Eat like a peasant—and enjoy it

2024-02-132024-02-13 / anthonypaonita / Leave a comment

If you’ve been following this blog, you know that The Spartan Woman and I went back to New York for the holidays. It had been a few months since we saw Daughter No. 1 and her family and we still have some stuff to bring back with us. I can’t say that, other than family and friends, I missed anything else except for one thing: Asian takeout.

Staten Island, where we spent three weeks and some, has this image of being a sort of Sopranoland, its residents a larger version of the cast of Jersey Shore. That’s only partly true, and applies only to some neighborhoods. Our daughter lives on the North Shore, which is a multiethnic paradise. And after a few months of mostly “Italian food”—I dislike the term because there really is no unified cuisine here—we were craving the offerings of our former Japanese, Chinese, Mexican, Vietnamese, Sri Lankan, and Turkish haunts.

Maybe we overindulged. But our kid has a baby, and trying to be good guests, we thought we’d make it easier by ordering out. It was a nice change from Umbria, even if this area is increasingly cosmopolitan, with sushi and Chinese food fairly commonplace. But one thing we didn’t miss: American (or is it New York) price tags. For one Saturday lunch, we order four banh mi, three bubble teas, and a Vietnamese coffee. Total bill, $115. That would have bought a fancy meal here.

SO BACK IN OUR HILLTOP RETREAT, we prepare a lot of wintertime comfort food. That pretty much means soups and pasta. We don’t eat meat, but with such a huge variety of vegetables, legumes and grain products, that doesn’t cramp our style.

Note: The dishes described here are vegetarian, not vegan. If meat is a must, you can serve these dishes as first courses, or read another post and come back next week. I don’t give recipes per se, so you won’t see exact quantities or cooking times. Anyone who cooks regularly can probably come up with something good. I don’t usually follow recipes; I use techniques my mother taught me as a teenager when she broke her arm, and I had to step in to cook family dinners.

After years of propaganda about the superiority of “Northern Italian” food, the South here is rising again, at least when it comes to culture. Maybe it’s down to TV shows here like Mare Fuori (The Sea Beyond) which portrays the lives of a bunch of photogenic kids in juvenile detention in Naples. One of our favorite Neapolitan dishes is pasta e patate. Yes, you can mix starches.

You can look up recipes here and here. While there are various versions, you basically make a soffrito—onions, celery, carrots—and sauté it. Add diced potatoes. When they’re halfway soft, add water or vegetable broth and a squirt of tomato paste (a couple of canned tomatoes or some purée will work too). Let that cook awhile, and then, making sure there’s enough liquid to boil pasta, toss in a couple of good handfuls of mismatched pasta, all those odds and ends that you’ve accumulated when you haven’t cooked the whole package. Improvise if not. Then, at the end, add cubes of provola cheese. This last bit may be hard to come by in the U.S., so I’d suggest diced hard (not fresh) mozzarella.

Beans and greens might be an easier combo to get behind. We make lots of variants of this basic comfort dish. It’s easy. Take good beans, whether they’re borlotti (cranberry), cannelini, or ceci/chickpeas. Cooking them from scratch is best, but canned beans are fine, too. Sauté a clove of garlic and a little hot pepper flakes in olive oil. Add the beans, stir. Add cleaned and chopped greens, like escarole, kale, chard, or even spinach. Make what’s in the pot as dry or soupy as you wish. If there’s a fair amount of water or broth, cook some soup pasta (orzo, ditalini, small elbows, etc.) directly in that pot or cook the pasta separately and add for a drier dish.

It’s best to keep to the basics with this, but you can optionally add a Parmigiano rind to the cooking liquid, or mix the beans or add another grain like farro. Add grated cheese if you want, but the soup/pasta dish should be able to stand on its own.

A post like this wouldn’t be complete without lentils. They’re an Umbrian staple. For example, it’s traditional to cook lentils for New Year’s, the pot of lentils symbolizing the riches that you hope the new year brings. Umbrian lentils are really small and don’t break down into brown mush. When in New York, I found that Trader Joe’s vacuum-packed French lentils are a pretty good substitute.

This dish won’t break the bank and is really easy to prepare. Do that soffrito thing again. It’s onion, celery, carrots. Add about half a pound of raw and rinsed lentils after the vegetables are soft. Stir around then add about 500 ml/a pint of water. Add a squeeze from a tube of tomato paste, or a dollop from a can of paste. Let the lentils cook until they almost done. At this point check how much liquid is in the pot. You’ll be adding a cup of ditalini or similar pasta so, if necessary add some water, keeping things on the boil. Add the pasta and cook until al dente. Serve with grated Parmigiano, Grana Padana, or even Pecorino cheese. And this is the result:

Job no. 1: Stay warm

2024-02-032024-02-03 / anthonypaonita / 2 Comments

Central heating is a good thing. I love that you can walk over to the thermostat and, miracle of miracles, set it for a temperature you like and like magic, the furnace rumbles into life and warms the air to that temperature. Set it and forget it: Modern life, ain’t it great?

This heating thing triggers my after-all-this-time-I’m-a-semi-newbie reaction. Getting basics down, like food, shelter, transportation, and language is at the heart of the immigrant—or reverse immigrant—experience. It’s what makes living here different from taking a vacation here. Travelers only have to figure out how to feed themselves, and it’s pretty easy in Italy. And they’ll figure out how to get around, unless they’ve taken a tour that comes with a big bus and lots of company. Living in another country forces you to relearn basic life skills; it’s like learning to walk again. I’m pretty good with most basics, but I’m only learning the central heating basics because we haven’t been here much before in the dead of winter.

I think about central heating a lot during the winters on our mountain because we have a high-maintenance kind of central heating, and tending to it and using it takes up more mind space than where to set the thermostat. Sure, we have the essentials: thermostats, pipes going around the house that end up in radiators. We even have a couple of dee-luxe radiators, the kind bathrooms houses have here that look like laundry racks and warm up the bath towels. There’s a furnace, too, a pretty new one from Germany that my friend Ruurd told me was the best brand. I’ll take his word for it.

What our central heating setup lacks is a steady source of natural gas. Instead, we have a tank. it’s a big tank for sure, though I’m not exactly sure how big because it’s buried in the yard right next to the lavender bush. It looks like the entrance to one of those bunkers in Albania that the paranoid ruler Enver Hoxha installed thoughout that once-repressed country. Only our lid conceals a receptacle and a gauge telling us, usually, that we need to buy more gas.

That should be easy enough, right? Not so fast. (And trust me, this was almost a shock to me, a confirmed urbanite, who never had to worry about how to supply life’s basics.) Luckily, it hasn’t been the coldest of winters. But these stone houses don’t hold the heat easily, a boon in the summer but not so much right now.

I have a contract with a large Umbrian provider of propane, or GPL as it’s called here. Theoretically I call and they deliver. Only their operators seem to think that their job is to protect the delivery drivers from actually making deliveries, and at the very least to keep delivery dates a secret. Right before leaving Italy to spend the holidays in New York I called the company. When I dared to ask when I should expect the delivery because it’s Christmastime and we need to buy gifts for the fam, I got “next week.” When? Next week. What day? Next week. You get the idea.

No one came that week. So the following week, I called again and ask that same nosy question. I should mention at this point that we were down below 10 percent, a percentage that according to my agreement with the company should trigger an immediate delivery. What I got on the other end was the Italian equivalent of “la la la la” to avoid hearing the question. But then shortly afterward, my mobile phone rings and a delivery driver asked for directions to the house.

At this point life was looking really good. The guy found us, hooked up his hose and delivered the gas for a princely sum of about €800, or $870, give or take. I paid with a card tapped on his portable card reader, and for awhile it looked as though my perfectly good Visa card was rejected. Happily, I learned later via a call from the gas company that the charge went through.

GAS ISN’T THE ONLY FUEL we burn. Like a lot of people here who have to deal with high gas and electricity rates, we have a fireplace that’s hooked into the heating system. In theory it’s an elegant thing. We build a fire and once the chamber heats to 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees F) a pump switches on a takes over from the gas furnace. If we get a good enough fire going, the house gets toasty and we aren’t burning expensive natural gas, just expensive wood. And we can bake potatoes in the ashes, which is something you can’t do with a gas furnace.

But that requires us to start a fire. And fire requires wood. There are lots of wood vendors around these parts, because utilities cost so much here. You can buy wood stacked in neat boxes, and you can buy lots of wood from guys who drive up with a dump truck and leave a huge pile for you to deal with. We chose the latter, trying to be 1-frugal and 2-forward thinking enough when it came to quantity. We were running low on wood, so I made a call and to our usual supplier a town away, unlike the gas company, the wood dude said he could deliver in about 10 minutes. Sold. The guy came as promised, and since he’s a local and has delivered to us before, we gossiped about the neighborhood characters.

Take a look though—we received a huge pile and had to move all that into the house in organized bundles. The te Spartan Woman lived up to her nickname, organized how we were going to tackle the pile and hauled tons of wood. Literally. In all, the two of us carried and stacked 25 quintales, or 2500 kg. That’s over 5,500 pounds.

Not bad for old people.

A stranger at home for the holidays

2024-01-222024-01-22 / anthonypaonita / 1 Comment

IF YOU READ last week’s post, you’ll know that we went to New York and back for the holidays. What I mostly left out is what we did there. Why? I’m still processing a couple of things, as they say. And in the past week or so at home here in Italy, we’ve been busy restarting our lives here, shopping for food, buying a huge pile of wood for the fireplace, getting medicine refills, etc.

I’m still finding it a little astonishing that I took my first vacation in my native New York. We’ve been buying round trip flights from here for awhile, ever since the airline Alitalia folded its wings. But then we stayed back in NY for a few months. This time it was for a scant few weeks and we definitely were visitors this time, staying at a relative’s home and borrowing a car we’d given up.

One of the things that happens during the holiday season (and pre-trip) is that you have to eliminate items from your to-do list. We started out with an ambitious to-do-before departure list and had to cull as we went along. I’ll get into that later, but the process led to our spending more time getting stuff done in New York. Unpleasant but necessary tasks, that is.

With all that in mind, I’ve been trying to figure out how to organize this so it’s not just a rant about reverse cultural shock. There’s too much of that floating around online. (Hey, I’ve had feet planted in two places for so long I’m immune.) The Spartan Woman suggested the following approach:

THE GOOD

REMEMBER WHEN PASSPORT agents were surly and acted as though you were a criminal for daring to leave the country? That’s changed, at least in our experience. Maybe it’s down to our being old? I don’t know, but suddenly ICE is hiring friendly people. Or, just maybe, we’re of a certain age now and don’t look like the kind of people US immigration wants to keep out.

In any event, it was a good way to ease into the U.S. Better still was seeing our grownup kids again. Daughter no. 1 gave us a new addition to the family, a bouncing (literally) baby boy. No pictures, sorry. We’re keeping the child out of social media, at least for now. I may be a proud nonno (grandpa), but The Boy is objectively really good looking, and appears to have inherited some of his mom’s impishness. You’ll have to take my biased word for it. And though we moved, it was good to see some neighbors, and comical to see others, like the wild turkeys that have taken over the island.

One thing we miss when we’re in our Umbrian mountain retreat is multiethnic food delivery. Even on Staten Island, which is often depicted as a bigoted white people hellscape. The truth is more subtle than that, and the island’s North Shore is a paradise of ethnic restaurants. In our short time there, we ordered from Chinese, Vietnamese, Turkish, Thai, and Mexican places. We didn’t have time to have the Sri Lankan food we love.

While we’re on the subject of crazy choice, Costco? I know, I know, where have I been? I finally was initiated into the cult by Daughter No. 1, just for one visit. I was overwhelmed. Not that we bought that much—we had specific goals. It wasn’t so much the crazy amount of merch for sale, even though I saw everything from espresso machines to solar panels to yoga pants to flats of every household item imaginable. But wow, in the space of less than hour I heard at least half a dozen non-English languages. That the company is fairly humane in its personnel practices compared to other giants of commerce added to my not hating it. Buon lavoro, Costco.

I did notice one other thing immediately. As soon as we cleared customs and were in a taxi headed to our kid’s home, I pulled out my phone and wow, this 5G thing. I’d forgotten how fast it is, at least the T-Mobile version of it, and later tested it to be, in some places, a 600 mb/s download. That’s fast. And our kid has, like we did, 1 gigabyte/second fiber. Fast fiber internet has made it to Italy in general, and our town of Valfabbrica specifically. But not in the rural areas. We use a local provider here, which gives us download speeds of around 30 mb/s, which isn’t bad considering it’s wireless. But a guy can get spoiled. Still, I wouldn’t trade my life for fast downloads. Yet.

THE BAD

OH BOY, THIS. Before we left for New York, we’d wanted to get a Covid booster shot, since the latest one covers the latest known variants. Here in Umbria, you go onto the public health website and look for a location and convenient time and hit the send button and show up for the shot. But we ran out of time and figured we’d get the shot at our former local pharmacy in New York.Unfortunately, Nick up the street wasn’t handling the vaccine. So we had to look at the local megaeverythingwithpharmacy places like CVS and Walgreen.

The closest CVS told us they were out of the stuff and maybe were getting some in the future. But Walgreen’s website said make that appointment. I went through the online scheduler and completed the online medical history/consent forms for the two of us.

The day arrives, we drive a couple of miles. There’s a woman ahead of us in the vaccine line. She’s filling out the history form. “We did ours online,” I said. “I did too but they want me to fill it out here again.” The staff behind the counter is obviously overwhelmed, answering phone calls, taking in prescriptions and giving out meds to other customers. We wait and wait and wait. The nice woman in front of us was finally frustrated and disappears. They call her name, finally, to get her shot, and no one answers.

Finally, the harried clerk asks us to fill out the damn history/consent form. “I did it online,” I respond. “We’re asking people to do it here,” she says without giving me a reason. I refuse. “Sorry, I did it online and I’m not going to fill it out again. Look in your system.” There’s a standoff. Finally the overworked pharmacist tells her to dig it out of the computer. More waiting–at this point we’d been there an hour past our appointment time. We weren’t giving up. At last, the pharmacist come out and administers the shot: 75 minutes after our appointment time. We note that they have lots of people restocking the shelves with stuff like Doritos and deodorant, while the pharmacy workers look like hunted animals. American free enterprise at work.

*As for this little pharmacy item (left), really?*

Finally we drive back. The main drag through that part of the island is a two lane road that was built in the 1920s and ’30s, with small shops and converted houses hosting insurance agencies and the like lining the street. But something’s out of whack. Big hulking SUVs and pickup trucks like Ford F150s dominate. It’s like the hippo dance in the Disney movie Fantasia. If the giants aren’t being driven like drunken Romans are behind the wheel, they’re creeping along because I’m sure their drivers can’t see out of them. Why do Americans need a tank to go to the drug store?

Another time I stop at a traffic light to make a left turn. One of the misplace macho drivers doesn’t think I’m moving fast enough (I am not a slow driver) and charges over on the right and without caring makes the left, causing oncoming drivers to hit their brakes. This happens over and over. All of a sudden driving in Italy seems sane.

THE MEH

LET’S TALK ABOUT prices, okay people? The U.S., once you’re been away, just seems like a giant machine designed to drain its people of their money. For instance, we buy Royal Canin dog food for our little prince Niko. It’s produced in plants around the world, but it’s a French subsidiary of the giant Mars Inc. In the U.S., a little over one kilo costs $21. The same food, but almost double the quantity, costs €21 in Italy, or about $23. The common excuse, er, rationalization is that wages are higher in the U.S. and so are fixed costs. But double? If you know, tell me why.

**Gratuitous puppy picture:** It costs twice as much to keep Lola from the U.S. (left) in Royal Canin than it does our little Niko from the suburbs of Rome.

While I’m on the subject of allocating funds….I get it. New York is constantly being rebuilt. But sorry, what’s there can be so crappy. I traipsed about the Financial District for the best part of a day to take care of a bureaucratic matter. An Italian matter. (Don’t ask.) I used to work in the neighborhood and didn’t really notice before, but the streets are in crappy condition. Sidewalks are broken up, there are shoddy barricades everywhere and in general the place doesn’t look like one of the financial and media capitals of the world. I guess I’d taken the crappiness for granted before.

/rantover. Back to Italy after this.

Liv breezed in for a bit, and everything moved faster

2023-11-212023-11-21 / anthonypaonita / 1 Comment

We’re almost up to where we left off. In our daily life, that is. Hurricane Olivia was our terrific excuse. We may have abandoned (mostly) our birth country for now, but certain things, like checking accounts, language between us at home, and, oh, our adult kids and a grandkid keep us tethered. Naturally, we’d prefer that our favorite humans somehow are able to make the same leap. But stuff like regular employment and deep friendships get in the way. I wasn’t ready to turn my life upside down when I was 30, either.

So it’s great when a kid or two comes by for a visit. This time it was Liv a/k/a Olivia, our younger daughter, and her partner Al. We got their room ready and stocked some of the foods we knew they’d like or need. So, big bunch of small hot peppers? Check. Oat milk, ditto. Restock coffee supply? Done. We took mercy on them and picked them up at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport instead of making them take the train. It’s a haul from “Alta Umbria,” but for a Monday morning just after rush hour, we just breezed in.

A lot of any visitor’s stay naturally involves food. I don’t really have to say it, but it’s pretty incredible ’round these parts. A visit to a regular supermarket is like going to an Eataly in the U.S., except that everything is half price, if that much. Back in ‘Merica, our offspring have developed some food intollerances, or so they thought. In Liv’s case, U.S. market pasta and wheat products give her a stomach ache, so she thought she’s got that fashionable gluten problem. But no. She can eat pasta and bread and pizza here, no problem. And she’s not alone—an anecdotal survey of people who live here but go to the U.S. regularly brought out a lot of the same reactions. Anyone have an idea why?

Liv and Al took two weeks of their valuable time off, so instead of sitting at home admiring the view we had to put on our tour guide hats and see stuff around this splendid little region. Not that it’s their first time around this block. Al said to me “Being here is, like, what I do now. It’s my alternate reality life.” First they had to return to Perugia, Liv’s first love and where Al has developed certain rituals. I dropped them off so they could wander around without us old people slowing them down. Despite the nasty weather, they dropped into their favorite places, Al at the porchetta stand on Piazza Matteotti, and the two of them for artisanal gelato (with flavors like gorgonzola and honey) at Lick (closed for vacation until 7 December).

ONCE THEY GOT PERUGIA OUT OF THEIR SYSTEMS, we tried to get away from the too familiar. Last year we spent a rain-drenched day in Foligno. Until then that small city was just a railroad station where we had to change for the Perugia branch line. But we discovered it’s a lively place and unlike most towns in Umbria, flat and really walkable. The window shopping is terrific, and there are tons of cafés and restaurants, many of the latter looking as though they dropped in from Williamsburg.

Knowing that we were going to be in Foligno long enough to have lunch, I started to surf the Web for suggestions, and ran into the service The Fork. It’s like Open Table and Resy in the U.S., but it points to places off the main tourist squares and, if you reserve a table through the site, you often get a discount. I looked through the service and got us a table at Fish Easy (that’s really its name). You can leave a note for the restaurant when you reserve, and I asked if it was okay to bring our dog. Most restaurants here are dog-friendly, but it never hurts to ask. I got a quick reply—sure, we’ll be happy to have him around. (Below, lunch at Fish Easy, with Niko hoping something falls off the table.)

The proprietor made good on his promise. Niko was our calling card, and as soon as he saw Niko leading the way, he knew it was our party of four. The place, like a lot of Foligno eateries, didn’t trade on the Olde Worlde thing, the decor and the menu was sleek and up to date.

Another day, we took advantage of the fine weather and drove across the region to the city of Orvieto, famed for its delicious white wine and its incredible Italian Gothic cathedral. I used The Fork again to find a place to eat, and it led us to Caffè Ristorante Capitano del Popolo, on, logically enough, the piazza of that name. After a funicular ride up from the train station (with plenty of free parking), we admired the Duomo, including the stunning frescoes by Luca Signorelli, before walking a few minutes away from the tourist crowds to the piazza. The market there was shutting down as we walked between stalls to the restaurant. I’d warned them, too, that we had a dog and they not only let Niko in, but gave him a plush chair, pillow, and water bowl. (Below, the Signorelli panels and a modern capolavoro.)

Like more and more restaurants here, the menu was creative but rooted in Umbrian tradition. So some familiar dishes has interesting twists, like the addition of ginger. I usually don’t eat meat, but I was pasta-ed out and went with a vegetable-forward version of chicken alla cacciatore, while my stronger-willed wife and kid had trucioli (a short pasta) with artichoke cream and mint.

THE SPARTAN WOMAN AND I have this compulsion to show off “the real Umbria” to our guests. That usually means one of the sagras around the region. They’re usually held in the summer, when warm weather means long sultry nights, local food specialties, and kitschy line dancing to live music. Liv and Al were too late for those. But they weren’t too late for Montone’s fall festival. Plus, going there gave us an excuse to check out a different part of our area—after a few months of living here, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut of shopping, home maintenance and occasional hanging out with friends.

So, Montone. It’s said to be one of the most beautiful towns in Italy by the kinds of groups that keep track of that stuff. I can vouch that it’s awfully pretty, though I gotta say that it’s got lots of competition. The festival was fun because it got us out of the house and, with its emphasis on local foods and the chattiness of the vendors, we got an education in local foods. Really, really local foods. The hyperlocal food culture means that local towns have wineries, honey producers, and other local producers just beyond the town walls. For us that day, the nasty November weather broke and we strolled around and talked to people about cheese, pasta, and medicinal herbs and tinctures (the maker of the latter grabbed us for a good long chat).

So much for all that. The Spartan Woman, Niko the pup, and I have returned to everyday life, evading the wild boar hunters, looking at the view, and trying to decide every day what to have for lunch. And one of these days we’ll hang more pictures on the walls and make this place look more lived in—in a good way.

Old friends

2023-10-192023-10-20 / anthonypaonita / 2 Comments

I’m psyched. I’ll soon get to hear Hackney Diamonds, the new album that most reviews say is the best Rolling Stones album in 40 years. I don’t usually listen to the music of my youth, but the Stones have a special place in my heart—I learned how to play electric guitar by listening to, and deconstructing, Keith Richards’ riffs on Exile on Main Street. Really, who could be a better teacher?

Thinking about these…I won’t call them father figures, but older brother and cousin figures has made me reflect on my long term friendships and leaving the country where most of my long term friends live. And also how we stay in touch. Back when, before email, Messages, and texts, we would have written letters, punctuated by the occasional expensive phone call. Now I zap a text across the world, and try to remember that they’re six to nine hours behind the time here. And every so often I bother them with a FaceTime session, where I get to walk around with my phone and show them what we’re up to. And then there’s the “so-shall,” as my Italian friends here call social media.

There is a difference between my Italian and American friends and family, especially beyond certain age (the young on both continents are adept at using phone apps to stay in touch). Americans of a certain age tend to be better at using their computers and phones to communicate, while with older Italians until recently were out of sight, out of mind. But I’ll keep this post to the people I’ve left behind.

One of the more interesting things is that the friends I’ve stayed in touch with the most are people I shared a crowded newsroom with back in the ’80s and ’90s. As one of them said replying to a FaceBook post, “You work with people for years and then you get old and suddenly realize that they are part of your group of lifelong friends.” The author is Victoria Slind-Flor (right), who was our San Francisco bureau chief. Ok, our bureau, period, in that city. She and I used to spend hours on the phone talking about just about everything. The last time I saw her I bumped into her serendipitously at the Ferry Building in San Francisco when I played hooky from a conference there. We sat on a bench overlooking the bay chatting and drinking coffee.

I was talking about writing this post with The Spartan Woman, and she noted that we see more old friends here than we did back in New York. Hmm…does being in Umbria have anything to do with it? Maybe it’s because our friends are habitual travelers, being or having been journalists and teachers. And once you’re in this country, you’re never really far from anywhere else because Italy is blessed with tons of rail and air connections.

Besides, we like to show off this part of Italy. It’s a nice break from tourist Italy, being mostly rural, hilly, and with fewer than 900,000 people in the entire region. It definitely was a good break for my ex-comrade Fred and his wife Mary. They’d buzzed around Puglia, attending a days-long party there, and then spent time exploring Sicily. But nothing prepared them for this place, which is sort of like Vermont but Italian. We look out at a river valley, some hills and mountains dotted with farmhouses and castles, and a big lake down the hill from us. As we drove around and walked up to a mountaintop, I kept hearing Fred say “wow.” That alone is almost worth the bureaucratic hassle it can be to live here.

*Fred studies the menu while his wife Mary contemplates the view.*

Someone we see more regularly is Doug, or Monsieur Chasse as we used to call him, translating his last name instead of, impossibly, his first. Poor Doug was smitten by the place some years ago when he took a month-long language course. And after years of planning and driving real estate agents crazy (he’s choosy) he found his bit of paradise. It’s a house perched on a hill overlooking the Valle Umbra, with incredible sunsets as part of the deal. The house needed TLC, and after seven months of to-the-walls renovation, it’s quite the place to hang out in.

*We celebrated Doug’s spendid digs with some bubbly.*

Who else? Two other former coworkers from that same place, Kris and Joanie. Both have visited and/or stayed with us. Do you sense a theme here? Our newsroom was an often crazy place, with an eccentric but brilliant cast of characters, and I can name a lot of people from there who have become lifelong friends. More than school, more than the old neighborhood, etc. There’s something about working on deadline with a bunch of like minded people—we used to joke that we could be a soap opera called “One Life to Give.”

/Rant: In fact, newsrooms up until the interweb days were pretty much like that in one way or another. It’s only when the Web forced wrenching change in how news is delivered that it changed. In came the consultants and data analysts and marketing experts who seem to have made a ton of money but have little to show for their efforts except turning those fertile beehives into what now resemble the dull precincts of insurance companies. I think the more eccentric personalities now somehow give off a signal that says “don’t hire me!” And we’re poorer for it.

Now instead of stories and scoops, there are clicks and content delivery systems. In my last days as a productive member of society, I’d sit in meetings with our marketing person turned content chief, and my deputy and I would zap messages with all the meaningless bizspeak buzzwords that the nonjournalists spouted. After awhile it got boring and sad.

/Rant over. We’ve gotten two of the gang of four over. Now we’ll try to get all of us together at the same time. And we’ll have our boss, who we called Mother, along too. Perugia hosts this bitchin’ journalism festival every spring, which is always a good excuse for a lot of friends to come, not to mention to get a trip on the expense account or as a tax deduction. Next year in Umbria?

Image up top: National Archives at College Park, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Face the music

2023-09-192023-09-19 / anthonypaonita / 2 Comments

Gotta say, this reverse immigration is a kick. As if I didn’t have enough to do—you’d be amazed at how complicated it can be to register a dog with Italian health authorities—I look at this thing we’re doing as if it were a multi-faceted model, turning it upside down and spinning it around to get a better look. Even my dreams get complicated, with people speaking different languages, and different shards of my life crashing into one another.

Most of the time I’m pretty comfortable being here. I almost lost sight of that over the summer’s hot spells, which kept us literally in the dark for hours during the middle of the day, after which we’d try to cool off with a swim, or go somewhere for a drink in the shade. It felt isolated and more than once I started to think I didn’t have to move thousands of miles/kilometers to live this life. But when it cooled down some, we started taking walks again and our neighbors would stop and chat. It felt good to be babbling in Italian, setting up coffee or dinner dates with the sweet people who live along this road.

I can only imagine how my father felt when he moved to New York back in 1955. He had the support of my mother’s family, but he didn’t have decades of rehearsing for the move, like I did. For my dad the move was a sudden plunge into the unknown, and that showed. He never quite understood how his new country worked, and why Americans didn’t take to the streets for economic reasons.

He clung to his culture. My sister and I would buy him Italian pop music albums for Father’s Day—one was a bunch of songs from Italy’s San Remo Festival, sort of a precursor to today’s Eurovision song contest. That album supplied my sister and me with a good sense of camp. Cynically teenagers brought up on The Beatles and Rolling Stones, we laughed at songs like this, by a character who called himself Little Tony. That bass line’s pretty catchy, though.

When my parents bought a decent stereo, my dad did what every respectable Italian in New York would do and bought some opera albums. Naturally, they were Italan operas: Cavalleria Rusticana, by Mascagni, about a Sicilian Easter Sunday that goes very badly, La Traviata by Verdi, a prostitute who dies alone without her client-lover; Aida,also by Verdi, two ancient Egyptians who meet a tragic end in a temple vault, and so on. (Hey, there seems to be a common thread here.)

The one exception to all of this was Dad’s unexpected love of the Supremes. When they came on The Ed Sullivan Show, he was under Diana Ross’s spell, uttering every so often, “She’s beauty.”

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH me? Music. I’ve gone pretty native in most ways; it wasn’t that hard to do. I’m down on “Italian” food—hey it’s just food that people eat here. My accent’s gotten better; no one offers to switch to English or complement me on speaking the language, a sure sign that you’re not doing too well.

But the one time I feel almost totally American is when I listen to music. In particular, R&B and anything that’s got that on-the-1 thing going on. Think James Brown, Funkadelic, Prince. Sure, we listen to Italian pop music up on the hill here. But that’s in addition to our usual stuff. I started thinking about this the other day when I first heard the new song, Angry, by those old guys The Rolling Stones. They may be Brits, but they swing like Americans and have done so since they were kids. Take a listen:

It’s not that I dislike Italian stuff; still, it’s more “in addition to” rather than a substitute. American music is what I grew up with. Certain rhythms and chord progressions resonate with me. We grow up with the three-chord blues progression, and that Chuck Berry chunka chunka riff is almost embedded somewhere in our brain. Even younger artists who don’t know from blues progressions or the Beach Boys have the music as a cultural background. There’s a certain way Americans and their British followers sing and play and it’s definitely a part of anyone for whom music is a big part of his or her life.

Fandom enters into it, too. Even hipster fandom. The other day I was reading the coverage of the rerelease of the Talking Heads concert movie Stop Making Sense and noted the relieved tone that a lot of the articles were written in: Look! They’re talking to each other! Hey, I felt relieved, too. They were a big part of my youf.

We’re trying to catch up on cultural references and the like, but it is a learning curve. I also think there’s a difference in how Americans and Italians play their instruments. If you listen to the bands behind Italian singers like Eros Ramazzotti (shown here in a cool live performance with Tina Turner) or Laura Pausini, they’re terrific. Every note’s in place and their sense of drama and dynamics is spot on, But in some ways they’re almost too good. Americans, at least when machines aren’t taking over, have a wilder edge.

Of course, I’m talking in generalities. Italian rappers get it, and performers like Mamood definitely use rhythm more than melody to power their songs. And Matteo Paolillo has become a breakout rap/pop star because of the TV series Mare Fuori, and his moody, rap-singing in Neapolitan deserves to go international. And one older guy, Zucchero, might as well be a big star in the U.S.—he’s got a great band that’s really beat-friendly. (By the way, take a look at the show Mare Fuori, soon to appear on the U.S. streaming service Mhz Choice as The Sea Beyond.

But I’m talking about me and The Spartan Woman. We’re lucky in a way to be living here now. With streaming services at our voice command, we can listen to anything we want. And while we’re listening to more Italian stuff, sometimes you can’t beat Marvin Gaye, you know? We didn’t have to ship boxes of CDs over; in fact as of now we’d have nothing to play them with. We have smart speakers, and when the ‘net goes down as it does every so often,, we can stream cellular data from our phones to a couple of Bluetooth speakers.

The music thing may sound pretty minor, but I have a soundtrack going on much of the time. If I’m not listening to something, I’m playing or arranging songs in my mind. I wake up most days with a tune in mind and often, even before making coffee (Italian coffee culture may be one of the biggest reasons for being here), I’ll have to tell the speakers to play the song lest I go insane. I associate places with a certain kind of music. Montréal, for example, for moody French pop or that Franco-Mali music that you hear on the radio there; Palermo, Sicily, for a North African-Sicilian hybrid, and so on.

And what do I think of when I think of Perugia? Right now, it’s mainly one of the hits of the summer, bellississima by Alfa (see below). Radio here is pretty eclectic, our car’s screen describes most stations as “vari” or hit radio. Last year it was all about Dua Lipa. It’s harder to say what was big this year; probably a mixture of Paolillo and this song, which comes on the car radio pretty often.

I’m still working all this out. There’s a long history of people from English-speaking countries being expats in Latin-speaking ones. My experience and perspective is a little weird because I grew up somewhere over the Atlantic to begin with. Right now a big part of me just says enjoy and tell Siri to “play music that I like.” Maybe that’s the best approach.

Hot vampire days

2023-07-172023-07-17 / anthonypaonita / 2 Comments

I might go for a drive today. Not because I want to go anywhere, but I can turn up the air conditioning and be almost sweat-free for a half hour or so. Until my conscience gets the best of me: Fuel for our economic little Renault costs €1.70 a litre, or $7 and change a gallon. Not bad, and probably a decent price to pay so that my brain doesn’t fry.

In case you’ve been offline or not paying attention, Southern Europe is in the midst of a heat wave. I forgot the heatwave’s name this week—yeah, they started naming them in Europe. Maybe Cerberus? Anyway, it’s hot. Really hot. Go out the door and flinch hot. Here’s a screen shot from my weather app:

For the Celsius-challenged of you, 37 is body temperature; each degree C is almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit, so 38 is 100.4F. Ugh. Serves me right. A couple of years ago I boasted that we could live without air conditioning up here on our hill. My bad. Even our hyperactive puppy (and new addition to the fam) Niko has taken to sleeping in the dark during the day. Actually, all three of us do. We try to bottle the cool morning air by opening up overnight. Then in the morning, we close the shutters and lock the windows shut. Then while inside we live in the dark like vampires, trying to avoid too much movement. We make it outside to swim as the sun starts to descend late in the afternoon.

Problem is, people gotta eat. The Spartan Woman did make a supermarket run yesterday morning—lucky her, she got to turn on the A/C. Old Perugian friends were coming over and we had to feed them and us. But instead of the typical mid-day meal, we had cold stuff: cheese, a Caprese salad (tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil), and salumi (Italian charcuterie, or cold cuts). We drank cold liquids and ate in our cool (literally) downstairs kitchen.

*A/C alternative. Can we get deliveries while we float?*

Luckily, we were able to go swimming. We built a pool when we bought this house and it’s the best investment ever. Silly me, after last month’s endless rain, dark cool cloudy days and general low temperatures, I thought we’d hardly get any use of the “cee-ment pond,” as they called the pool in that stupid TV series The Beverly Hillbillies. Wrong! I’d live in it if I could, except that I have to swim underwater to keep the sun from overheating my head. Yeah, I know, first world problem.

So, splashing around. That’s what we did all weekend. Friends and ex-colleagues of TSW were due to arrive in Perugia on Thursday, and we were going to show them the town. But a train strike put an end to that. They rebooked for Saturday, but instead of trekking around the hilly city and dying of heat stroke, we brought them to our lair and we spent a good part of their few hours here in the pool. It was a nice change for them from touring; the videos and photos from tourist favorites like the Trevi Fountain are horrifying for this crowd-averse blogger. Take a look:

In with the old, in with the new

2022-12-302022-12-30 / anthonypaonita / Leave a comment

I’ve been lazy. Uninspired? Bored? Had writer’s block? Nah. It’s just that living in an outer borough of New York and not going out much can be, well, not the stuff I want to write about. So I didn’t. I was struggling to do something profound, either about differences between Europeople and Americans. Or maybe about technology, or taking a quick road trip. I could show you the unfinished drafts in my queue. But that way you’d see my tortured thought process.

At one point, I even got a bot—the now famous ChatGPT—to write about driving from New York to the Boston suburbs. Then I thought maybe I’d critique what the bot did. Okay, I’ll give you a peek:

On a chilly weekend, we took a 400 km ride to the Boston suburbs in our Volkswagen Golf. Four of us traveled comfortably in the spacious car, but we had to make a couple of stops along the way for our pregnant daughter, who is in her last trimester. Despite the stops, the ride was generally smooth and we were able to make good time. One thing that struck us on the American highways was the lack of lane discipline. People would frequently pass us on the right and zig zag dangerously through traffic.

Kind of workmanlike, no? I gave the bot no instructions as to style or my attitude. I wonder how it decided that the car is spacious—in Europe it’s a midsize thing, in the U.S., the land of SUVs, like a matchbox. I’ve read worse copy in my way too long editing career, but at this point I’m not exactly scared that it’s going to take my place.

*The Matalas coven takes over the living room.*

Anyhow, then Christmas came, and three days later, we transferred to our Umbrian hill, so, yes! I have something to write about. First of all, the holiday. We’re not really subscribers to religion, but we’re culturally a tiny bit Catholic, and for years we’ve had The Spartan Woman’s Jewish cousins over for the day, as well as her parents and sister, etc. This year’s get-together was bittersweet for a couple of reasons. It was the first one post-Covid onset. And it could be the last one we do, because we may not be living in the U.S. this time next year.

All the same, it was terrific to see our kids and their second cousins hanging out together. We jokingly call them the coven; for years, hardly anyone in TSW’s extended family gave birth to males. I’m not the only one calling them a bunch of witches, they themselves encourage it and, well, it’s just funny. But in the next couple of months, that should end. Our number 1 kid, who got married this past March, is expected to actually bring a male infant into this world. “I don’t know what to do with a little boy,” TSW said at one point. I think she’ll manage somehow, she seems to have no trouble with grownup boys.

AFTER THE HOLIDAY, we had to scurry and clean up and get ready to spend a few weeks in Italy. Obviously, this isn’t our first time around the block for this. Still, we have to make sure stuff is taken care of there and that we remember to take what we need in terms of tech stuff and meds, weird food substances we use in the U.S. but impossible to find in Italy. [Tip: Cheddar cheese powder is really, really good on popcorn.]

The trip over was something else. Not that we were delayed or anything, like thousands of holiday travelers in the U.S. But for the first time since early 2020 airports and flights were jammed. I never saw so many people crowding JFK Airport’s bars/restaurants/shops. It was hard to find a place to sit at the gate. When I went to the least-crowded bar to get my by-now traditional preflight Martini, the bartender apologized for having to use a plastic glass because all the Martini glasses were being used.

The flights, first to Munich, then to Rome, were similarly jammed. Lufthansa kept texting us begging us to check our carryon bags (for free even!). We had huge bags anyway, and only knapsacks as carryons. Lufthansa in general is one of my favorite airlines. Its staff treat people like humans, the food and entertainment are halfway decent, as are drinks, and the Airbuses are pretty comfortable, at least in premium economy (and upward, though I can’t shell out for that).

I’d nervously been looking at flight stats; we had 1.5 hours between flights and with the chaos in the United States, our first flight was late on the days leading up to our departure. That had me looking at how often Lufthansa and affiliates flew between Munich and Rome. Happily, it didn’t come to pass. We left on time and arrived early. Since we’re EU citizens, we breezed through passport control. And somehow we landed at a different terminal, the same one as our second flight, so we even had time for a cappuccino and snack.

I’ve crossed the Atlantic countless times and I usually sleep through most flights. But I was so happy to be traveling that I pretended to be a tourist from my window seat. Long Island looked colorful and even a little glamorous as night had fallen. Germany looked tiny and modern, at least from the buildings I could see. And the Alps? Mozzafiati! (Breathtaking in Italian)

*I never get tired of flying over the Alps.*

So here we are. And yeah, it’s a nice place. But it’s more than liking the place and having nice scenery and food. Our friend Angelo picked us up at the airport and knowing that we didn’t have much fresh food at the house, gave us a big bag of fantastic oranges (there is nothing like Italian citrus). This morning, I walked next door to our neighbors Marjatta and Pasquale at the agriturismo Ca’ Mazzetto to pick up our car; they’d been car-sitting while we were away. They used it every now and then and returned it with a full tank and cleaned inside and our. Later, Pasquale dropped by to say hi and give us a tin of their fantastic organic olive oil. It’s great to be home.

We’re getting ready for a quiet and decadent New Year’s Eve dinner here with our old friend Doug and his trusty sidekick Georgia the dog. Shopping for it was like being at JFK, way too crowded but instead of making me crabby, the IperCoop near Perugia had a party vibe, with sales of good Champagne and Franciacorta (Prosecco’s upscale cousin, fermented in the bottle like Champagne). Since this is Italy, we’ll take Franciacorta—to go with some scallops in the shell from France.

Thanks for reading this year, and happy New Year! See you here after the holidays.

What’s that about how you can’t go home again?

2022-10-222022-10-22 / anthonypaonita / 5 Comments

I’m sitting in the kitchen of our house in New York. It’s been awhile since I posted from here, say, six months or so. We got here a week ago and I guess I could’ve posted some fluffy thing about our smooth voyage back to the land of the compulsory national anthem.

But then it happened.

We innocently took ourselves up the street to our friendly locally owned pharmacy for the latest Covid omnicron bi-whatever booster shot. We’d faithfully gotten every vaccine, every booster. In Italy, we stayed away from crowds. We wore masks when we weren’t obligated to. We got here via one long van ride piloted by our friend Angelo, one night in a beachside hotel, an early morning cab ride and two Lufthansa flights, the first from Rome to Munich, then Munich to JFK. The flights were jam-packed, so much so that we got alerts on our phones to check hand baggage if possible to leave enough space in the overheads.

So we masked on board, except for meals. Sorry kiddos, but these old peeps gotta eat and drink. Then, remasked, The Spartan Woman settled in for some movies, while I, the dissolute blogger, took advantage of some pharmaceuticals and the delicious bubbly Henkell Trocken supplied by Lufthansa to get some needed sleep. As far as I’m concerned, the best flight is the flight that I barely remember.

Immigration in NY was swift, lubricated by a nice conversation with an elderly lawyer and his charming wife while on line for Mr. Passport Man. “How long was your stay?” asked the passport guy. “Six months, more or less.” Welcome home. An Uber later and a frenzied Lola the Bassotto (dachshund in Italian) was doing circles and screaming at the top of her lungs when we saw her. It was nice to be back.

So fast forward…it’s Saturday. We take the pooch out for a walk and head for the Greenmarket. We’re always thinking of Sunday pranzo (midday meal, spiritually more than just lunch), so we buy mussels, some beautiful tuna and swordfish, chard, and apples. Corn, too. In other words, we’re back to our New Yawk life.

*Snug Harbor: Where art and botany live together in perfect harmony*

Or so we thought.

It started late Saturday. You know that intuition that something isn’t quite right? I felt hot. I felt cold. I felt hot and cold at the same time, I couldn’t tell the difference. Pressure built up in my head. I looked over to TSW. She seemed to be a bit ragged too. It got worse. We tested. Negative. Phew. It’s just a reaction to the booster.

It wasn’t. A day (or was it two? It’s all a blur) later, TSW tests positive. I took a few home rapid tests, still negative. Still, as of Monday morning I would’ve been happy to have been knocked unconscious. I put my hoodie on and wrapped myself up in a fleece blanket. Then took it all off and hung out in my T-shirt. Rinse. Repeat. Or something like that. In the back of my fevered brain (yes, I had a fever of 102 by this point) I knew I was on deadline for an actual, someone’s paying me article. In a mighty show of pitiful mind over matter, I sat up and banged out a draft. Then I collapsed in an easy chair. I don’t remember much else except that an hour before filing the piece the next day I decided that I wrote it backwards, and rearranged paragraphs. Good thing I had 30 years of editing experience, so doing that didn’t take much brainpower or patching around the moved pieces.

*She had to rest after all the excitement of seeing us.*

More tests for me. Same result. TSW and Dr. Joe said get thee to a PCR test. Did that. Still negative, while TSW, daughter no. 2 and BF of daughter no. 2 all positive This does not make sense. Nope. None.

So that’s where we are. We get a little better every day. The other three at least have a name for how rotten they feel. Trust me, I’m not having sympathy pains, though by now I’m a day or so ahead and can approximate a human being.

We never did have that nice seafood dinner.

Perugia, mon amour

2022-08-052022-08-05 / anthonypaonita / 1 Comment

We went antiquing the other day. You might say, “meh, so what?” But this was an unusual event for us. Well, okay, not the venue: Our nearest big city, Perugia, hosts an antiques market in one of the big piazzas on the last weekend of every month and we’ve been there before. Still, this was kind of a big deal. The heat, and still-widespread Covid cases, kept us on our mountain most of the time. But we got antsy and needed to go out. And in the process, with the heat abating somewhat, we’ve rediscovered our old love: Perugia.

There’s an amazing amount of both good stuff and kitsch. In particular, I have a thing for old magazines from the 1950s and ’60s, artifacts of “La Dolce Vita” Italy, the Italy that my sister and I reveled in as kids, when our relatives from abroad came to visit, or when we listened to the pop songs of the time. The Spartan Woman and I have even bought little stuff at the market, like an antique corkscrew or some prints.

*Looking for artifacts of a former civilization*

This time was different. We actually bought a large piece of furniture. The seller called it a libreria—a bookshelf. But it looked like the perfect breakfront for our kitchen in the country. The top part had glass doors, while the bottom doors were wooden. It looked like it came from nonna’s (grandma’s) house. The seller probably sanded it down and painted, then distressed the wood to give it that old country house feeling. Whatever. We liked it. The price tag was €490, which comes to about the same amount in dollars. We were just looking and the seller blurted out €300. Sold!

What happened afterward is what made the deal special. We told him we lived in the country, about 20 kilometers away. Does he ship? He said he did. It would take a few days, which was fine by us. We gave him our address, with some directions, and my mobile phone number. Did we want to leave a deposit? he asked. He quickly added, it’s not necessary. Would this happen anywhere else I wondered? At the time, it seemed to me that at this point he had no incentive to get the piece to us, but hey, it’s not as though we were going to lose out if he didn’t deliver.

After breakfast at a nearby café (coffee and pastries), we headed to our car. My phone rings. “Antonio, this is the antiques guy,” the voice on the other end said in Italian. “Are you going to be home soon? We can deliver the piece today if you want.” Sure, I said, we’re on our way. Give us an hour or so—the actual trip is 25 minutes, but we had to clear out a space for the piece. A couple of hours later, a delivery van arrives, I help the guy carry the heavy load into the kitchen. Delivery guy drinks three glasses of cold water after he complained that the ghost town next to ours didn’t even have an open bar. We give him the cash and now the piece sits nicely in the kitchen.

I know, this is not extraordinary. People buy stuff like this all the time. But what got to me, and what I love about living here, is the element of trust. The seller didn’t take a deposit, and yet he delivered the piece based on our word. Maybe I’m wrong, but I can’t imagine that happening in New York. Or much of the U.S.

ON THAT SAME WEEKEND AS THE ANTIQUES MARKET, we had another terrific reason to go into town. Blame, or credit Laura. She’s part of the Santucci clan, which adopted The Spartan Woman back in the day, and which has become our chosen family here. In fact, the connection with Laura is where our Kid No. 2 was baptized. It’s a Romanesque church that dates to the 6th century, give or take, and was built using the columns of a Roman temple that previously stood on the site. Laura co-authored a book on the church, grandly called, at least officially, the Tempio di San Michele Arcangelo. But most perugini just called it the Tempietto di Sant’Angelo.

Perugia’s archeological museum hosted a presentation on the book and a general lecture about this extraordinary structure. It’s round, and set on a hill surrounded by lawns, with the neighborhood’s guard tower nearby. It’s such a tranquil and beautiful place that it’s got a waiting list of couples throughout Italy who want to be married there.

*Laura Santucci, right, laughs at a co-panelist’s comment.*

Besides its fame, it’s the local parish church, and hosts such activities as after-school recreation for latchkey kids in the neighborhood. And before Covid, its yard was the venue for an evening that Laura, her family, and friends organized called “Mangiamo Insieme,” or “Let’s Eat Together.” For a nominal sum, I think €10 or €15 a head (about the same in dollars), people in the neighborhood got together in long long tables for a full dinner. Some 200 people attended the one we were at; it was a beautiful night, bringing together just about everything that makes living in Umbria a pleasure.

After Laura’s presentation, we had a real need for some adult beverages and people watching. Perugia’s main drag, the Corso Vannucci, is a pedestrian island full of bars, cafes, restaurants, and shops. It’s also way too touristy for us, at least in Perugian terms—this city is decidedly not like the Holy Trinity of Italian tourist sites, RomeFlorenceVenice. You can spot the tourists easily: They’re the ones having dinner at 18:30 on the Corso.

So, avoiding the early dinner crowd, we went to a hipster bar, Mercato Vianova, on a side street. You can get sushi at this bar, if that’s your thing. But we were just into a drink and snacks.

I usually go for a spritz of some kind, but after seeing a glass of Franciacorta on the drinks list (like a lot of restaurants post-Covid here, you scan a QR code for the menu), we decided to have our bubbly unadulterated. (If you’re wondering, Franciacorta is Prosecco’s more grownup cousin. It’s aged and develops bubbles in the bottle, just like Champagne, and is usually drier than Prosecco.) Some house-made potato chips and toast with butter and anchovies, add some great people watching, and we fell in love again with the city that took TSW’s heart decades ago.

(Not) A Year (Not) in tuscany

Our adventures in Umbria and New York

The Spartan Woman