Dreaming In Italian

Another stay with a Servas host. One nice thing is that these hosts tend to live in places not well known. Giulianova is a relatively small city of 28,000 residents in Abruzzo on the Adriatic coast. There is the old town on the hill and a short drive down to the lido area (area near the sea). My hosts, Aurelia and Paolo didn’t have room in their house because they were expecting their sons, who are both university students to return for the weekend and I arrived on Friday. They did, however, have an apartment in the lido area that their kids use during the summer. It’s a short walk to the beach. I walked around a bit but for me, if you’ve seen one spiaggia (beach) you’ve seen them all. The high points were: lunch on Saturday which Paolo fixed. They both admit that Paolo is a much better cook than Aurelia and since Paolo likes food (don’t all Italians?) he has learned to cook quite well. So the lunch consisted of sole (the fish) cooked over a bed of tiny clams. He removed the clams and added pasta so it was tagliatelle with clam sauce with sole on the side. There was also a little antipasto of a very nice salami and parmigiano cheese (it’s not just for grating you know). The contorno was a green salad. Of course there was a local white wine, probably from someone they know since there was no label on the bottle. Of course I’m kicking myself for not remembering to take pictures of Aurelia and Paolo and their daughter Lucrezia but sometimes it just happens.

Another high point was a visit to a frantoio (olive press). Paolo is in the cleaning products business and was doing a favor for a friend by loaning an industrial grade floor cleaning machine to the friend’s frantoio. So the friend, the proprietor, walked me through the process. People bring their olives which are then processed in batches and the oil returned to the provider of the olives. There is a machine to take off the leaves and stems, then they are washed and sent to the crusher which consists of two large granite wheels that are probably much like they were a couple of centuries ago but now are no longer powered by mules or whatever. Then the resulting paste goes through some kind of process that thoroughly mixes everything. Then goes into a machine that adds water that combines with the oil and spins it to separate the resulting fluid from the pulp. There is something else that happens afterward which was hard to follow in Italian but the end result is very high quality extra virgin olive oil. The proprietor gave me a bottle and I’m thinking really hard about whether I can risk putting that in my suitcase for the trip home. It’s probably great stuff but if it should leak it would be a disaster.

Another highpoint was the dinner out on the last night. Paolo recommended a place (Osteria del Moro) and, fortunately, I reserved a spot. There was no menu but they asked if I wanted the antipasto. There was no choice; there was just THE antipasto. OK, why not?  Apparently it’s quite common in the south, unlike the north, to have an antipasto with a lot of different things. So it started arriving. First 3 plates then more and then still more. A total of nine things and I don’t remember them all; seafood bruschetta, calamari, an anchovie with some kind of green sauce, a bowl of small clams about the size of your thumb, a bowl of little snails that looked like little conch along with a toothpick to extract the little critters, a sea creature that resembled a large shrimp, but different, and is unique to the Adriatic sea, mussels, that’s the limit of my memory. I wasn’t really very hungry at that point but couldn’t resist at least a small secondo so I had some grilled fish. All delicious. “Si mangia bene” (one eats well) in the south of Italy. I wish I had pictures but I’m pretty timid about photographing food when the restaurant is full of people.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard of Ascoli Piceno. “What? Is that some kind of fish?” Well, no, it’s a beautiful city in the Marche. I had heard the name only as a type of Italian wine. Like all cities of any size it has a title; in this case “city of art”. Probably a bunch of cities have that some self designation. It’s major points of interest in the historic center seems to have been built 500-600 years ago although of course the city is much older. The sense of history is ever present in Italy. People live in houses older than our country. Daily life is lived in an environment of great beauty. Of course when living here it must just seem like background. One doesn’t wander around like an awestruck tourist all the time going about one’s daily life.

As part of my wandering, I saw what seemed to be ritual at this fountain. People would stop by for a sip of the water. I didn’t get a picture of them but one woman came by and got her dog into the act.

Speaking of daily life, I have sometimes wondered how you got all of that furniture up to the 3rd or 4th floor of a building with only narrow stairways. Well, you hire a mover with an external elevator.

So as is my habit I wander the streets, have a cafe at a bar in one of the magnificent piazzas and take random photos. I now also go to the information office and they shower me with information. Now I ask about a place to eat where “si mangia bene e paghi poco” (one eat’s well and pays little). I also say “if I were your cousin that had come from America to visit where would you advise me to go?”. That seems to work well and I had a great meal in Ascoli Piceno. I go for the regional specialties and am almost never disappointed.

After lunch I waddled out and walked for around for another half hour or so. It’s really tempting to eat too much. The food is great and the prices reasonable. Yes, I could have skipped the ravioli and had only the fritto misto – which is a real regional specialty. But then I would have missed terrific ravioli. Sigh. I guess I just need to keep walking a lot.

Speaking of food – and I always seem to speaking of food, that night I had yet another terrific meal in the nearby town of Acquaviva Picena nearby. Meg recommended it and again I couldn’t resist both the strozzapretti (a handmade pasta typical of the area) with truffle sauce followed by rabbit with a contorno (side dish) of artichokes plus of course wine, water, coffee and a grappa. You can see a pattern here.

At the end of dinner I drove back in fog so thick you could almost swim in it. Maximum speed of about 20 miles per hour and didn’t feel good about even that. Yet another interesting experience.

I had time on my hands after leaving the BnB at Rosora I so I decided to go to Macerata. I thought that I had been there about 20 years ago but I certainly didn’t recognize anything. It’s a much larger city than I remembered. Like most Italian cities there is a centro storico (historic center). In this case it was another of those old cities built at the top of a hill so everything was up and down. I stopped at the tourist office as I tend to do and got a map and asked for advice on a place to eat. Usually I ask “If I were your cousin that came from the United States, where would you advise me to go where you eat well and pay little (si mangia bene e paghi poco).” Of the choices, the nice lady immediately told me the best place to go. So I walked up and down in the old part of town and then headed for the restaurant. Oh, no! It’s closed for a week of vacation. All of the others that she recommended were in the centro storico and I really didn’t want to climb up and down again so I settled for a couple of tramazzini and a corner bar before heading out of town. Then I headed for the next stop. Another BnB that I found through AirBnB. Another adventure.

Having learned the lesson about never being without a source of charging for my iPhone when I left Rosora I bought a device that plugs into the cigarette lighter receptacle in the car and provides a USB port to charge the phone. When I left Macerata I dutifully put in the address. I was in no hurry so I decided to use the navigation feature again since I had no worries about exhausting the battery. It was a very pretty drive along country roads and the roads became progressively smaller. Finally I was on a road barely wider than one lane and Google maps told me that I had arrived at the destination. BUT the number on the house was wrong. There was a place in front, outside of the gate to park so I did so and started trying to figure out what was wrong. I rechecked the address, reentered it into Google maps and the same result. About that time I noticed in the rear view mirror that a Carabinieri car had pulled up on the road behind me. The Carabinieri are kind of an elite police force in Italy. They are actually part of the military so I don’t know what the equivalent would be in the U.S. In any case I sensed that perhaps someone in a nearby house in this isolated area had concern that maybe I was up to no good. I hopped out of the car and went over and talked with one of the guys. I showed him the address that I was searching for and he told me that I was WAY off base. I was near Potenza Picena rather than Monsampolo del Tronto, the proper destination that was an hour’s drive south. He seemed a little bit annoyed, not very friendly. I imagine that he was a little pissed about having been called by some little old lady only to find a lost American tourist. In any case he pointed me in the proper direction and I made it to the tiny (and of course lovely) little town of Monsampolo del Tronto. At that point of course I realized that trying to use the iPhone to find the B&B would be totally useless so I called Meg the proprietor. I talked to her for a while and then passed the phone to some helpful resident. Then I was given directions out of town and with a couple of more calls to Meg I finally arrived at the destination.

Lesson learned: don’t trust Google maps for a address in a remote location. You can get to a town but an exact address? Forget it. For a non-Italian speaker it probably would pay to get a detailed description (a map would be better) from the proprietor about how to get there. I say map because in my experience Italians are not great about giving directions.

After leaving Urbino I was headed to an AirBnB room not too far away in the relatively microscopic town of Rosora. Google maps on my trusty iPhone gave me two options. A drive through the countryside or take major roads. I was in no hurry so opted for the leisurely drive through the country. I used the navigation part including the prompts. After awhile I noted that when in navigation mode it was sucking power like crazy so I turned off the prompts and looked occasionally at where I was and adjusted accordingly. At first everything seemed to be going quite well but after the second wrong turn and backtrack I noted that the power was now showing in the red at under 20% battery capacity. I persevered and kept getting closer to the elusive Rosora but still was not there when I noticed that I was at about 8% of capacity. Oh dear. I stopped at a service station/bar and asked directions and also asked to charge my cell phone. So I charged it up to 15% and headed out. I finally got to Rosora. The address given was for the city hall. I knew this because I had talked to Roberta the previous day on the phone. She said that I should just go to the only bar in town near the city hall and she would be there being the barrista. Well, I arrived and I didn’t see any bar near the city hall. I called and now noted that the phone showed 3% remaining – 3 PERCENT! So I backtracked in the car and found the place that had german writing on the awning that I thought must have been a birreria (pub) but no, it was the bar and Stefano, Roberta’s brother treated me to a beer while I recharged the phone for awhile and then followed him to the house/B and B where I was the only guest. I didn’t really take any pictures but happened upon a couple on the web, including the bar.  I guess a one bar town is the equivalent of our one horse town.

Lessons learned. #1:Regardless of how attractive it seems don’t take the ambling country road. #2: Get a charger that goes into the cigarette lighter and keep the charging cord handy. Certainly can relieve a lot of anxiety.

I did get directions from Stefano to an Agritourismo that serves dinner. It wasn’t spectacular but was good, well prepared and the waitress was friendly. At the end of the meal they bought 4 bottles of liquids produced on the farm; lemoncello, grappa, an amaro (digestivo) and some other kind of after dinner drink. I sampled them all and they were all good.