Dreaming In Italian

The subtitle for this book is “A Bittersweet Adventure” and that it is. I have had this book for quite a while. I’ve loaned it out only after having the recipient swear to return it. Usually with books that I have read and liked I just give them away. For some reason when I first read this I was quite smitten. Of course I’m an incurable romantic as well as an Italophile and this book has heaps of both. So I reread it recently with the intent of doing a blog post on it. I had a lot of mixed feelings about it. As romantic as I am, I must say that it is, well, a bit florid. Marlena, the author, has never met an adjective she didn’t like and uses her entire arsenal without reservation. So while I still love it I will say that it is a bit overwrought. In my rereading I started kind of at random at first and it was a happy chance that I landed on Chapter 6 – “Vendemmiamo” – “Let’s pick grapes”. There was such beauty in the communal endeavor of picking the grapes and then celebrating the conclusion of that chore with a fantastic rural, rustic and delicious meal that it was quite a tear jerker – not out of sadness but rather the beauty of it all. There are wonderful characters in the book, not the least of which are the author herself and her Venetian husband. But most of all there is the “Duke”, Barlozzo. I don’t remember his first name or even if it is mentioned. He’s been a resident of this rural Tuscan very small town, village really, for his whole life. He’s lived through the extremely trying, starvation times during the big war and has knowledge of how to manage everything. Mushrooms, truffles, chestnuts, olives, cooking a leg of wild boar? Leave it to Barlozzo to show the way. Almost surprisingly a cultured philosophical gentlemen in the most meager of surroundings. Of course he’s quite the rascal as well. You can’t help but fall for him as the author does. The other true star is the community. While it is hard to truly imagine I can’t help but yearn for a community so tightly knit and caring for each other even though everybody knows everything about everyone. That’s one of those tradeoffs that I’ve never been faced with but again never sought out. It does make you wonder how life would, could, be different had the stars been aligned differently.

I actually have cooked two of the recipes from this book. One I cooked before I ever saw this book is called schiacciata with grapes. It was in one of Giuliano Bugiali’s books and I cooked it while staying in a rented cottage at harvest time in the Napa valley. The other is the one with sausages with grapes and I thought that it was great. The recipes are only sort of incidental to the rest of the book but provide a nice enrichment. There is a bittersweet sadness at the end that is profound but you shouldn’t skip to that like I skipped to chapter 6. For that it is really best to start back at the beginning so that you get the full weight of the context.

I truly do recommend it. After all, a little grandiose language is a small price to play for the good feelings that I get from this book.  See if you can make it though without tears. If you CAN make it through that means that you too are a romantic and can’t avoid the tears of both happiness and sadness. And of course you’ll also know what to do with a leg of wild boar if you are ever lucky enough to have one left on your doorstep.

Have you read this book or either of her other two?  Also do you have any favorite Italophile books that you would recommend?

As I got reacquainted with my local library I one day looked over the movie section. Of course since I have such an interest in things Italian I was very curious about the DVD labeled only “ROMA” on the spine. When I looked further and found that it was a Fellini movie that’s all that I needed to take it home with me. I hadn’t seen many Fellini movies. I do remember “La Strada” because it was so stark, had “Zorba” (Anthony Quinn) in it and seemed so allegorical. Of course the big movie for Fellini that made him so well known was “La Dolce Vita”. I had seen that in the past and frankly was not that taken with it even though it was a breakthrough movie in terms of the craft of movie making. I had never even heard of “Roma”. I was absolutely stunned by this movie. Maybe this is for the same reason that I prefer visiting supermarkets and hardware store to churches when traveling – it’s more about everyday life than art. This movie combines both for me. It struck me that Fellini was as much a poet as a film maker. Who’d have thought to outfit a truck and car with movie making gear and set out on the autostrada just to see what would happen like the film clip below. Be forewarned that it is almost 10 minutes long but I recommend it for the apparently serendipitous events. Staged? Who knows but it doesn’t really seem like it.

There are also great scenes in Rome that show such vitality and exuberance. A theater scene with rude comments from the audience, a visit to a house of prostitution are some of the others. The one below also has a food element so of course I like it.

Then there is the one about the ecclesiastical fashion show which like the autostrada sequence is a bit long but hilarious. Priests on roller skates, nuns with winged headgear? Not to mention fantastic colors, flashing lights and mirrors – well, you just have to see it to believe it.

So I don’t know what the critics thought of this film but it worked for me and I highly recommend it. Are you a Fellini fan and what films would you recommend? What about other Italian directors?

Several years ago a friend gave me what I thought was a most unusual cookbook. The title of the book is the title of this post. The author is Pino Luongo, a Tuscan with a very interesting background. In Italy he was an actor before coming to the United States. He is a very successful restauranteur, having opened (and sometimes closed) 16 restaurants in New York, a very tough place. Anthony Bourdain, in his book” Kitchen Confidential” called him “the Dark Prince of Italian fine dining, a man loved and hated with equal fervor by the wide swath of New Yorkers left in his wake”. Quite an intriguing set of facts just to start with, eh? Still, my introduction to him was this cookbook. I had no prior knowledge of him whatsoever. While I have cooked a number of recipes in this book, I would say that the recipes are not what has stayed with me so much. First, let me quote a bit from his own introduction to the cookbook.

“Most cookbooks give exact amounts of this and that, but I never learned about timing and quantities – I did everything by instinct. If you make a mistake in tablespoons, it’s not going to hurt you. You don’t need a prescription for cooking food; you’re the person in charge. Don’t be afraid to follow your feelings. Be flexible, be creative – abandon your inhibitions and have fun. When it looks good and feels right, you’ll know it. Trust yourself – you know better than to stuff anchovies into a profiterole. One day you’ll make something so good you’ll know it’s a triumph that came from your imagination and not some rule or formula. As in love, there are no rules for cooking. Everything should be done with feeling”

So that’s a pretty big quote in more ways than one. The whole book continues in that vein. For each recipe he gives a list of ingredients divided into pantry (oil, salt, canned stuff, etc.), cold storage (onion, celery, parsley, etc.) and market (meat, veggies, cheese, etc). There are no quantities. He says something like (I paraphrase) “ how can I tell you how many mushrooms to put in? If you want it to taste more like mushrooms, put more in!” Following his philosophy has freed me a great deal to trust my own instincts. If you’ve read any of my other recipes you’ll note that I feel free to make modifications and have a sense when something will be good in a recipe and certainly when there is something wrong with a recipe (like some of Mario Batali’s stuff).

There is a second thing about this cookbook that makes it enormously enjoyable. You can just read it. Even if you never cook a thing from it, each chapter has wonderful stories about the chapter contents. For example there is a story in the subchapter on soups “The Soups of Bread and Fantasy”. It is about having a bread based soup, ribollita, in a very humble trattoria in a very humble Tuscan mountain town named Femmina Morta (Dead Woman). It’s a tale of a beautiful day, a beautiful young woman and local tradition – everything in harmony. It’s too long to quote here but believe me it’s lovely and like many other stories in the book  is really enjoyable.

So, no matter what, you can learn a lot from this unusual cookbook. Are there any other cookbooks that you’ve found to have an unusual twist to them?

Learning Italian will probably always be a struggle for me. I’m always amazed when I talk to someone and they say that they just “picked it up”. I know that languages come easily to some people. The lovely D seems to understand spoken Italian better than I do which drives me nuts. Perhaps that’s because she studied French a lot when she was in high school and college while I avoided any semblance of real language study in both cases. The Latin that I studied in Jr. High (or middle school as it’s called now) has never been much help. However I use whatever resources that I can find to help me soldier on with the goal of, if not real fluency, at least respectable ability in the language. I would like to someday be able to strike up a conversation with a stranger in Italy and have a reasonable chat.

The web does offer a lot of options. There are a couple of blogs written by Americans that I follow. One is written by an American woman from the San Francisco Bay Area (a virtual neighbor). I can generally read her blog reasonably well which makes it both good practice and gives me a little more confidence in the language. It is called “Diario di una studentessa matta” – Diary of a crazy student. You can find her blog here. Another blog that I like that is very language specific is also on my blog roll on the right sidebar. This is “Becoming Italian Word by Word”. Diane Hales who writes this blog really likes the language and has written a book about it that I want for a gift one of these day (hear that D?). Her posts almost always describe some interesting Italian words but you don’t need to be trying to learn the language to enjoy it. On the other hand if the language is your goal it is an easy way to broaden your vocabulary. Here is a link to her blog.

Lest I forget, I find Google Translate to be an enormous help. I use it to check my Italian when writing to my Italian correspondent, Massimiliano, and if need be I use it to translate something written in Italian on any website. Also it seems to be built into my preferred browser, Google Chrome. It automatically detects a foreign language and asks if I want to have it translated. I can revert to the original or see the original language for a sentence by hovering the cursor over the translated sentence. How cool is that!

Another blog that I like is really a commercial one. It is maintained by a company that makes language learning software – Transparent Language. I have used their software in the past but seem to have lost the disks – it’s been awhile since I used it. It really was pretty good software and probably has improved a lot since i first got it. Still, I receive their Italian Word of the Day every day by email which gives a word, a usage example and the pronunciation of both the word and a sentence each day. The blog is written in English but has some very interesting and different aspects of life and culture in Italy. Just poke around and you’ll find some interesting things. Don’t be deterred by posts that are very language learning specific if that’s not your goal. You’ll find something really interesting with minimal effort. Here is a link to the blog.

For serious language learners there is a blog from the University of Texas (of all places) that is good for learning and can be quite amusing. This is called “Radio Arlecchino” and provides an audio podcast as well as a pdf transcript in both English and Italian. It can be a little hard to follow sometimes because the vocabulary can be a little advanced but you get a good view of real Italian usage. There are two principle narrator-instructors and I particularly like it when the man of the team says something like, “in English we don’t really have a plural form of “you” except if you live in Texas – then it’s ya’ll”. Here is a link for your amusement.

One last item. Interestingly enough I found, quite by accident, another blog with the identical name to mine, Dreaming In Italian, but the URL has dashes; dreaming-in-italian.com. What a surprise. I left a comment but never heard from the person (male/female? – no indication). The blog has been largely dormant for the last few months but I really recommend the “Italian Slang Dictionary”. You know that you really wanted to know what those guys were saying to each other on the street when they almost collided on their Vespas! Here is a link to the slang.

I hate to leave the post without some photo or video. I hope that you like this one. It kind of reminds me of one of the guys that was in one of my Italian classes.

Any of you Italian language enthusiasts out there, please don’t hesitate to share your own favorite sites for enjoying and learning the language.