Last call (for summer tomatoes)

/ anthonypaonita / 3 Comments

It was good while it lasted. We put our home-grown tomatoes in salads and sandwiches. We marinated them and they made an incredibie summer salad. We put them on pizza, we cut them up and tossed them for a few minutes with olive oil, salt, hot pepper, and olive oil for a sweet and half-tart short pasta dish. Add some anchovies and wow, that was great.

But now those tomato plants look forlorn. They struggle to stay upright as the early autumn winds blow, their leaves turning yellow and brown. Gotta say it’s kind of sad. So instead of petering out, or going out in a gradual fade away, The Spartan Woman gathered all the ripe small tomatoes and a few larger ones, and put them in a bowl. We looked at that red tableau and decided that a late summer roast would end the season with a bang. But what to do with the roasted tomatoes? The dish is a traditional foil for a roasted and/or grilled leg of lamb. But no, we couldn’t. Not when we have little lambs from the neighbor visiting us every now and then and taunting the pup. We could have paired them with pasta and ricotta salata, but that seemed too ordinary a dish to salute their tomato-ness.

In the end, we decided on a risotto, one that would be finished with butter and mascarpone, an appropriate blowout to what had been a decent season.

The “Recipe”

I put the headline in quotes because this is a dish that you feel more than you quantify. The risotto itself should be rigorously orthodox, a blank canvas for the intense tomatoes. We decided not to use saffron, thinking that it would distract from the star attractions. For a risotto for two people, you’ll need a cup of carnaroli rice—arborio works, too—an onion, a liter+ of good vegetable stock (I added wine and water so I’d have enough liquid), enough olive oil and butter to sauté the onion and toast the rice, and a splash of white wine. It’s a two-part process that takes a couple of hours, half of it passive, but it’s worth it.

You first have to roast the tomatoes. This could take up to an hour, depending on your oven. Preheat your oven to 220 deg C., or 425 deg F.

Halve or quarter the tomatoes and put them in a roasting pan. The quantity is up to you; the amount of the red stuff in the photo above was perfect for the two of us. Smash 2-3 garlic cloves and put them in the pan. Add a good amount of both olive oil and white wine. Sprinkly with salt and pepper, and if you’re into it, a bit of chili. Thyme goes really well with this, so a few sprigs. Rosemary sounds good in the abstract but will overpower the dish. Basil is fine, if not great looking when it roasts, and in a pinch you could add some herbes de Provence.

Check the tomatoes every 15-20 minutes. Stir them to judge doneness. When they look like those below, the tomatoes are done.

Set the tomatoes aside for now. It’s time to make risotto. I’m going to go quickly here. I’m assuming you know the basics; By now, you’ve got the stock simmering in a separate pot.

Saute the onion in some mixed olive oil and butter, then add the rice. Stir, toasting the rice. When the onion is translucent and no longer crunchy add a big splash of white wine.

Now, ladle by ladle, add stock and stir. A lot of people say that the regular stirring is unnecessary. I like to stand at the stove and stir. Plus, it gives me an excuse to drink some crisp white wine while laboring over a hot pan.

Somewhere in the middle of being done, which will take 25 minutes or so, start adding the tomatoes. You will notice the skins coming off. Some might look at this with horror; we don’t mind. Keep adding stock and tomatoes until the rice is al dente–soft around the edges but with a definite bite at its core.

Now the fun part: Turn off the heat. Stir in a few dollops of mascarpone. The quantity is up to you and your gall bladder. I went for decadence, but that’s me. Stir and dissolve. Now add a nice handful of grated Parmigiano-Reggiano or Grana Padano. Stir some more. If you’re a really sick puppy, you can add a couple of knobs of butter, but that could be way over the top. I won’t tell.

Serve. A small mound per person to start. Seconds for the greedy and/or decadent. Buon appetito e arrivederci summer.

Face the music

/ 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.

Little Tony at a swingin’ party

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.

I hear you had a nice time in Italy this summer. Next time come back to fill in the blanks

/ anthonypaonita / 5 Comments

Up here at Villa Sconita we receive occasional dispatches from the civilization we recently left. Occasional as in every time we look at our phones… But never mind. We see that a lot of you came to il Bel Paese this summer, with a fair number visiting our big attractions like RomeFlorenceVenice(RFV), and venturing to Rick Steves-approved sites like the Cinque Terre. And cousins of mine weren’t too far away at one point from our aerie here and then headed south to Sorrento. I’m fine with that, really. We have a dog.

We have access to webcams, and the hot spots looked very crowded. And from personal experience, we know that touring Italy in the summer is not a good thing for those averse to extremely hot weather. And climate change only ramped up the heat. My phone was pinging me almost every hour about extremely hot temperatures, courtesy of the Italian Meteorological Service, a unit of the national air force (really). And that was here, where we’re surrounded by trees, shrubs, and other flora, and we are not surrounded by other people. I think I worked up a sweat just gazing at the Trevi Fountain crowd on my laptop screen.

You probably ate, too. With any luck, you ate fairly well, although in those tourist traps, I mean popular destinations, the food can be hit or miss. My cousins who didn’t come this way seem to have done pretty well for themselves, judging from their posts on “il social,” as we say ’round these parts. But sorry, I have to say, they were in cities, big cities and/or popular cities. You can only get so far. And restaurant workers in the touristy places have acquired bad habits, like expecting a tip from Americans and other non Italians. We don’t tip out here in the provinces.

I’ll get more serious now. It’s a different world here, with an entirely different culinary culture. In the United States, most decent restaurants are in big cities, which attract the best and most ambitious cooks and restaurateurs. Go outside New York or Boston or Chicago and you’ve got chain restaurants like Olive Garden, with the occasional brave indie that was featured on Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. I exaggerate, but you get the point. In Italy, sure there are great city restaurants like the Osteria Francescana (I haven’t been, but I’ve seen the YouTube videos). But the really good and funky stuff is in people’s kitchens, and out in the sticks and smaller urban places.

For instance, earlier this summer a friend and I went up a mountain above the town of Gualdo Tadino, just because. We walked around a sanctuary and admired the view. That sure worked up an appetite, so he suggested we go to Villa Dama, a nearby agriturismo his daughter’s in-laws go to for celebratory occasions. I called for a table (they had plenty that day) and 20 minutes later we were walking the place’s beautiful grounds. Nice lunch, too, multi-course with wine, for €40 apiece. And that’s relatively posh for this area (photos below).

Traveling outside the big centers doesn’t limit your tastebuds, either. You might think you’ll have to eat “Italian food.” The towns near us (the biggest being the small university city of Perugia) feature Greek, Japanese, Chinese, and African food, and even an ersatz American barbecue chain. (But us mostly vegetarian types haven’t tried it.)

I’M LUCKY. I KNOW THAT. I have family here, and chosen family, too. Most of my meals before we move to Umbria took place in their kitchens and dining rooms. The day my grandmother turned 90 we had a banquet at a country restaurant that night. The party meal was of a zillion courses and I thought it was pretty good, but the critics at home (one uncle was a chef) had issues. I’ve watched my brilliant Perugian mamma create simple delicious meals in a half hour in her small kitchen. When I started peeling a ripe pear she motioned for me to wait a sec and broke off a piece of Parmigiano-Reggiano to go with it. Simple. Perfect. My Venetian aunt invited us over once and she and her daughters created an amazing 10-dish array of cicchetti—think Venetian tapas. And so on.

You don’t need a Venetian aunt, though. You do need to be a little adventurous. Get away from RFV. Get on a train or rent a car—it’s not scary driving out in the countryside, I promise. Find an agriturismo, a working farm that puts people up and feeds them. We’re surrounded by them here, and they aren’t hard to find. Go to the website With Locals and set up dinner or a cooking class with real live Italians. Even in restaurants, though, the feeling is different away from the aforementioned RFV. Service is casual and really friendly and the tab is a fraction of what it would be in RFV. You’ll find yourself chatting with the proprietor once they realize you’re from elsewhere. You might end up exchanging recipes, too.

Above, the out in the sticks experience. Clockwise, the first two photos are at Osteria del Cambio in Palazzo di Assisi. And we had the antipasto plate and the truffle lasagne at La Terrazza di San Guido, a laid-back restaurant in the hills above the town of Gualdo Tadino.

For the ultimate in getting down with the peeps, seek out local sagras and festivals. You can get a good start here. I’ve written about them before, but to sum up, it’s how a town might raise money for the school’s gym, but in reality it’s a celebration of people’s towns, local culture and produce. The other night we went to the shindig in our town; the week before we went up in the mountains to a town that grows fantastic potatoes. Of course, almost every dish featured the spuds. (Text continues below photo.)

Waiting in line for the spuds fest

Here’s the thing. Travel like this and you’ll get to know what the real treasure of this country is. Not the Coliseum, not the Vatican or Florence’s art treasures. You’ll likely get to hang out with the people, who despite bad governments, annoying bureaucracy, and anemic economic growth somehow manage to be kind, generous of spirit, and a pleasure to be around.

I do like Sundays, they’re my fun days

/ anthonypaonita / 1 Comment

It was Saturday afternoon and I had a couple of errands to do. One was to pick up a couple of items at the supermarket in town, some tagliatelle pasta and a bottle of wine. “Buona domenica,” the cashier said: Have a good Sunday. It’s a standard greeting as the last day on Italian calendars approaches.

Sunday is still a big deal here. unlike the U.S. where it usually feels like just another day. Sure, American banks are closed, but you can pretty much do everything else. Even in New York, which still has ridiculous liquor laws, banishing meal stapes like wine to the liquor store. Unlike pretty recently, liquor stores were closed on Sunday, so if you forgot to buy wine to go with dinner you were either out of luck or making a trip over the bridge to New Jersey. That changed a few years ago, but still, store hours are limited. 

It’s true that commerce doesn’t shut down completely here in Italy any more. Supermarkets and malls (yeah, we have ’em here, too) are open. A lot of it is out of necessity, because just as in the U.S. and elsewhere, it takes two incomes to support a household. (I bet European Union rules enter into it too.) Being able to load up on groceries is a big help to harried parents. Still, Sunday has a more relaxed vibe and most people treat it as their day to hang out, have a long afternoon meal with family and friends, and maybe take a walk or a dip afterward. Just like it used to be when I was a kid in New York. 

While the sabbath obervance started as a religious thing, that’s not necessarily the case here any more. You always see on American news sites that Italy “is a Catholic country,” but it’s a much less religious place than you’d think. Anecdotally it seems that only older women and their son/husband-drivers attend Sunday mass. And surveys show that about 25 percent of Italians attend mass at least once a month; about 30 percent of Americans can say the same.

Anyway, I like Sundays. And now that I’m no longer a wage slave, I don’t have to dread Sunday evening, when thoughts of work used to cloud my mind and I’d try to distract myself by watching something good on TV. I guess it all goes back to my roots. When I was really little we’d go to my grandparents house in Brooklyn most Sundays, when my grandmother held court in her dining room filled with heavy, wood-inlayed dark furniture. My parents kept it going long after my grandparents passed on. My father would play operas on the stereo, usually Aida or Cavalleria Rusticana while my mom put together what is now usually called “Sunday sauce,” a ragù filled with various pieces of meat and meatballs.

Before dinner, my father would make whisky sours for himself and mom and maybe our neighbor Joe, a Bavarian immigrant who kept up the European habit of making the rounds of neighbors, to say hi and maybe get a drink. Sunday afternoon dinner—pranzo in Italian—was always in the dining room, except in summer when it got a lot less formal and moved out to the backyard picnic table.

WE KEPT IT UP WITH OUR KIDS, even as they became adults. I won’t bore you with details, but in the past few months before we moved here, The Spartan Woman devised the most labor-intensive Sunday meals that left the kitchen a wreck. She usually made bread or focaccia and a dessert. A couple of times, we went informal and made a few pizzas. I was assigned to primo duty, including multiple step risotti. My daughters and I drank a fair amount of wine and we took walks after dinner to work it off. Those Sundays were a good time to unwind and talk with my splendid daughters and their partners. I wish I could somehow pop into New York and do that once a week. 

But I can’t—our private jet’s in the shop for awhile—so we do what we can here. Generally we make a more involved pranzo (the main midday meal) than usual. I’ll bring out better wine. And we invite friends. It’s great when our local friends come over, because then we have a total immersion in Italian day. Living in the country, we have less one-on-one talking time. 

And I treasure the summer Sundays we’ve been having with our old friend from New York, M. Chasse. In a lot of ways, these Sundays are like our old days in New York. When our paper went out, a group of us that I like to call the Gang of Four would repair to Restaurant Florent in the meatpacking district and spend a dissolute afternoon eating and drinking, French-New York style, for hours. Except that now we have the Umbrian countryside and a couple of sweet dogs to amuse us while we relax over an hours-long meal.

Guess who came to dinner?

We’re mostly vegetarian—we’ll have fish or seafood as a decadent treat—and so is our friend. At the same time, we have no strictures on wine, coffee, after-dinner drinks, aperitifs, whatever. So last Sunday dinner was tagliatelle with zucchine cream (see my post on Italian-English veggie sex-change operations), Prosecco, seitan in the form of cutlets (I’ve yet to set down the loose recipe The Spartan Woman follows to do this) and a fresh summer salad. We had melon and limoncello for dessert. 

An afternoon dinner isn’t the only Sunday game in town. For some reason, Sunday morning’s a good time to do some hiking. We live in an area criss-crossed by trails. And we can get in the car and drive to mountaintops and parks up in the Apennines, which we did today. Sure, it was crowded—it’s a holiday weekend here, with ferragosto coming up on Tuesday. We’d usually go up to Valsorda, above the town of Gualdo Tadino, on a weekday. But sometimes it’s good to mix it up with the crowd of nature lovers and observe our fellow Italians on holiday. Plus, the pup loves to meet other dogs, and being a cute little one, he’s a women magnet.

I somehow managed to get a people-less shot. There’s a cool bar up here that’s got the best cornetti—the Italian version of croissants.

I’m always asking myself why do I do certain things—it’s in my nature to second guess everything I do, and I’ve thrown out a lot of stuff that I eventually found silly or meaningless. You know, meetings, material striving, telephone landlines, listening to Kanye West. Sunday is a keeper. We all need a commerce-free day of hedonism, whether it’s walking around a mountaintop or feeding my favorite people and keeping that connection to an increasingly distant past.

NOTE: Notayearnotintuscany is doing the Italian thing and taking the rest of August off. See you next month.

Niko in love

/ anthonypaonita / 1 Comment

Meet Niko. He’s a three-month old dachshund and the latest addition to our family. He likes to chew, and he likes to chew. But most of all, he loves Georgia, our friend Doug’s dog. When Georgia is around, Niko becomes a good little student, following her around as well as doing dachshund-like things like charging her in attempt to make her play with him. It usually works. There’s another benefit when Georgia is around; Niko doesn’t wander off our yard, which is at the crest of a hill and beyond that it’s straight down into a gulley.

Georgia (left) and Niko commune over some blades of grass and weeds.

While we like to think that we, the people who brought him home, feed him, and indulge most of his whims, have a place in Niko’s heart, he is also very women-friendly. While he has his puppy holy-terror spells at home, when we take him on errands, he becomes the perfect little gentlepup. With his good looks and puppy size, he’s a natural (sorry about this–>) babe magnet. It’s true; I could safely say that most if not all of the people who react to his cuteness are women. And he likes them back, licking their hands and acting like the sleepy little puppy that he isn’t most of the time.

Okay, I exaggerate. A little. As I write this sentence, he’s tugging at my shoelace.

Niko surveys his kingdom from his living room couch perch. He is the boss of us.

We haven’t had a puppy around in more than a decade. But this house needed a dog. We’d seen a listing for him online from a family in the neighboring region of Lazio (near Rome). It was an almost two-hour drive but worth it. We met a young woman in her small town, and she was actually holding sleepy little Niko. After talking about what he eats and looking at his libretto—his medical record of vaccinations, etc.—we were off, back to Umbria. The Spartan Woman hung out with him in the back seat and he slept most of the way.

You gotta fill out the form…..

Getting a dog was a good repeat lesson in Italian bureaucracy, as though we needed a refresher course. Italy, and Europe in general, have a thing for knowing how many we are and where we live. And it’s not only for humans. Dogs, too, are registered with their local comune, or municipality. Little Niko has a microchip imbedded in his shoulder that contains his info–birthdate, how many born in his litter, place of birth, and owner’s vital data. Right now he’s registered as C’s dog. We had to fill out a change in ownership form, and that form is being sent from his birthplace to our town’s healthcare center so that his chip can be updated to reflect his being part of our family. Then he can get, yes, a passport, which will permit him to travel with us.

And that’s one of the good things about having a dog here. Niko has a lot more freedom here than most of his America cousins. He can come with us almost everywhere. Naturally, we take him to the pet store. He likes to choose his chew toys. But he’s also gone to the supermarket and to bars. He’s spent aperitivo time people-watching and eating prosciutto. He’s only been with us a few weeks and with the heatwave here, we haven’t gone out much. But otherwise, we’ve seen dogs on trains, in bookstores and museums, and even in pretty ritzy restaurants on a chilly winter day, happily resting under the table. We plan to take him on road trips, and the continent’s pet-friendly practices will make it pretty easy to do so.

Niko gets around. When he’s not examining menus or being admired, he likes to hide under the table.

We live in a small town, so maybe our experience is different from others. Niko needs a series of vaccines, so we looked up the town’s vet. We always passed a sign pointing to an “ambulatorio veterinario,” so it was easy to find him. The vet, a man with a mellow, kind demeanor, just smiled at Niko and murmured flattering things while giving him a deworming pill. I’m so used to going to a vet’s office, checking in, giving billing info, etc., that the informality of our visit was almost a shock. When I asked the doc what I owed him, he said no charge, first visits are free.

IN A LOT OF WAYS, dog ownership pretty much sums up life here in our little town and region. Official encounters can be stiff and encumbered by rules and procedures. Yet everyday life is punctuated by small kindnesses and a gentleness that’s hard to explain if you haven’t experienced it. Some years ago I subscribed to Quora, and my feed lately is dominated by Americans (real or bots, I can’t say) comparing their great freedoms to the horrors experienced by us in Europe. Like universal healthcare.

A very silly question.

A lot of the questions are silly. But they make me think about how people in my country of birth live and perceive the rest of the world, if they do at all. When I go back to New York for a visit, it seems very stiff and cold, and I start paying attention to people’s status—not to mention that it’s ridiculously expensive. Driving around the U.S. is weird, you have to be on guard for cops monitoring your speed and crazed pickup drivers treating their trucks as though they were Porsches. Being pulled over can be a life-threatening situation. When it comes to driving here in Italy, the onus of staying under the speed limit is on the driver; speed cameras are everywhere. Go too fast and a ticket arrives in the mail.

Here in heavily rural Umbria, there’s more of a we’re in this together feeling that I find appealing. In general, too, there’s a looser vibe. And that’s pretty recent. Italians used to be more rules-bound and have more hangups about, for example, what to wear, and when. One of our recent guests from across the pond wore jeans on a hot day because he read that Italians never wear shorts outside of beach towns. Wrong! We’re adapting to climate change here and shorts are everywhere.

Oops. I have to run after the dog. He’s got my shoe.

Hot vampire days

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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:

Dog days: Niko being sensible

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:

No, grazie, I’ll stay home.

We went to a truffle dinner and ended up getting to know a dentist

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Summer in Umbria: festivals, swallows putting on an air show for us, cool hikes in the mountains, and dinners with friends, old and new. Hey I know it sounds impossibly idyllic, but hey, after commuting to a packed newsroom for 30 years and pretending to care what corporate lawyers do, I deserve it.

I’ve written before about the sagra (think of a town festival, usually featuring an ingredient the town is or would like to be known for) of truffles in Ripa, two towns down the road from us. Ripa has a tiny circular fortified historic center and otherwise sprawls across some suburban development and farms. The sagra is going on as I type, but a few nights ago the town held a preview dinner with a few of the dishes that would later be served to the crowd.

We figured what the hell, let’s try the dinner. At €20 each, or about $22, it seemed a bargain, with four courses and water and a coffee included (wine was extra, but at prices that beat retail in the U.S.). Besides, it’s always great to go to these communal dinners. Our town holds them every so often, and they’re terrific, with good food, interesting tablemates, and, often, a DJ.

Niko gets a seat at the table.

We had a big life event in between reserving our places and the dinner itself: the addition to our family of a scrappy dachshund puppy we named Niko. Dogs go everywhere with their people here in Italy. We’ve eaten at Michelin-mentioned places and seen big dogs sitting placidly under the table. Should we take Niko? In just a few short days he’d grown attached to us, so we gave it a try.

We shouldn’t have even debated it. Niko turned out to be our passport to conversation. While waiting on line to pay at the start of the evening, he obligingly looked cute for the people around us. And he was pretty mellow as the crowd around our table got louder and more boisterous as food was served by Ripa’s kids and teenagers.

Foodies, here’s what we got for our €49 (2 x 20 + €9 for a bottle of local white Grechetto wine): Truffle bruschetta, gnocchetti (little gnocchi) with truffle sauce, tagliatelle with truffles (a bit too salty we told someone who asked on behalf of the town), pork scallops with truffles nd roast potatoes, and chocolate gelato with truffles [see photo gallery below].

Dinners like this are pretty rustic, even if the star is the local black truffle. Plates are biodegradable plastic, as are drinking cups for both water and wine. You sit at picnic tables and if you don’t fill the table, you’re going to get to know others who find seats at the table.

The good people of Ripa served about 300 dinners that night.

Or not. At least at first. We sat alone for awhile, one of the few couples not part of a jolly family or friends group. It was okay, because the people watching is always good. But then a couple came up to ask if there were empty seats at our table. There were.

The two couples, us and them, sat for awhile mostly ignorning each other. They apparently know everyone because most people passing the table stopped to greet them. We were happy just to sit and enjoy the warm summer night, and eavesdrop every now and then on people’s conversations.

Enter Niko once again. He wanted to see who dared to sit near us, so we held him up and predictably, our tablemates asked us about him in a way that would be familiar to parents of cute babies. They picked up on our New York-inflected Italian. Where are we from? We gave our town here, which usually elicits a chuckle. Then we came clean. Why here? We like it. We’re Italian, too, we add. We tell them about NYC’s high prices, which always comes as a shock to those who haven’t been. Within a few moments, they knew our life story.

I had to turn the tables and get them to tell us who they are. As it turns out, he’s a local dentist. Being nosy and needy, I asked him how much implants cost. (It’s less than a third what a NY dentist would charge.) The wife gave us his business card. We talked about different towns, schools, etc. Then dessert came—a Dixie cup of chocolate gelato with truffle shavings. It was getting chilly, so we all decided to leave, another communal event under our belt.

Who knows, if I have a toothache….

Gone fishin’

/ anthonypaonita / 2 Comments

Hey friends, I’m taking a short break and using the Fourth of July as a convenient excuse. I’ll leave you with this, one of my favorite Paul Simon songs.

I got (minor) beef with the dude, but damn, he’s a good songwriter. I once covered a post- 9/11 benefit where he was the star performer, and he wouldn’t let me interview him. Feh.

Simon wrote and recorded this song as the Vietnam War wound down, the draft was ending, and Nixon’s dirty tricks dominated the news. I can’t think of a song, other than his own “Peace Like a River,” that better expressed the weariness and sadness of the era. It’s ageless, really, and sounds current 50 years later. Plus, the tune itself is beautiful and his acoustic guitar playing is exemplary, as always.

There are better clips of a younger Simon singing this song out there, but YouTube in its strange wisdom makes you go to the site rather than play it here. You can track them down, or just enjoy this before you head out to the barbecue. Stay safe and enjoy the fireworks.

[Image top of page, A. Paonita as we left JFK Airport for Europe, May 2023]

Well, this definitely feels different

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After years of slowly, glacially, indecisively moving over, we’re finally doing it. The old house in New York is mostly empty and being renovated by its soon-to-be occupants (we’re keeping it in the family), while a few dozen boxes of personal effects are somewhere in a warehouse awaiting shipment to us here. This house has been ready for years, even if there are features here and there that we’d like to put in. My ex-editor used to tease me about my commitment issues, so take that, boss.

This old (by American standards) house will soon have new occupants.

Call it procrastination, call it circumstance, call it Covid-19, whatever. Up to now our stays here on the Umbrian hilltop have felt like really long vacations, even if we had to do everyday stuff like renewing the car registration. Not to mention taking the garbage and recyclables to the “tip,” as Brits would say. (We’re talking about a few plastic bins down the road. More on this last bit later.)

All that’s left is some bureaucratic stuff It also means that we’ll be back in the U.S. less, and in some ways that’s a relief.

Let me explain. I don’t usually like to do the we have this, they have that game, but to understand something, or a place, you often have to stand outside of it. Such is the case with the country of my birth. Our four- or five-month stays away have given me some perspective. And I gotta say I don’t like what I’ve been seeing. After one absence a few years ago, for example, we suddenly saw monster gas-guzzling pickup trucks everywhere. In New York City. Driven to the supermarket and on the school run. Really?

Relax, it’s just an induction cooktop, not a culture war. And water boils real fast.

More recently, and especially after Covid, there’s a palpable feeling of anger on the streets. Maybe we’ve gotten too used to the easy sociability here in Italy, where every encounter is a potential long conversation, but our fellow Americans seem sullen and angry. You feel it even when driving, when every SUV and pickup surrounding us seems to be driven by a lunatic. People do stuff that Americans used to accuse Italians of doing, ignoring stop signs, passing on the right only to make a left turn, driving at ridiculous speeds on local streets. No wonder there are speed cameras everywhere. It’s not just driving; shop clerks are nasty and ‘net bulletin boards are full of snarky comments.

What makes me really sad, though, is how the U.S. seems stuck in the past. Sure, this Mac I’m writing this on is up to date, and companies are always updating products and services. But every single change, even trivial ones like cooktops, has become a political and cultural minefield. Meanwhile, the Old Continent moves on. Not everyone likes it, I’m sure. But the feeling that this is 2020-something and we have to deal with climate change is palpable, even here where a right-wing government was elected last fall. (Never mind that the prime minister is a relatively young woman, who isn’t married to her partner, the father of her child.)

LET’S GO FOOD SHOPPING, just to make a few points. Here we are at the garbage bins. We drove here with our pint-sized Renault, which is due to be replaced by an electric model in a couple of years. You can argue about the ultimate merits of recycling, but for now we have to sort our garbage. One bin gets plastic, and almost everything plastic counts. Another is for paper, another for regular garbage. And the final, smelly one is for organic food waste. There’s a glass bin down the hill; we love the sound, as Nick Lowe once wrote, of breaking glass.

The Clio encounters some garbage bins on the way down the hill.

I’ll cop to the fact that we shouldn’t have driven so long to get to a supermarket. But in landlocked Umbria, just the occasional store has fresh fish, and these former seaside people gotta get our fix. Notice that there’s something different about the parking lot. Those panels shading the cars aren’t just pieces of plastic and steel; they’re solar panels. And these panels supply a big part of the shopping center’s electricity.

Those panels aren’t just there for the shade.

A lot of people, and especially Italians, criticize this country for being fossilized. And I can see that when it comes to some bureaucrats (let me tell you about the woman at the water board…). At the same time, we have a decent infrastructure, fiber Internet is being rolled out across this region, and, especially since Covid, most people just tap their phones or cards to pay everything from a coffee at the bar to induction cooktops at the Italian version of Best Buy.

And our prime minister and the opposition leader are both women.

It’s not just a glass of Chianti in the sunset

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Quick! When you think of Italy and its food and drink, what springs to mind? Pasta, sure. Pizza, definitely. Maybe gelato, and of course, a glass of wine to go with the meal. In fact, Italy is the biggest wine producer in the world, flooding shops and supermarkets globally with gallons of Prosecco, mass market Pinot Grigio, and fine reds and minerally whites.

But Italians are also beer drinkers. It’s not to the extent that Germans, Brits or Americans are—you don’t see Italians having keggers, and they tend not to wander around the cities in a beer-drunk haze. But historically, people here drink beer when it’s hot, or if they’re having a pizza night out.

Up until recently, mass market beers ruled Italian supermarket shelves and restaurant menus. But the micro/artisanal brew trend came to Italy too, and people appreciative of good beer have a wide selection of often local, interesting brews to choose from. Restaurateurs have picked up on the trend, too. Not from our house is a place called Umami Beer, whose owner has scanned the world for interesting brews for his patrons. The menu is eclectic too, with a wide selection of snacks, burgers and more traditional local dishes. It’s all part of the general loosening up of the culture, as more Italians travel abroad and acquire a taste for a wider palette of flavors.

The taproom of Staten Island’s finest

Before leaving New York, I paid a visit to one of Staten Island’s two local small breweries, Flagship. The good people there like to name their brews after local places and people. The island’s population is about 37 percent Italian-American, so in recognition of that, they named a Pilsener-style beer (popular here) Birra Locale. (You should be able to figure it out, but if not, it means “local beer.”) My slightly perverse mind thought it would be fun to bring that Birra Locale to an Italian artisanal brewery.

My target: the brewers of Birra Flea. In this case, “flea” is not the pesky little bug infesting the cat and your carpets. The name derives from a local river. I thought it might refer to a family, but no. I took minutes—minutes, I tell you!—of intense online research to learn this. The beer is definitely one of the shining lights of artisanal brews. The big Coop supermarket here places it in its cantina of good wines and small-producer beer, and Roman celebrity chef Max Mariola drinks it regularly as he shows his YouTube following another recipe. Flea comes from Gualdo Tadino, a town about a half-hour from our house that nestles in the foothills of the Apennine Mountain chain.

OFF I WENT THIS MORNING. Flea’s headquarters and brewery is located outside Gualdo on an isolated road. I had serious doubts that anything except a farm might can exist there. But I asked a couple on the road if I was on the right track and they assured me that the brewery was, in fact, down the road. Of course, it ended up being hard to miss, a modern charcoal gray-to-black edifice dominating the area. To emphasize its importance, the outside sign reads “Universo Flea.” I thought, well, this is more than a folksy little brewery.

However imposing the building is, the reception was the typical friendly greeting that’s pretty universal in this part of Italy. As soon as I stepped through the doors, they knew who I was and why I was there. (It wasn’t a mystery; you reserve a tour and sampling on Flea’s website.) The decor is modern yet warm. And for some reason, they have a historic red (what else?) Ferrari parked near the reception desk.

Sara poses with a birra that is definitely not locale.

My handler Sara soon greeted me. I won’t bore you with the details of brewing, but I can say that I was impressed by the tranquil atmosphere, not to mention the huge fermentation tanks. Trashing a stereotype a lot of people have about Italy and artisans, Flea’s operation is decidedly high tech and as sustainable as it can be. They grow a lot of their own malt at a farm not far from where I live. The farm animals that came with the land supply them with milk, which they’ve turned into a cheesemaking operation. I’ve been fascinated by production lines ever since I was a little kid, and the bottling, tapping and packing machinery gave me tons to stare at and admire.

I’ll confess that I love conscientious food and drink producers. And breweries have a special scent, the sweet malt that perfumes the place. It kind of humanizes the assembly lines and the high-tech fermentation tanks. Beer, like wine, has a long history. Sara told me stuff I had no idea about, like how hops isn’t there just for flavor, but also acts as a natural preservative. And centuries ago, nuns figured out how it preserves but also balances the flavor. Before then, most beer was sweet, a natural result of the yeast reacting with the malt or other grain used to brew the beer.

By now, you probably realize that Flea may make artisanal beer, but it’s not a hole in the wall operation. They’re looking toward the future. Much of their electricity comes from solar panels. (In fact Italy leads Europe in solar-derived energy.) And now they’re going to try to brew beer from the air; they’re experimenting with a technology that pulls humidity from the air. They’ll pilot test that water for brewing.

Who needs lunch when you’ve got this to go with the tasting?

At the end, I had a taste test. I chose three beers from their list; I tried to pick different colors and strengths. “Margherita,” a wheat beer, was crisp, not too hoppy, and just right for a hot summer day, or a nightcap. Their golden ale, dubbed Federico II, was fruity and just assertive enough. And a Belgian style ale named Violante was, just as the label said, powerful and just right for a cold night and stew. Because we’re in Italy, food soon appeared in front of me, so I didn’t have to think about lunch—the cheeses on the tray come from their cheesemaking operation.

Flea turns a decade old this weekend. If the next decade resembles the past ten years, they may have to reassess that artisanal tag. In any event, this afternoon was a great way to see a bunch of mostly young people making a terrific product in a beautiful space.