Dreaming In Italian

Actually it would be pretty hard to to have a lunch with Mussolini since he has been dead for 67 years, killed by partisans near the Swiss border while trying to escape from Italy. The lunch in question took place on the holiday here commemorating the liberation of Italy near the end of WWII. The location of the trattoria was in Predappio (a little town in Emilia-Romagna)  just across the street from where he was born. It was the usual group lunch with a bunch of italians: Barbara and Vittorio and 21 of their friends (including me). There was a pasta course (the primo), a main course (the secondo) accompanied by side dishes of veggies (contorni), dessert (fantastic strawberries with lemon cream for me), lots of wine and bottled water and of course a bottle of grappa afterwards. Lots of debates about whatever subject all around the tables at increasingly loud volume. It always seems that if an Italian doesn’t feel that he has satisfactorily gotten his point across then he just raises the volume for the next round of discussion. Maybe we Americans are much the same. After lunch we strolled across the street and up a little hill to his birthplace. There is a little museum there but I wasn’t that interested in paying the 5 euro entrance fee. We then proceeded up the road for a relatively short distance to a cemetery where we visited the crypt of Il Duce.

It felt a little strange to be visiting the crypt on Liberation Day of all days and I mentioned that fact to Cesare. He started off on a winding statement that; first of all it was all just history (granted) and that no other country celebrates their defeat. “But Cesare, it has nothing to do with a victory or defeat.” In fact, I wish that I had presence of mind to mention the fact that near the end of the war Italy was, in fact, occupied by the Germans and that I thought that was the point of Liberation day. Anyway I could not deter him and this sparked another discussion among the Italians which I couldn’t follow very well and feared that I had become a pariah due to what I thought was a fairly innocent comment. Anyway everything passed and I did have a pretty good discussion with Vicenzo who did understand what I meant by my comment. I must say that Italians seem a little sensitive about certain points in their history.

Back in our caravan of cars we then visited a store that was completely devoted to Mussolini memorabilia. Another somewhat strange experience. I was really tempted to buy a baseball cap with the statement “Non me ne frega” which roughly translates as “I don’t give a damn”. It was a famous statement of Mussolini’s. It would be fun to wear in the states but I would never consider wearing it in Italy!

I did buy a postcard at the store and also received a giveaway calendar with his smiling face on the front ; well, he’s almost smiling. Plus at the restaurant someone found a pile of business cards for the store saying ” Duce you are always in my heart”.

While it’s nice to shop at a lot of little stores, sometimes I really just want to go to a supermarket. Buying stuff like toothpaste, butter and eggs can be done at the little stores but the prices tend, naturally, to be higher and you generally can’t buy everything in one place. There’s a little supermarket near Porta Saragozza but it’s pretty small, has limited choices and what seems to me lower quality. So I did a Google search to find something more substantial that’s not too far away. I found a Coop (the name of a supermarket chain here). It’s ¾ of a mile from my house with poor bus service so I took my little backpack and walked there and back. This is quite a large supermarket with all kinds of great stuff. They have packaged stuff of course but they also have a section with fresh bread, very fresh fish, a meat market, a cheese section, a gastonomia and a pretty good selection of wines. I forgot to take my camera but the place was very crowded at 10:00 am and it would have been difficult to take pictures anysay. I’ll go earlier next time and take some photos. While I was there I noticed some people were carrying around a little apparatus the size of a large cell phone and were scanning the bar codes on items before putting them in their shopping cart. I’m curious about how that system works when they get to checkout. Certainly in the U.S. many people would succumb to the temptation to scan, say a small can of tuna at $1 when they actually put a premium $4 jar of anchovies in their cart and generally I’d say that the Italians succumb more readily to such a temptation. I’ll ask someone how the system works.

There are a some difference between a supermarket in the states and one in Italy. The first thing that I noticed is that in addition to a bag for the produce there are dispensers for cheap plastic gloves that you are requested to wear when you handle the produce along with a container to deposit the gloves when you’re finished. The second is that you must weigh and label your produce. Each produce bin has a number. You go to a scale that has a touch screen, put the bag on the scale and enter the number of the produce. It prints a bar coded label that you then stick on the bag. Woe to anyone that arrives at the checkout counter with several people behind only to be told that “you idiot, you didn’t weigh and label your produce”. Actually they’re more polite than that but you get the picture. The final difference is that, yes, they do provide bags (plastic with handles) but charge about 25 cents (U.S.) for each one. You are required to bag your own groceries. That’s part of the reason that I knew to bring the backpack. So the items below were almost all bought at the Coop (note the box of shelf-stable milk). The strawberries and bread I bought at little stores on the way back. I think that I mentioned before that the strawberries are incredible but I doubt that they are as good at any supermarket.

There is an interesting side note that I discovered this morning when I made an omelet. The eggs were all individually stamped. This is only done with high quality eggs, but it is really amazing. The code identifies the country and comune (kind of like a county in the states), the actual farm where the chickens were raised, how the chickens were raised or fed (caged, allowed to run around inside a building, free range or organic) and the date that the eggs were laid. So my eggs were from Italian chickens,  uncaged but inside and  laid in the comune di Ferrare (not far from Bologna) on the 16th of April. And they were indeed very good.

Well, it’s not really exactly the street where I live. My house is on a little side street. La casa “house” in Italy is the place that you call home rather than “house” as a structure. In fact most Italians, at least in the cities, live in apartments. Apartments are in a “palazzo”. Yes, the idea of living in a palace is very nice but actually a palazzo is simply an apartment building. The word for building “edificio” is reserved for office buildings and the like. So la casa mia is in a palazzo with 6 apartments in the area of the city called Saragozza. It is quite a lovely area and my palazzo is on a little side street 150 meters up the hill from via Saragozza so it’s very quiet, which I really appreciate. No traffic noise at all and there is a nice park right across the street. One advantage of apartment living is the same as in, say, New York or San Francisco. The population density is such that there are lots of services in the neighborhood. So I consider my street to be Saragozza. It has a bunch of bars (that’s a caffe to you), tabaccaie (tobacconists), trattorie, edicole (book and newspaper stores) , parrucchiere (beauty shops) and a number of specialty food shops for bread, meat, cheese wine and liquor, pastries and fish.

There are also a travel agencies and several real estate offices. All of these are within easy walking distance. There are probably others but those are all that I remember from my walks along the street.

As a side note, a tabaccaia of course sells tobacco products but much more. You can recharge your cell phone, buy bus tickets, stamps, envelopes, gum and mints, lottery tickets, tissues, send faxes and god knows what else. Yet another side note, most people pay for a certain number of minutes usage on their cell phone and when it is running low you go into a tabaccaia, give them your number and 10 euros and presto you’ve added a bunch of minutes (in my case about 50) to the minutes available for calls and messages on the phone. There must be 50 shops of various varieties within a kilometer walk (0.62 miles) from where I live so I took some pictures of just a few. They are roughly in order starting from the Porta. I’ve also included a map. Click on any image to be able to see a larger version.

Pasquetta is a holiday here. It is the Monday after Pasqua (Easter). Generally people spend Pasqua with their families and Pasquetta feasting with their friends. My friend Vittorio and his lovely wife Barbara invited me to join them in the mountains with a bunch of their friends. They were already in the mountains since Barbara’s parents live there but they arranged a ride for me with their friends and I went in one of the three cars into the mountains. By the way on some of the higher mountains it had snowed the night before and they were beautiful.

We were 12 in all. We ate in a nice place and they brought the menu. I was looking at it and trying to decide which things that I would have when Barbara told me we would have ALL of them. Well, we missed some of them, perhaps they ran out since there were three or four other tables with at least 10 or 12 people in each group. I didn’t take any pictures but at the end of the meal a waiter took a picture of all of us. So here is the menu along with the translations.

Primi Piatti First Course

Tortelloni di Bianca Tortelloni                                                 (big tortelli) with a very light sauce – maybe just oil an herbs

Modenese Burro e Salvia                                                           some kind of soup from Modena (we didn’t have this one)

Talietelle ragu’ e funghi                                                               Taglietelle (fairly thin fresh pasta) with ragu’ and mushrooms

Torellini in brodo                                                                          Tiny  tortellini in chicken broth (fantastic)

Secondi Piatti Second Courses

Cotelette di Angnello                                                                     Lamb Cutlets

Pollo fritto                                                                                         Fried Chicken

Arrosto di Agnello                                                                         Lamb Roast

Arrosto di Farona                                                                          Roast Peasant (the best of the meats)

Verdure a Tema                                                                             A bunch of different veggies (not sure about “tema)

Dolci a Buffet A buffet with about 8 -10 different desert selections

(you could have one or all – and seconds)

Bevande Beverages

Caffe’ and Liquori Coffee and booze

My opinion of the food:

All of the primi were excellent – especially the tagliatelle and the tortellini in brodo. In general i secondi weren’t very good except the faraona (pheasant). The dolci (desserts) were great. The wine that we had at our end of the table was lambrusco which is a Emilia-Romagna specialty, specifically from Modena. It’s a slightly fizzy red wine that goes well the the somewhat heavy foods of the region. I don’t have much to compare it to since very little decent examples are imported into the U.S. but it does indeed go well with the food and I liked it. The grappa was of good quality and they gave me the remainder of the bottle to take home with me.

The price for everything, and I mean everything including the wine and grappa was 28 euros each – about 37 at current exchange rates. Certainly the food wasn’t optimum but the price was pretty good and the company was a lot of fun. Of course I struggled as always to understand what people said to me but managed reasonably well.

When they said beverages, this meant probably 8-10 bottles of wine for our table plus as many bottles of water as we could drink. At the end they also brought grappa and lemoncello and anything else that anyone wanted. After we finished that they bought another entire bottle of pretty decent grappa for the table. Fantastic!

A good time was had by all and I was home by 7:00. Certainly no need for dinner tonight.