Month: September 2022

It’s something we think about all the time here

/ anthonypaonita / 2 Comments

Let’s talk about food, shall we? And where you consumed said food? (Sorry if the headline led you to think I was going to write about that other obsession.) I’m thinking about food in Italy these days, since I’m here. It really is an obsession, and not just with “sovrappeso” [overweight] me. I’ve overheard chic saleswomen talk about what they were going to have for lunch in tones that were, well, erotic. And if you happen to be in Italy and happen to get onto YouTube, your feed will soon be blitzed with food videos. I don’t think it’s just mine.

First off, most Americans without the good luck (or misfortune. It depends.) of having relatives living in Italy don’t get the full-on experience. They–you?–have to go to restaurants. And that’s a shame, especially if you’re in the big tourist cities. Why? Because restaurant food may be ok, but eating in an urban restaurant in Italy doesn’t come close to the real deal, and in big cities and touristy locations, many restaurants serve a kind of national “Italian” food that doesn’t reflect what people really eat in this intensely regional country. Plus they miss the vibe, where people loosen up and sit with friends, family, lovers, kids, dogs, whatever, just enjoying the moment. Or a town festival. Or, in the case of our town, any excuse to get together. Any.

First, friends and/or family. One of my most memorable “meals” here, if you can call it that, happened before we had a place of our own. My magazine astoundingly let me come to Italy on a reporting trip. My assignment was to make the rounds of lawyers and business analysts and give American lawyers an idea of what to expect if their companies or clients tried to buy an Italian company. I cannily scheduled interviews for the latter part of the week in Milan, and the early part of the week in Rome. Oh, dear, what to do in between? Live in a lonely hotel room? Eat meals by myself?

Nope.

I visited friends who happened to live in Perugia, about two-thirds of the way south to Rome. After a couple of train rides, my Italian papà Franco picked me up at the station. “We have to hurry,” he said. “Giovanna’s in the middle of a surprise for you.” Franco, never a quiet pensive kinda guy, gunned it, shouting at anyone who dared to drive any slower. “Figlio di puttana! Bastardo!” he shouted. After holding on for dear life—Perugia doesn’t know from straightaways—we got to their house. “Hurry! Just leave your bag. You can keep you jacket on. We have to do this NOW!” Franco told me.

What was the fuss all about? Artichokes. Glorious crunchy salty hot just from the fryer pieces of artichoke. “I’m squeezing lemon on these, ok?” said Giovanna in Italian (these two didn’t speak English; this is all translated), more as a statement of purpose than a question. “Eat with your fingers.” She had put the freshly fried artichokes in a paper lined basket and shoved it at me. “Eat with your fingers.” The three of us didn’t even sit; we just stood there eating, blowing on our fingers between bites.” When we weren’t wolfing down the artichokes, we were drinking and smiling at each other. It was one of the best food events I’ve ever been at. I know we sat down to a regular lunch after that, but for the life of me, I can’t remember it. Can you blame me?

If you don’t have an Italian friend or relative, the next best thing is probably eating at an agriturismo, or at least a country restaurant. If it’s the right season, eat outside. Yeah, there’s an Under the Tuscan Sun thing going at these places. But you’ll see what makes it all worth it. Some years before that reporting trip, we’d gone to an agriturismo high above Lago Trasimeno, the big almost ocean-like lake around here. I can still taste the pasta course, with an eggplant purée (no tomatoes) and bits of sausage. But what I really remember was the vibe. There we were, our family, plus our Perugian surrogate parents and their dog, just relaxing around a table with a view of the lake below for the whole afternoon. And it cost maybe a half of what a city restaurant would’ve charged. Maybe less.

ANOTHER WAY TO ENJOY NON-RESTAURANT food is at a sagra or a festival. They’re held all over Italy, and here in Umbria there seems to be one every day or so somewhere. They serve as fundraisers for the town’s pro-loco associations, which support soccer teams, after school activities for working parents, and the like. But they’re also a way to get the whole town involved in something—and, for people to connect with their history. Local volunteer cooks take care of the food, sometimes, but only sometime, under the guidance of professional chefs. Of course, doing so often involves getting done up in medieval drag, which seems to happen for any excuse, but I digress.

After the Covid shutdown, the region came alive this year. We’ve been to a few. The first was for the food, in Ripa, two towns down the main road here. The town itself is a tiny hamlet, with a circular historic center, and various memorials to Gino Bartoli. He was a heroic figure, a Tour de France bicyclist who smuggled citizenship documents for Jews during World War II by stuffing them in his bike’s tubes and delivering them. Ripa holds a truffle sagra, and the food’s pretty good if you’re a fan of the underground fungus. (We are; Ripa sagra shown below.)

There’s a biggie around here, too. The small town of Cannara, near Assisi, is known for its onions. They’re sold in all the grocery stores and to be honest, we’re spoiled. I won’t say you haven’t lived until you’ve had a really fresh onion—but like a lot of produce, being grown locally makes a real difference. Cannara puts on a pretty big show, with various “stands” (yes, in English), really kitchens/outdoor restaurants, with each producing dishes that feature, yes, onions. Cipollamisu, anyone? It was a lot better than you’d think, with the typical tiramisu ingredients topped with a compote of sweet onions.,

Valfabbrica, where we live, goes all out. It’s bigger than Ripa, as far as towns and hamlets go around here, but smaller (population around 3,400) than the surrounding towns. There’s a week-plus celebration of being a valfabbricheso, with pageants, jousting tournaments, and, of course, food. The town’s historic center turns into a restaurant, and the town has a communal kitchen that churns out tons of dishes based on local produce and history. Gotta say, it was pretty good.

But the most charming event involving food was last weekend. Our town likes its parties, and the old medieval tower was restored recently. Most places would have the mayor cut the ribbon and leave it at that. Valfabbrica? Uh-uh. It got Italy’s only all-female jazz marching band to escort the mayor to the tower, playing Stevie Wonder’s Sir Duke and The Beatles A Hard Day’s Night. The women walked up the tower with Enrico (we’re all on a first-name basis here)

We don’t have dull ribbon-cutting ceremonies in Valfabbrica.

I know, this is supposed to be about food. Sure enough, after the music and the ribbon-cutting and the speeches about the historic importance of the tower, there was a free aperitivo* in the piazza. Older guys sat behind tables with loaded with decent boxed local red wine and porchetta panini* and doled it all out. I haven’t eaten much meat in a decade, but one of the guys shoved a panino at me after I poured myself a healthy glass. It seemed churlish to say no—and it was great to be hanging out in the main piazza on a beautiful late summer night with our fellow townspeople.

Vino and a panino, anyone?

*”Aperitivo” refers not only to a pre-dinner drink, but food to go with it. Places like Milan and even good bars elsewhere elevate it to the point where it can substitute for dinner. At that point you can all the meal an apericena—aperitivo and cena, which is what the nighttime meal is called.

* The word is “panino” for a single sandwich. “Panini” is plural. More than 1 sandwich. Ok? I get a little nuts when I hear “I’ll have a panini .” It’s like nails on a blackboard.

I hear voices

/ anthonypaonita / Leave a comment

I came back the other day from the pharmacy in town with a new haul of inhalers and antibiotics. And there was another little box in my medicinal cocktail: a cough serum in droplet form called Levotuss. Sure, I was able to decode what the name means—get rid of the cough, basically. But that wasn’t my immediate reaction. Instead, I heard my father’s voice saying something that sounds like “leva mind.” It’s how he used to say “never mind.”

This wasn’t anything new, though. Nuccio/Tony, my dad, has been gone from this plane of existence about eight months. And all these months later, his less than masterful command of the English language still pops up all the time in my head and while talking to The Spartan Woman and my sister. (Behind the two names: My father’s name was Antonino. One diminutive of that is Nuccio. And in the U.S., he anglicized his name to Anthony, and most people called him Tony.) It’s kind of comforting; my mom used to say that you weren’t truly dead until no one remembered you. Well, pop, as far as I can tell, you’re still around.

We used to call his malapropisms “Nuccio-isms.” Sometimes they took the form of weird mistakes in colloquial expressions. My favorite was “you ‘affa to [have to] cry the consequences.” It always made me think that Patsy Cline would’ve had a hit with that title. Other times he’d conflate a brand name with the product—cars were “oldsmobiles” and refrigerators “frigidase” (this is a common mistake in New York City immigrant dialect).

You have to be an Italian speaker, or at least be acquainted with the language, to figure out where other mistakes came from. He could not pronounce the consonant combo “ct” to save his life—the combination isn’t common in Italian, if it exists at all. Hence, “dottor” (doctor) and “fatt” (fact). Other times he left out personal pronouns. So instead of saying “He’s a good guy,” Nuccio would simply say “Ees a good guy.” Why? In Italian, you don’t have to say personal pronouns like “I” and “she” and “we”—they’re understood from the verb conjugation that you use.

The Spartan Woman and I are always uttering these Nuccio-isms, and most of the time it’s with a fond laugh. But it also reminds me of how much I miss him, and how in some ways my siblings and I had a slightly zany and interesting time growing up. My sister and I in particular viewed what we called “normal families”—i.e., with two native born, English as a mother tongue speaking parents—as somewhat dull. My sister called them “Americans” and I went along with that.

On the other hand, Nuccio gave me a leg up when we decided to live here in Italy part-time. For one thing, when I was born he was an Italian citizen, which meant I got an Italian passport and could stay here as long as I want without having to worry about bureaucratic stuff like residence visas. An even better gift, though, was cultural and linguistic. I didn’t learn to speak Italian until I was in college, though I understood it fairly well before then (and didn’t let on). But languages have another dimension, expressions that are almost nonverbal but can say whole sentences. Here’s an example: I thought everyone understood that when someone slightly raises his or her head and say “buh” (pronounced, sort of, like “boo”) it meant “I don’t know.” I did that once in the U.S. and got a really funny look. Here in Italy, everyone knows what it means.

Nonno (grandpa) and me

I WISH THAT MY parents had started early speaking to me in both English and Italian. I think I was at least partly bilingual when I was 5 years old because my Sicilian grandfather lived with us and we took long walks together, talking all the while—and he didn’t speak English. Then again, maybe not. I have some cousins who, like me, grew up in the United States. But both of their parents emigrated from Italy, so Italian was the language spoken at home. Those who kept it up may have better accents than I do, but they got lazy later and didn’t follow up with formal instruction, so their written Italian and comprehension isn’t great.

I may have started later in life, but grew up hearing that other language, so it was relatively easy to pick up, especially after five years of middle and high school French. (Yeah, they’re the same language with different accents. Tell me what’s the difference between J’ai besoin d’un autre divan/Ho bisogno di un altro divano?—okay, I cherrypicked the words for “I need another sofa,” but you get the idea.) It didn’t hurt that I worked for an Italian media outlet for a couple of years and had to write articles in both English and Italian.

As young first-time parents a zillion years ago, we tried getting Kid No. 1 to speak Italian. We bought a BBC language series for kids. It consisted of a bunch of VHS cartoon tapes and was pretty funny, relying on repetition and a good story line. Martina really got into it and the cartoons were on a regular rotation. That summer, we took a three-week trip to Italy, with a slight detour onto France’s Côte d’Azur. We stayed with friends here in Perugia, and one day left our daughter with our friend while we did errands. When we returned, our friend intercepted us and asked us to tiptoe in and watch Martina and our friend through the slight door opening. Our little one was, at least temporarily, fluent, talking to our friend about the Barbie doll clothes they were making. And we were astonished.

It’s much harder later. Linguists say that age 15 might be the cutoff point where you can learn a language and have it sound like your mother tongue. I believe it; I’m watching a brave friend here, who moved to Italy in July from Florida, take lessons and it’s a struggle. (He’s getting better every day, though, and you just have to admire him.) On the other hand, I have a friend who moved to the U.S. from Romania when he was 15. He’s completely fluent in English. Years ago he had a slight intonation of something else, but that’s faded.

People here say that they can tell I grew up elsewhere but my accent doesn’t tell them from where. Each time I’m here, I pick up more vocabulary and more connective tissue: In Italian you use a lot of words like however/therefore/practically. (I think I speak Italian with a slight New York accent, personally.) I don’t need to concentrate on song lyrics or TV news any more, and ignore subtitles in TV shows.

Still, it’s one thing to learn the rules and the grammar and the vocabulary. Ask the American dude in the video below.