Food in Italy.

Well, the food was a shock.  Some friends who had been to Italy told me about how good it would be and I thought I was ready.  But I still made a fool of myself.  I ate a lot of really tasty food, and in spite of an e-mail sent early in the second week that I had gained 42 pounds, I actually lost about a half pound while on the trip, mostly attributable to walking an average of 7 miles each day (which does not count the stairs, most of which went straight up).   Remember - pictures will enlarge if clicked on.

Ate a lot of pizza, mainly for lunch.  Everywhere we went we saw Italians walking about with a quarter pizza slice folded over and eating it while on the run.  I tried that too although I always found a place to sit down and enjoy some of their fine Italian beer.    Most of the pizzas I ate were Marghereta pizzas.  Liked to keep away from meat, although I did try one with ham and one with pepperoni/salami/something. The really good part of the pizzas was the dough - I know that sounds weird but you have to taste it to understand it.

Was their beer as good as German beer?  Of course not, but it will do in a pinch.  We did not find local beers to be prevalent where we went in Italy, and that is the problem.  You order a beer in Italy and they ask “What kind?”.  You will NEVER have that happen in Germany or even France for that matter. They will just bring you their LOCAL beer.  Which will be the best you have ever tasted. Even America now has good beers if you stay local.

A lot of the main meals were delicious because they often surprised us.  Sometimes it was with an extra piece of bread for dipping in the olive oil that was the best either of us had EVER tasted anywhere. Once it was  a piece of bread that was a tossup between cracker and cornbread with toasted Italian cheese (delicious!).  Another time it was a salad dressing with a mixture of olive oil, salt and balsamic vinegar whipped up by our waitress in a spoon with a fork and then put into the salad.  We kept looking up from our plate and smiling as a familiar taste was detected, and we kept frowning as some taste had come to puzzle our memories.  

So their food was tasty. But they could do better.  And easily too.  Here's how.  Start with a couple of pieces of their famous bread. Let you swirl that over a little pool of their famous olive oil with a drop or two of their famous balsamic vinegar on a small plate as a glass of their famous Italian wine or a good German beer is brought to your table. 

Then you could order a fragment of one of the famous Italian salads, perhaps a small mix of onion pieces with dark green leaves and a piece or two of arugula (which the Italians call “rocket”), a slice or two of those great Italian tomatoes and pine nuts or bacon with cumin and lemon juice  made magic by more oil and vinegar. but keep it small, no more than 6 or 8 bites so you can enjoy a couple of sips of their good wine too.  And why not a tiny cup of famous Italian soups like minestrone or ribollita or a small saucer of anti-pasta?   

Now you can order your pasta.  Again, it will be a small helping. More bread perhaps, and perhaps another glass of wine, maybe a different type.  This would be the consecration of the meal because these tastes would be the ones you will remember. Thoroughly blessed with garlic, oil, spices and some kind of a surprise - these would be the tastes that would bring a smile to your lips or maybe haunt you for days. 

There could be a small helping of meat perhaps, for those who like that kind of thing, or fish or chicken but keep it small.  Perhaps another kind of wine.  Hey, this meal is not going to be finished in less than a couple of hours.  And another question, already asked in another blog: why so MUCH white bread and white pasta, and so much meat?  This is really not what the human body needs to continue its constant rebuilding process.  For a week or two, on vacation, this is just a little bit of looking the other way, but for a constant lifestyle, it is not what the human body needs.

And it really doesn't make sense to have as much really good tasting food as Italy has and then be served HUGE helpings of salad and soup and great servings of antipasto and pasta and meat, fish or chicken, and then TOO, if you place a complete order with your waiter he will bring you your salad or soup AND your pasta AND meat all at virtually the same time.   Why?  Why not just put it all, salad, soup, pasta, fish, chicken and wine and desert in a great big pot and roll it in?  Oh well.  Now I’ve had my say.

Finally, how did Italian food on this trip seem to compare with French food on our trip last  year?  Well, obviously this is a problem not easily resolved.  It would require endless trips to the two countries to collect data, determine alternatives, select criteria, evaluate opportunities and so on.  I would need a large number of graduate students to conduct such experiments, or have to dedicate my life to finding the answer.  But I was struck with the thought that perhaps the food in France was more of a glorious experiment with the human soul, a series of unexpected initiations, and mystical steps leading to gastronomic glory, whereas the Italian food was more like precious memories from a previously lived, and mostly forgotten lifetime full of happiness, contentment, joy and good food.  At any rate, we noticed a lot of Italians having their parties at their restaurants and having a blast!

Sorrento

Early morning Sorrento sounds heard while still in bed.  Doors opening and closing in the Bed and Breakfast.  Car tires squishing up a wet road, then cresting the hill and speeding down and quickly vanishing.  Little dog barks:  “Get away from me! Leave me alone! If  you don’t get away right now I will bite!”  Motor scooters slowly whine up the hill rising to a crescendo, then changing pitch as they slowly drone on down.  Big dog barking:  “I’m here!”  “Shut up!”  Italian voices briefly heard as fast steps quickly come and go.  “Click-click-click-click”  of three inch heels on the cement outside the window.  A motorcycle splits the morning, shifts gears  and then slowly disappears.

We stayed at the Villa Adriana which was one of the main highlights of our trip to Sorrento.  The Bread and Breakfast is actually an Italian villa which is operated b y its owners, Andrea and Valerio.  It is a beautiful place and they went out of their way to make our sty there a wonderful memory.  Sorrento was our jummping-ff place for trips to Pompei and Malfi.  It was also a place to collect our wi-fi connections for the iTouch and our new iPad.

Sorrento Navigation.  Street signs are scarce.  Some are hidden.  When you find one you feel proud. Street numbers are rare and inconsistent, numbers on one side of the street bear no relationship to the numbers on the other side.  There are many maps of Sorrento. But they are all the same map or poorly made copies of that map.  None of them reflect what really is there or where you might be.  “Lost” is the standard condition of existence.  Tourists gather under lights with maps held in front of them, then go wandering about looking for street signs.  The fact that some of the street names are written on the maps in something resembling font 2 doesn’t help.  After dark it gets dark unless you are on one of the main streets.  There is some street music but not as much as we have found in other European countries.

Several very deep gorges slice into the town and the vegetation is almost tropical.  Lantana, palm trees, great numbers of lemon trees.  That seems unreal for 40 degrees north latitude.  Cars park partly on sidewalks when you get out of downtown with two wheels in the gutter.  If you step carefully you might avoid stepping in dog doo.  Lots of cigarette smoke/gas.  There is a feeling that you are paying a lot of money to see a second-rate copy of a second class show that you signed up for by accident.  So the villa was wonderful and the day trips were good.  The food was OK but not close to that we experienced in the northern part of Italy.

Pompeii

Walking through Pompeii is like wandering through an great building. You keep seeing things from a different perspective and then you see those things again from still different perspectives a moment later.  You really can't get a handle on the place.  Everybody walks around constantly amazed. 

There are some signs that explain what you are looking at. But they are incomplete, especially for non Italians. One might come away with the impression that those who show the exhibit expected only Italians to come here. And there are not nearly enough signs.  Audio guides help, but it is still hard to find out where you are and where your audio guide is.  One of our two didn't work well, then it later changed itself from English to German.  We kept finding out that we were listening to one description while we were actually someplace else.

The reconstruction does provide an insight to the people who lived here. You can see that it was a large growing city with a bright future. It had already come through a lot, a previous eruption  or two and at least one tsunami.  There are views into the lives some of the people lived here. You can find homes or perhaps businesses that had two, three or more rooms.    

Even here the rudeness of those child-things which otherwise appear to be humanoid teen-agers continues unabated.  One collision with two "boys" forced me through a barrier into one of the "rooms".  And the beehives of tour groups which move slowly across the ruins constantly obstruct your way and even force you off the common path. One tour group will often follow another so closely they both appear to be combined.

Still, there are impressions of what took place here.    Deep ruts cut into the stones which form streets attest to the fact that this city had been a going concern for over 600 years when IT happened. In American terms of today it would have been a city founded before Christopher Columbus’ parents were born, and have been in constant operation since!  The ruts in the large stones in the streets also attest to the observation that Pompei was a noisy city.

The eruption covered Pompeii in thirty feet of ash, totally obscuring it.  And it was some 1500 years before the city was "discovered".  Almost all of the interesting and beautiful items in Pompeii were moved to the city of Naples.  But they couldn't take away the feeling.




There is a Presence that remains here.  There is a Silence that commands your attention.  It has the feel of a graveyard.  People died here.  A city died here.  And more than that, it was abandoned, and then it was forgotten.  Fifteen hundred years is a long time by anybody's measure.  City-states and nations came and went.  The Christian and Muslim religions emerged and grew.  And Pompeii lay buried and forgotten.  And Vesuvius - who did the deed - stood, as it does today, looking over the old city, still keeping an eye on it. 

Italy. Impressions.

ART! 


Bold and slamming, it comes and grabs and shakes you in Italy.  Magnificently lavish and astonishingly exquisite, it is far beyond anything it needs to be or even probably ought to be, and it will stretch  your capacity to comprehend its complexities and leave you dazed as you explore delicate details only as wave after wave of aftershocks reach through your newly expanding awareness.   
That’s art in Italy, that’s true, but that is the ancient 
Italian art.  The modern Italian art is 

there too and it is overpowering also.  It is the astonishing displays of graffiti, trash, noise and cigarette smoke/gas.  That grabs you too, and those memories also come home with you.

Tuscan hillsides run horizontally, marked off in vertical cypress tree metrics and with ancient farmhouses interposed on those sweeping lines together resembling sheets of music stretching into the distance.  Artists are always found seated with brushes and canvas interpreting and transcribing these melodies into another form of art.  This seems a permanent feature of Italy and perhaps is the most relaxing part of the country.

The Amalfi Coast falls, plunging desperately into the sea perhaps in despair  - or maybe rising from it in a great crescendo of triumph.  There is a road from Sorrento down to Amalfi, but that ride is a job best left to the professional bus drivers because there are a LOT of sharp curves and most of them only have one lane, as the curve tightens up, no matter which way you want to go.  Going down, sit on the right side of the bus; coming  back up, sit on the left.  And try not to look straight down.   

Venice waltzes with its sea.  Rising, falling, lifting and sometimes swirling under a little bit of the surface, and it seems to smile as it rises again. Drop by drop, lap by lap, this city carefully performs the most delicate 
fascination with death ever seen by mortal man.  And it now has its new “Veils of Venice”, those delicate stretches of gauze that now obscure 


the great architectural masterpieces of ancient art that people come from around the world to see. Now those tourists to Venice see the modern art form which lights up at night  to show advertisements for a movie or for a new product.  But that’s Italy now.

In Italy, food is another form of art.  Olive oil and wine, and pasta and tomatoes and spices and garlic and  - well, there are surprises here and there as you explore this new world of Italian food. 
 Yet there are nagging questions that you really don’t want to ask about those 
great masses of white bread and white pasta and you wonder about the nutritional value of these encounters with gastronomic glory.

I don’t plan to go back.  Italy to me, has a fatal flaw, and it is the Italians themselves. I found them  to be rude and aggressive. Their land was trashy - trashed by them -  their cities, while filled with ancient art, also presented a dirty and foul mess.  It is not like Germany or France or Austria or even Spain - it was filthy and its subway system was very limited, poorly done and dark. It was a land of endless cigarette smoke/gas, it was noisy, filled with graffiti and worst of all, the astonishing humanoid-like creatures which I at first took to be human teen-age boys, but quickly found to be reincarnate exemplars of vandals from ancient Italy.  I brought home a bruise or two from encounters with them as they knocked me and other passers-by from sidewalks during their hard-swinging and hard-kicking gleeful encounters with each other.  These are powerful memories you bring home and they don’t fade like the bruises they inflicted will.

In fairness (hopefully), I found the northern part of the country to be beautiful, peaceful,  exquisite and delicious.  The farther south I went, the more defensive I had to be and  the more distractions I found present.   The animals were more aggressive, the art less impressive, the food less tasty and the towns harder to navigate around in.  

I brought home a question too.  Why are almost all of the signs at the art shows, ruins, displays in museums, and exhibits only in Italian?  Perhaps they expect only Italians to come to visit these sights?  I doubt that America does any better in this respect, but the rest of Europe is pretty up on this issue.