I was going to write this post a few days ago. But then I thought that following the U.S. supreme court’s terrible decisions regarding abortion/privacy rights and gun control laws, it just seemed superficial. On the other hand, this post isn’t just about tourism, it’s about the friendships we make along the way, even if they’re fleeting and our time together lasts for just a couple of hours once a year.

The scene is the Piano Grande di Castelluccio. It’s a glacial plain up in the Apennines, the mountain chain that forms the spine of the Italian boot. The Piano is an amazing place, a huge basin, the kind of geological feature that you don’t often see in Italy—especially if your vision of the country is quaint villages, big cities with museums, and picturesque coasts. It’s a wild place, where sheep graze and where you can ride a horse Western-style and pretend you’re in the Wild West. Lots of European vacationers with campers congregate there, forming their own kind of little village as they set up camp and watch daytrippers like The Spartan Woman and me wandering around.

We’ve been going up there for years; it’s about a two-hour drive from our mountaintop. Timing can be crucial for one event, the annual outburst of wildflowers and some blue cultivated lentil blossoms. This fioritura brings a big splash of color to an already stunning tableau. It takes place around the end of June and beginning of July and on weekends, the place is insane. The crowds have gotten so bad that you now have to register online for a parking space and a shuttle to take you to the Piano and the nearby village of Castelluccio.

Unfortunately for Castelluccio, it was nearly leveled by two successive earthquakes in the autumn of 2016. And that’s where this story really starts. Before then it was a friends and family ritual to visit the Piano, then head to the Taverna Castelluccio for a decadent lunch. The Taverna was in a building on the edge of town, and if you sat outside, you had a great view of the expansive lentil fields below. (Castelluccio lentils are small, brown, and don’t dissolve into a brown mush.)

My friend Doug and I first went to the Taverna about eight years ago. We were seated next to a woman with a teenage daughter who was apparently teaching the daughter about good food and wine. She talked to the kid about the dishes, they sampled a bunch of them. They tasted some good wine, and at one point we began talking to her. She’s a pretty well known food blogger and TV personality based in Rome and I wish I could remember her name. At one point, she ordered an incredible dessert wine, and she insisted that we have a taste.

That visit was the first of a few annual visits, with both daughters and one year, with our daughters’ friends. We loved the location, and the food was traditional with a twist, with pasta like homemade spaghetti alla chitarra with the local lentils and fresh ricotta. And since we were near Norcia, the culinary capital of truffle-dense Umbria, a lot of dishes came with the prized black funghi. More than the food and wine list, though, were the owners. The wife in the mom and pop pair would take a seat at the table and chat for awhile. Hearing our accent, she was curious about where we’re from. Not a whole lot of Americans know about the Piano Grande and its delights. We always came away from lunch sated and happy that we made a human connection with the proprietors.

Disaster struck in 2016, with two successive earthquakes. The first was on August 24, and that caused some damage to Norcia and its surroundings, including the hamlet of Castelluccio. I texted the restaurant and asked if they were okay. They said yes and that the restaurant was intact, save for a couple of cracks. They were just waiting for the authorities’ okay to go back. But the second, on October 30, was devastating. Norcia’s cathedral was almost leveled, with only the façade remaining intact. Castelluccio was another story; the town was destroyed and was declared a no-entry red zone. The Taverna and all the other businesses were history.

Or so we thought. I’d seen that it had set up a temporary tent, but for one reason or another we never went. But this year, a friend posted to Facebook that she had eaten there at the more permanent setup outside the wrecked town, and that it was terrific. She urged people to go. So we went—after a few days at home I was eager for another road trip, even if it was to a place I’d been quite a few times, and that’s a couple of hours away, taking us on winding roads through mountain passes in the area called the Valnerina.

Being pensionati, we were lucky to be able to go on a weekday; even on a Thursday the Piano hosted lots of people there for the fioratura. The flowers weren’t in full bloom yet, but we saw enough colors and textures to keep us happy. That, and a run by a couple hundred sheep kept things lively. But lunch was the day’s main attraction for us. The Taverna is in one of two containers outside the hamlet that host a bunch of restaurants and shops. We found the Taverna and we shown to an outside table, as requested.

It’s weird to say that the new site has a better view and is nicer than the “real” restaurant. At least objectively. Subjectively…. here in Italy, nothing is better than saying that something is originale (I think you can figure that out). Unlike the neighboring French, who tend to plaster over cracks and holes in stucco, for example, Italians will leave the signs of aging and use, either to show authenticity, or just because they think it looks better.

If the container was new, the filling was as it always was. The Taverna still trades in slightly creative, upscale versions of local dishes with “km 0” (farm-to-table) ingredients, and we were happy to indulge in a plate of local pecorino cheeses, including one that resembled Brie. The Spartan Woman went real roots and had lentil soup, while I happily indulged in the local pasta, stringozzi, showered with tons of local truffles. She had the truffles atop her trout, while I went off our usual meat-free diet because I had this weird craving for Umbrian sausages. We had some sauteed wild greens, almost like spinach to go with it, and a small pitcher of local wine.

But more than the decent food and the beautiful view were the Taverna’s people. Our young waiter heard our accent and asked where we’re from. When we told him New York he smiled and said the Italian equivalent of “wow.” He kept watch over us the whole time, apologizing for a lag between courses because a large party had the kitchen in caos. The owner came by to chat, and we told him that it was good to be back. “We’ve been here since 2019,” he said. We replied that with Covid, etc., it was impossible to come. No, we said, we were patrons of the original Taverna, and he shot us a big smile.

Before I went up to the counter to pay the bill, I rifled through my phone’s photos to find some of the old place. I showed it to the owner when I paid, and he got teary eyed. “Look, look at the pictures,” he said to his employees, and passed around my phone so they could see what it was like. Still, a little weepy, he gave me a little hug and patted me on the back. “Thanks for looking out for us, and coming back. Please come back soon.”

We will, promise.

Like I said here, we did an Ikea run a couple of weeks ago for some odds and ends. This being Italy, Land of Perpetual Roadworks, we hit a couple of detours going and coming. For some reason on the way back, our iPhone’s navigator took us off the highway and routed us through a town in the mountains, in the Le Marche region, just over the border from our Umbria. We couldn’t figure out why exactly we were on a main street in the small city of Fabriano; we didn’t see any obvious road closures.

But we were intrigued by what we saw. Fabriano looked prosperous; there was a mixture of architectural styles, from baroque and older to some strikingly modern blue glass-sided structures. At one point, the road went through a park. Being conditioned by living in and around Perugia, we scouted for parking spaces, saw some, but didn’t stop. Not with a bunch of Ikea booty in the hatch, anyway. But when we got home, we looked the place up and decided to pay it a visit, especially when we realized the city is only 40 minutes from home.

Okay, so now I’ve put my flame shields up and I’ll explain the headline. Making fun of people who do the Rome-Florence-Venice axis is like shooting fish in a barrel; it’s way too easy. But I’ll say this. If you limit a trip to Italy to those places, you’ll “see” a lot, but you won’t really get what this country is about. Stanley Tucci and Rick Steves tried to remedy that in their TV series. But rather than getting people to explore places on their own, Steves, especially, unwittingly created a sort of cult that follows his guidebooks and shows religiously, following his itineraries as though they’ll fall off the planet if they wander off elsewhere. A lot of people here blame him for singlehandedly ruining the Cinque Terre.

I like what I’ve seen of Tucci’s series. (CNN, for some reason, blocks me from seeing it here.) He goes into the social and political aspects of the culture and food here. They’re often inseparable, like why bread can be so bland here in Umbria (the Pope’s salt tax back when is cited as the main reason). But like Steves, his restaurant choices on the show may throw a lot of business to the places, but they have the effect of spoiling them for the regulars. It’s almost a joke, and my favorite YouTube cooking couple, Harper and Eva as Pasta Grammar, make a point of hiding the name of a restaurant they like so that Tucci can’t ruin it.

Back to Fabriano. We’re usually in a hurry going through airports and we’re terrible at window shopping. But you may have noticed shops in Italy that feature paper from Fabriano. We didn’t know it until recently, but artisans in Fabriano over 500 years ago figured out how to produce paper on a large enough scale to make it a regular medium for writing and printing. I won’t go so far as to call it industrial—the process was fairly laborious—but Fabriano paper was once a really big thing and was shipped throughout Europe. The city’s close connections to shipping ports like Ancona made distribution throughout Europe easy and cheap. In fact even now, a lot of the Euro currency notes in daily use throughout Europe are produced in Fabriano, and the city lies on the rail trunk line between Ancona and Orte/Rome.

And so we took off to see what Fabriano is like. Unlike a lot of precious towns and cities in Umbria and Toscana, Fabriano makes it easy; there’s a big free parking lot adjacent to the park I mentioned above. It’s a short walk through shop-lined streets to the main piazza, a large area that features a fountain that was influenced by our fountain in Perugia, in the Piazza IV Novembre. Like any Italian city, the piazza has a vibrant cafe life. We took a break after our arduous (not!) 40-minute drive to sit with the Fabriani and have that second shot of coffee.

The Spartan Woman and I have a non-routine routine when we visit a new city. We ignore the guides for awhile and just walk around. We look at the shops downtown—Fabriano has lots of pretty high end clothing shops. And we look at how people are dressed and the kinds of cars they drive. In Fabriano’s case, there were lots of women in long, flowing, almost diaphanous multicolored dresses. And there was a high percentage of Audis on the streets; Audis being the brand for the upwardly mobile Italian these days.

After all this socio-economic analysis, we had to eat lunch. TSW found a restaurant online on a central square, Nonna Rina, that looked good. I found its Facebook page and texted for a reservation on its day off; the owners responded almost immediately. It apparently featured a fish menu—we’re mainly vegetarians but eat fish and seafood when we want to splurge or feel decadent. But when we arrived we saw that the fish menu was only for weekends. To compensate, the regular menu has lots of creative, and we found out delicious, vegetarian dishes.

Food porn alert: We had a shared appetizer of a fritto misto, crisp fried vegetables, fried mozzarella balls, and the local delicacy, olive all’Ascolana. These last had a little chopmeat in them; I made the sacrifice and scarfed them up. TSW followed with orecchiette with pesto; I had the local specialty called pincinelle, simply dressed with olive oil, garlic, chilis, and bread crumbs. The pincinelle resemble the Tuscan pici, or Umbrian umbricelle, in being thick homemade long pasta with a chewy texture. But these are made of stoneground whole wheat and, unusual for pasta, yeast. Historically, pincinelle were made from some set-aside bread dough.

The secondi followed, and we began to think we over-ordered. In fact, when TSW asked about side dishes, our cheerful and friendly server told us that the quantities were quite enough and that we didn’t have to order any side dishes, which is common elsewhere in Italy. The Marchigiani, in fact, pride themselves on the generosity of their hospitality, and that pride was in full evidence. We had a little local sparkling white wine, a bottle of fizzy water, and coffees. The price? A princely €55.

At that point, we would have gladly stumbled to our car and driven home. But I’d reserved a spot on a tour of Fabriano’s Museo della Carta e della Filligrana (Paper and Watermark Museum). I love little museums with a peculiar specialty, and this sweet place fits the bill. It’s definitely worth a visit. We paid our lunch bill and walked over to the museum, waiting for it to open after its lunch break. After entering and waiting in the courtyard of the former convent that houses the museum, we were gathered by our guide, who showed us all the steps to medieval papermaking. She was terrific; they don’t appear to do tours in English, but the demonstrations were quite visual. You can just look around without a tour anyway. Our guide must have been a teacher because she’d ask the few kids questions and at times handle the paper. We were treated to a demonstration of some real papermaking, and then satisfied, left to find our car and drive back home through the mountains.

Some thoughts: Fabriano sees few tourists. It’s a real, working small city with a fair amount of industry, including nearby home appliance factories. That said, there’s a pretty large historic center, which is a mix of medieval, baroque, and modern buildings. Its inhabitants seem justifiably proud of their city, and it’s got a hip vibe to it. In fact, that vibe is common in a lot of Italy today—Fabriano, like Perugia and Ravenna and other small cities, feature sushi/poke bars, independent bookstores, wine bars and restaurant workers who know their menus and the history behind them. A lot of restaurants riff on traditional ingredients, and it’s great to see that the country is not becoming one big museum for tourists. Maybe we’ll set cities like Florence and Venice aside for that, while we go on living our everyday lives.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences in everyday living and those Big Philosophical Differences between my two countries. And I start writing about them and then I stop somewhere in the middle. I either get bored, or it seems too obvious, or I’m reacting to a terrible event, like the killing of children in an American school and I get depressed. So I’m going to punt. I said to myself that once I was mostly done with meetings and other people’s deadlines, that I would keep to one of my own, to keep that journalism thing going. And I let it slip. So here goes, one of many posts that step in for something that might have been meatier—but also may have been me whining about something.

That said, living in a place is different from being on vacation—even here in Central Italy. We don’t sit around in scenic cafes sipping Chianti all day, though I guess if I really put my mind to it, I could. But there are dishwashers to be unloaded and loaded, floors that need sweeping, and bills to pay. Especially that last bit. One of the joys of Italian life is that a lot of stuff comes up piecemeal: the real estate tax, the garbage tax, the various insurance policies, you get the idea. Thankfully, you can take care of most of that online.

So we’ve been getting the place into shape. We pretty much skipped over 2020, though I came here to turn lights on and clear cobwebs. Last year we were just happy to be here, so we didn’t really take care of stuff beyond what was necessary. This summer looks like it’s going to be a hot summer, and we’re not flush with Lotto winnings, but we have (courtesy of our prior thrift) a nice pool. I called the people who built it and who do the heavy lifting in opening and closing it, and soon two ragazzi (guys) show up and did their thing. We’re hoping that this year’s weather will cooperate. Last year an incessant wind blew sand into the pool every day from the Sahara, and the water kept evaporating because of that wind. We kept topping it up and the water never really warmed up.

One big part of our day as pensionati (retired people) is our morning walk. We try to get in at least 4.5-5 km every morning. That’s 2.75 to 3.2 miles. It doesn’t sound like much, but the terrain here makes it a little challenging, because we’re up in the mountains. The only flat walk is down by the river, and that doesn’t go very far. The upside is that our walks are ridiculously scenic. The Spartan Woman makes sure we do this at least five times a week; more typically it’s six days in a row until I rebel. She would’ve made a good drill sergeant. The gallery below shows how taking a walk around the block has a whole new meaning here; we were on the Sentiero Francescano della Pace (St. Frankie Peace Trail) and it’s hard to see here, but some of the climbs are near vertical. We have trekking poles.

But we are in Italy, after all, and there’s food at the end of the trail. Lots of good stuff, everywhere. The small local supermarket in town would be a dee-luxe food shoppe back in the U.S. Lots of good local cheeses, most of them pecorino (sheep’s milk) variants, along with some foreign cheeses; Italians like Emmentaler, or Swiss. Salumi, meats from neighboring Tuscany if you’re into that kind of thing, black truffles, terrific bubbly like Franciacorta (Prosecco’s posh rival, more like decent Champagne)…you get the idea. We do spend a lot of time thinking about and preparing meals. One of the advances of the past couple of decades is that inland Umbria has suddenly become a seafood lover’s paradise; we can get tiny clams called lupini, slighty bigger clams called vongole veraci, oysters, spiny lobster, mussels, branzino (sea bass) all about half the price it would be in New York.

The place also inspires the mad baker in The Spartan Woman. We got her a stand mixer to serve as the Italian cousin to her beloved Kitchen Aid, and she’ll prepare great focaccia or bread with very little prompting. Usually all it takes it running out of bread in the house and our reluctance to leave our mountaintop.

We do errands too. We’ve been in the house, off and on (and mainly off during Covid) for five years now. We needed a few pieces of furniture for storage or just to finish rooms off. But we didn’t want to break the banca. So we went off to Ikea, about 80 minutes away near the Adriatic port of Ancona. Forget any notions of romantic seacoast lunches; we ate at the cafeteria. Of course, Ikea adapted to the area; when you check out at the restaurant, the cashier asks if you want a post-prandial coffee. I did, and when I was done with my gravlax and veggie balls, I went up to the bar and had a good espresso made from organic coffee beans. What’s funny, though, is that in addition to the identical wares with funny Swedish names, were our fellow customers. For the most part they looked identical to the clientele in the Elizabeth, New Jersey Ikea, adjusting of course for the New York area’s racial and ethnic diversity.

It’s not all errands and drudgery. The other day we drove to the town of Gualdo Tadino up against the Apennines because of a planned power interruption. We walked around, looking at the often whimsical architecture of the place, stopped at a bar for coffee, window shopped—and then lunch. There’s a terrific restaurant outside—La Terrazza di San Guido—above the town, set in a pine forest, with a deck that has a panoramic view of the town and its surroundings. The food is really good, quite traditional but carefully prepared with good ingredients. We spent the princely sum of €49 We reckon the pasta alone would cost somewhere around that in New York. Talk about turning lemons into limoncello.