidding, he wasn’t that old). There were also well-behaved children. Imagine.
(Oh, and just in case you think you might miss the info a hotel might give you, Gabrielle, the guy who runs the place, can give you a map and tell you what’s going on in the region.)
Ok, so here’s the good part. You wake up on a beautiful Monday morning. The Chianti you let slide down your throat the previous night is gone, but the bottle remains with the cork beside it. After your coffee, you grab the bottle, the cork, and the arm of your sweet honey and amble down a country lane lined with cypress, just like you might expect to see in the Tuscany art you would have been looking at with a blank stare in a museum in Florence if you took one of those onlooker vacations that everyone takes.
After 20 minutes or so you arrive at a castle and borgo. The castle is called Castello di Poppiano. You walk up to the little shop on the lower level of the castle and peer in the windows. Someone’s there. Good. You push open the door and find the spigots for the wine. Yes, you’re going to buy some wine from Chianti’s legendary vineyards. Furthermore, you’re going to buy it like you would gasoline; you’re going to grab the pump handle and pump three quarters of a liter into your bottle and then, hopefully stop, especially if you’ve chosen red. You will cork your bottle and pay less than €2 for the whole deal. It’s way cheaper than gasoline for the rental car, especially a rental car in Italy.
If you are thinking of having a great meal, you might also pick up a bottle of Castello di Poppiano’s famous dessert wine, Vin Santo. They make it the old way, right in the big tower of the castle, in what they call the _ Vinsantaia_. It’s quite a process, starting with Malvasia grapes that dry on mats at the base of the tower and continuing with the wine that’s aged for years in chestnut and oak barrels stacked along the walls of the tower like you see in the picture on the top left.
Then, after dropping off your bottle at your little love nest, you might continue ambling into the nearby town of San Querico for the rest of your supplies for dinner. Don’t want to cook? Well, you can always wait until the evening and go to the alimentari con forno, the little grocery store that happens to have an oven that cranks out all manner of good breads and pizzas after dark.
You can go out for dinner, of course. This is wine country after all. Wine and good food goes together. You won’t likely get a bad meal in this part of the world—and the house wine here is a big cut above most house wines in Italy. It will cost you €4 or so for a half liter.
Admit it, this isn’t a picture of a bad life, is it? This time of year Le Torri is a steal.
But wait, with all this eating and drinking, we might as well think of a little exercise. Sure, in early spring you can walk the vineyards as we did, hunting for wild asparagus like real Italians, but you can also bike. In fact, you can get a tour of Poppiano castle and its wine and olive oil facilities at noon, then hop on a bike and tour the countryside for fewer Euros than you might think.
Tuscany Bike Tours runs an amazingly cheap bike tour through this corner of Chianti. They charge a mere €60. You don’t even have to have in your possession a pair of brilliantly colored spandex shorts; you’ll still get lunch and a cafe break, the tour, use of a bike and a helmet to wear. If you’re a wimp like me you can hop in the sag wagon any time you want, all included in the low price.
Interested in the Italian lifestyle for non-Italians? Take a look at our Poppiano Castle Pictures for a start. Then make a reservation at Le Torri (here’s Martha’s review of Le Torri). Then find out more about the folks who own (and have owned for a very long time) Castello di Poppiano
Classic Florence - Fiat Cinquecento - Sophie Drives Us · Apr 2, 07:36 AM by James Martin
I’m always looking for new ways to tell tourists how to “experience” Italy. Sure, you can traipse around from museum to museum looking for the art you’ve read about in a schoolbook somewhere, stopping every once in a while for a gelato while hoping it didn’t start life as a chemical slurry in a factory in Brooklyn. But that’s just what tourists do…
Instead, we took a ride in a freshly restored Fiat Cinquecento, the car Italians see as the classic Italian vehicle. Shoot, it almost brings tears to their eyes when they see these things. A true “people’s car,” this thing can be parked anywhere, at least by the Italian “rules” of parking.
We went through town with Sophie, the owner of the innovative Touring Club 500, giving us the insider look at the city. Then we zipped out of town to where the better-off-the-you-and-I experience Florence, a Tuscan dreamscape of narrow, walled streets with the occasional block of houses set right against them and those mysterious, gated villas, their winding graveled drives lined with cypress and the balconies shaded by Umbrella pines.
You wanna see the real Tuscany? Hey, maybe you should get behind the wheel of a Fiat Cinquecento and let Sophie guide you.
More on Cinquecento Tours: Touring Club 500
(Oh, and click on the picture if you wanna see the Fiat Cinquecento much bigger. It might bring tears to your eyes. Watch that keyboard!)
Going Nuts in Sarzana · Mar 10, 09:38 AM by James Martin
Monday morning is usually a day when most small stores are closed in Italy—yet today Sarzana was hopping. There were vendors all over town; trucks and tents were strung through the streets and squares.
It was the festival of the big nuts. I read it on a poster. I didn’t know if you were supposed to get a little crazy or they were going to measure something usually quite private, but count me in for any Italian festival.
Actually, it was the festival of the big walnuts, which I suppose are blooming this time of year. I’m bad with trees. I can never remember their names or when they bloom. Come to think of it, I’m pretty much that way with people, too.
In any case, we snaked through the throngs of people squeezed between stalls laid out in the streets. You could buy canaries, olives from all over Italy, transparent underwear, soup pots, high heeled shoes, Peruvian knick-knacks, or get a sausage sandwich—or better yet a panino stuffed with porchetta, my favorite Tuscan/Umbrian street food. Here’s what you look for:
Yes, it’s a young piglet stuffed with rosemary, garlic, salt (lots of salt) pepper and other things probably best left unmentioned, roasted in a wood-fired oven and laid out on the counter of a deli built into a trailer. You just belly up to the porchetta truck and ask for a panino di porchetta. Don’t ask for a panini unless you want more than one. Panini is the plural of panino (Americans often get that wrong because they are taught by the dingbats manning industrial food emporiums that an Italian sandwich is a panini).
You can point to the pig and ask for “un panino” or hold up your thumb to indicate the number one. Yes, that’s right, don’t point to the sky with your index finger or they might interpret that as “two” (or maybe even “make one for the big guy upstairs.”) Of course, two is better than one, so don’t fight fate, especially when it drops extra porchetta in your lap.
We ate. Then after putting the camera in the car in preparation for shopping at the Ipercoop, the clouds came. By the time we had shopped it had begun to rain.
Winter is fickle. But there’s nothing better to do than wait it out with the help of some truffled lasagna followed by a couple of fat sausages over a pile of canelli and borlotti beans. We’re in Italy; let it rain, damn it.
Cost of an Inexpensive Meal in Sarzana, Italy · Jan 25, 07:26 PM by James Martin
Lots of you potential travelers are searching to see if you can find the cost of food in Italy. Food in Italy – Is it expensive? is one of our most popular posts (second to the topless at the docks in Tellero post, of course).
Anyway, here’s a picture of a chalkboard menu I took in one of my favorite towns near my place in Italy, Sarzana. The place is filled with great restaurants, by the way. The menu below is from a little trattoria/gelateria in the main piazza, quite a pleasant place to hang out on a summer evening.
Let’s see, you’ve got your cold pasta with seafood for 6 Euros—about $9, but remember that ithe price includes taxes and service.
You can get the lunigiana regional specialty testaroli with pesto for 5.20, and gnocchi for 5.50.
But you might like just a second, or meat course. You can get a slab of roasted meat with potatoes for 6.50, or some rabbit with olives and peppers for the same price. 6 Euros will get you a chicken leg with potatoes. Deserts are 2.50, or $3.75. A glass of wine, not on this menu, is likely to cost you less than $2.
So that should give you some idea of what prices were at an inexpensive restaurant at lunch time in Liguria.
If you’re having trouble reading it, see a bigger picture of the menu.
Update on Sarzana: In the process of searching for Sarzana info, I came across this great slide show from the Napoleon Festival 2007
The Essence of Easy Cooking - Spaghetti al Tonno · Dec 3, 11:34 AM by James Martin
What I like best about Italian cooking is that it doesn’t take a lot of fuss to make something particularly good to eat. I’m in a vacation home right now in Southern California. The kitchen is pretty well-outfitted for one of these places, but you don’t want to run to the store to buy a spice whenever you want to cook. That’s where Italian cooking really comes in handy. All you need is a can of tuna, some tomato sauce, olive oil, and garlic. With the pasta, that’s five ingredients. You can gussy it up, of course, but it’s good the way we prepare it, especially if you can get some Italian (or even Iranian) tuna in olive oil.
As your well-salted pasta water comes to a boil (it should be the saltiness of the sea—none of that “one teaspoon for five gallons” crap the food channel dingbats tell you). You heat a pan, add some olive oil and garlic. Let the garlic soften, then add a can of tuna (for two) and a few ounces of tomato sauce. Let it cook through while your spaghetti cooks. If it dries out, add some of that seasoned and starchy pasta water.
When the spaghetti is done, drain and toss in the pan with the sauce.
You’re done. No cheese. Variations? Add capers, chili flakes, lemon zest or all three.
Easy. You can make spaghetti al tonno in a vacation home kitchen, and it will fill you up at a cost that’s darn reasonable.
The Cinque Terre Is Dangerous! · Nov 26, 10:16 AM by James Martin
A while back I got an email from someone who felt it was my duty to warn readers about the horrible danger lurking in the Cinque Terre, a small strip of land on the coast with five little villages that tourists are supposed to visit, according to the guidebooks.
A woman had recently died there—due in large part, the email hinted, to the hush job given to the region’s inherent dangers.
The world isn’t a cakewalk, I muttered to myself. I figured someone who wasn’t paying attention had taken a fatal tumble down one of the retaining walls that keep the trail and vineyards from sloughing off into the sea, or had fallen off steep, warn steps like these.
The overtouristed strip of land, as has been pointed out many times before, is showing signs of wear—and there are few stonemasons up to the task these days of maintaining the more challenging sections of trail.
But the email immediately made me think of some cross-cultural differences in how differently dangers are perceived. I remember when I first climbed Pisa’s leaning tower. Each floor slanted precariously toward the freshly mown grass of the “field of miracles” without a single railing to keep the curiously clumsy from becoming a newsworthy spectacle.
So, being responsible—at least to myself—I clung to the inside wall, my heart thumping like a jackhammer.
(It’s true, many folks hate big government, but expect the itty-bitty government of their dreams to perpetually work at keeping them from getting hurt when they do something insanely stupid. There are now guard rails on the tower.)
In any case, I was wrong. The woman who died had done absolutely nothing wrong, nothing idiotic, nothing clumsy. She was posing for a photo. It was to be one of those grand photos with a stirring, watery background that would steal the eyes away from the subject and make the relatives “ooh” and “ah.”
But, like lots of pictures like this, things got all blurry when something moved suddenly.
The short of it: A giant wave came and washed her out to sea, where she died.
Tragedy, to be sure. I can’t imagine the grief the family suffered after a horrible twist of fate like this.
I’ve walked the Cinque Terre trails three or four times, I’ve eaten in the villages, and for the life of me I can’t figure out where this scene might have played itself out.
And there’s the rub. How does a journalist convey the dangers of a place without knowing where it is? And further, what good would it do, given that this was one of those “perfect storm” type of waves (or so it seems from the press report).
So, what can I do? Perhaps this:
Pay attention! The Cinque Terre is dangerous.
But even more importantly: Make every moment of your life count. You never know, do you?
Torino, Italy in February · Nov 20, 02:06 PM by James Martin
Lots of folks knock Turin, or Torino. When I was covering the Olympics, the NBC crew spent their mornings on such pursuits as likening Torino to Cleveland in the 40s. I don’t know how much of it they had seen of Torino, except for the innards of the media center, but there you have it.
I loved walking around in Turin. Even with the Olympic hype, and all sorts of commercial visual noise battering your senses, it was a special place to wander, camera in hand. And the weather in February wasn’t at all bad most days. Keep that in mind as the dollar sinks (Indians now are shunning the incredibly shrinking dollar in favor of the Rupee, I’ve read this morning), as you might want to plan a trip for the off-season, which for my money is really the on-season, but I’m a photographer, dreamer, and drunkard, not a sun worshiper.
In any case, the purpose of this post was to point you to a nice Torino photo blog updated frequently and annotated in Italian, French and English, as befitting a place with an architecture that stradles two cultures (with an Egyptian fascination thrown in). In any case, see Torino per immagini
And here is my Torino offering (Why must all my pictures lately contain jugglers!?):
