We wanted to go someplace extraordinary for dinner for our last evening in Italy. The concierge at Motel Corsi, in Torrimpietra just west of Rome near da Vinci Airport, recommended the pleasant-looking family restaurant across the street. But we wanted something near the ocean.
He suggested we take a drive out to Fregene, but he warned that not many places are open because they're still waking from their winter slumber. After searching for a place that was open, we found Sogno del Mare, a restaurant that's part of a seaside resort. We were told we'd have to wait about 45 minutes while the staff ate dinner, so we took a walk along the beach as the sun began to slip into the Mediterranean, imagining the battles that took place here as long 2,000 years ago, when Rome ruled the seas, and as recently as 60 years ago, when the Allies landed nearby.
The Sogno del Mare staff spoke no English, and the only other people in the place, which looked like it seated 100 or more, were two couples. Our wait was rewarded with such specialties as gnochetti (little gnocchi) with clams and shrimp. Paul had a cheese pizza designed for four people, which he nearly consumed himself but shared with his sister Emma, whose onion pizza strangely arrived with no cheese. So much for my ordering skills. For dessert we had fresh strawberries with vanilla gelato, tiramisu, and tortino di cioccolata, a dense chocolate torte artfully presented on a large plate drizzled with hot fudge and dusted with sugar. What a perfect way to end our trip, with a show from the magnificent sunset and edible art from the kitchen Sogno del Mare. Like the name, it was a "Dream by the Sea."
On the 20-minute drive back to the hotel, we talked about what a great time we've had and what the kids liked best (Venice and Rome), interspersed with practical talk about what and how we were going to pack for the journey tomorrow, especially all those souvenirs.
Diane joked about kidnapping all of us, chucking everything and buying a house in Tuscany. The kids for a moment weren't sure if she was serious. Maybe she was half serious.
"I'm ready to stay forever if that were possible," I said, ready to embrace a culture that seems to make "doing nothing" an art form, a culture that loves good food, good company and seems to make the time for it. "But I'm ready to go home if not."
Alas, staying forever is not possible, at least not now.
"You know, Dad," said Sarah, "I feel exactly the same way."
Monday, May 14, 2007
April 27 - City of the dead
We arrived at the Catacombs of St. Domitilla in Rome after an unintended but pleasant detour on the Appian Way, the oldest of the old Roman roads with its apparently original paving stones that have the same effect on modern automobiles as speed bumps.
The tour of the Catacombs was brief, about 25 minutes, but comprehensive in the guide's description of the 17 miles of tunnels and 180,000 tombs, of which only about 2,000 are allowed to be open to the public. The tombs, cut out of volcanic ash, are nevertheless strong enough to support the tunnels. They were dug as temporary resting places, since the early Christians believed that Jesus would be returning very shortly.
One thing the guide wanted to make clear: The tombs were NOT used as hiding places, despite what is depicted in "Quo Vadis?", because they would have been way too rank from the decomposition of bodies and the lack of ventilation.
The tour of the Catacombs was brief, about 25 minutes, but comprehensive in the guide's description of the 17 miles of tunnels and 180,000 tombs, of which only about 2,000 are allowed to be open to the public. The tombs, cut out of volcanic ash, are nevertheless strong enough to support the tunnels. They were dug as temporary resting places, since the early Christians believed that Jesus would be returning very shortly.
One thing the guide wanted to make clear: The tombs were NOT used as hiding places, despite what is depicted in "Quo Vadis?", because they would have been way too rank from the decomposition of bodies and the lack of ventilation.
Friday, May 11, 2007
April 27 - Siena, we really want to like you, Part II
We toured the Duomo Friday morning and meandered among its distinctive zebra-marble columns. The alleged arm of St. John the Baptist was nowhere to be found, but we did find some amazement in the beautifully carved pulpit intricately depicting various Bible stories.
One disturbing aspect of visiting churches in Italy is that most of them charge admission, but they must due to declining attendance. One of our guidebooks said admission to the Duomo is free; we found that's the case no longer. And once you're inside, you can get nickled and dimed for audio explanations of every significant piece of artwork. While the ticket booth clearly stated that the admission fees were to go to the church restoration, which was obviously under way as evidenced by the crane and scaffolding outside, it still didn't feel quite right that you were being shaken down to enter a house of worship. The story of Jesus and the moneychangers immediately comes to mind.
After a struggle to get out of Siena due to confusing street signs, we finally made it out and onto the Autostrada for the last leg of our Italian journey.
One disturbing aspect of visiting churches in Italy is that most of them charge admission, but they must due to declining attendance. One of our guidebooks said admission to the Duomo is free; we found that's the case no longer. And once you're inside, you can get nickled and dimed for audio explanations of every significant piece of artwork. While the ticket booth clearly stated that the admission fees were to go to the church restoration, which was obviously under way as evidenced by the crane and scaffolding outside, it still didn't feel quite right that you were being shaken down to enter a house of worship. The story of Jesus and the moneychangers immediately comes to mind.
After a struggle to get out of Siena due to confusing street signs, we finally made it out and onto the Autostrada for the last leg of our Italian journey.
April 26 - Siena, we really want to like you
"Everybody" supposedly loves this medieval city, and certainly there's a lot to enjoy, but finding our hotel was way more of a chore than it had to be. Serves us right, I suppose, for trusting venere.com, which was great for reservations but awful for directions. "Just off the highway." Hah! If you're a pedestrian trying to find landmarks, Siena is the best of the Italian cities we visited. But if you're a motorist trying to find your hotel or even your way out of town, you'll be befuddled by the confusing and contradictory signs. Although cars have supposedly been banned from the center of the city since the mid 1960s, you still had to be on the lookout for commercial vehicles that part the seas of people wandering the streets. And motorists like us trying to find our hotel!
The best revenge for arduous driving is good food. We had a great dinner tonight (We deserved it!) at Ristorante Guidoriccio, just off Il Campo, the shell-shaped main square lined with cafes. (I've never read that Boston's brutalist City Hall Plaza was supposed to evoke Il Campo, but to us it does. Maybe the Hub's plaza just needs some nice cafes to humanize it.) Anyway, the family-run Guidoriccio had some of the most artfully-presented food we've had, including a crostini appetizer with unusual toppings including fresh tomato, ground sausage and a ground vegetable spread --- so beautiful that I had to get a picture of it. The only disappointment was the house red wine, but admittedly our palates had been spoiled by the visit to Poggio-Torselli earlier in the day.
The best revenge for arduous driving is good food. We had a great dinner tonight (We deserved it!) at Ristorante Guidoriccio, just off Il Campo, the shell-shaped main square lined with cafes. (I've never read that Boston's brutalist City Hall Plaza was supposed to evoke Il Campo, but to us it does. Maybe the Hub's plaza just needs some nice cafes to humanize it.) Anyway, the family-run Guidoriccio had some of the most artfully-presented food we've had, including a crostini appetizer with unusual toppings including fresh tomato, ground sausage and a ground vegetable spread --- so beautiful that I had to get a picture of it. The only disappointment was the house red wine, but admittedly our palates had been spoiled by the visit to Poggio-Torselli earlier in the day.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
April 26 - We'll take "Manhattan"
When I first visited San Gimignano with my dad in 1981, the town was just beginning to become a tourist attraction, with its towers that make it resemble a sort of medieval Manhattan jutting from the Tuscan countryside about 35 miles south of Florence.
Today you can barely move here, with loads of tour buses parked outside, loads of shops inside the main gate and even a shuttle bus that takes less mobile (or lazier) tourists through the tiny town. It's somewhat of a disappointment to see all these people here, although the charm remains undeniable as you gaze up at the "skyscrapers" a couple of hundred feet tall from which warring families and groups did their battles, and found protection, centuries ago.
Thanks to Rick Steves' Italy, we were able to escape the crowds to Locanda San Agostino at Piazza San Agostino and a fine lunch of pizzas, sausage and cheese and tagliatelle. It's amazing how even in the most crowded of Italian tourists sites you can still find some peace --- if you allow yourself to get lost a bit.
Today you can barely move here, with loads of tour buses parked outside, loads of shops inside the main gate and even a shuttle bus that takes less mobile (or lazier) tourists through the tiny town. It's somewhat of a disappointment to see all these people here, although the charm remains undeniable as you gaze up at the "skyscrapers" a couple of hundred feet tall from which warring families and groups did their battles, and found protection, centuries ago.
Thanks to Rick Steves' Italy, we were able to escape the crowds to Locanda San Agostino at Piazza San Agostino and a fine lunch of pizzas, sausage and cheese and tagliatelle. It's amazing how even in the most crowded of Italian tourists sites you can still find some peace --- if you allow yourself to get lost a bit.
April 26 - Like taking Chianti from a baby
We checked out of Hotel Enza and took a somewhat unplanned scenic route around the eastern side of Florence, past the Piazzale Michelangelo park with its panoramic views of the city from on high.
Heading south on country roads about 15 miles south of Florence, we found Poggio-Torselli winery in San Casciano val di Pesa and arrived on time for our appointment for a tour and tasting with Maurizio Santone, the director, who led us around the new winery (first vintage 2002) that has as its centerpiece a 700-year-old villa that Maurizio told us was once home to Machiavelli and his family.
The investors in Poggio-Torselli appear to have spared no expense, either in restoring what was a ruin of a villa or investing in modern equipment, from the stainless steel tanks for the initial fermentation, to the hand-made oak barrels, where the wine is further aged from 18 months to two years before it is ready for bottling.
Our tasting consisted of Chianti Classico '03, Classico Riserva '04 and a Cabernet that proved the most complex (and green) of the three. He explained, with helpfulness and without pretension, the importance of appreciating the color (by tipping the glass away from you), the fragrance (one nostril is best), and why professional wine tasters spit: getting drunk doesn't help your ability to critically evaluate a wine, and as your digestive system processes the non-alcoholic components of the wine, it also alters your objective sense of taste. After a mini-feast of bread, cheese and prosciutto, we decided on six bottles of wine plus a bottle of grappa, an Italian brandy; olive oil and honey, all produced at the winery. The kids got to try the wine, too, although all except Paul admitted they had yet to acquire a taste for the stuff.
As Maurizio prepared the wine-tasting, we were able to wander the formal gardens outside the the villa overlooking the 30-hectare property, a piece of classic Tuscan heaven both God- and man-made, with rows of just-developing grapevines interspersed with rows of olive trees. Maurizio marveled at how fortunate he was to be able to work in the countryside during the day and return to the bustle of his native Florence each evening. And he was humble enough to admit that even though he directs the nurture and harvest of all these magnificent plants, he can't grow anything in his garden at home.
Heading south on country roads about 15 miles south of Florence, we found Poggio-Torselli winery in San Casciano val di Pesa and arrived on time for our appointment for a tour and tasting with Maurizio Santone, the director, who led us around the new winery (first vintage 2002) that has as its centerpiece a 700-year-old villa that Maurizio told us was once home to Machiavelli and his family.
The investors in Poggio-Torselli appear to have spared no expense, either in restoring what was a ruin of a villa or investing in modern equipment, from the stainless steel tanks for the initial fermentation, to the hand-made oak barrels, where the wine is further aged from 18 months to two years before it is ready for bottling.
Our tasting consisted of Chianti Classico '03, Classico Riserva '04 and a Cabernet that proved the most complex (and green) of the three. He explained, with helpfulness and without pretension, the importance of appreciating the color (by tipping the glass away from you), the fragrance (one nostril is best), and why professional wine tasters spit: getting drunk doesn't help your ability to critically evaluate a wine, and as your digestive system processes the non-alcoholic components of the wine, it also alters your objective sense of taste. After a mini-feast of bread, cheese and prosciutto, we decided on six bottles of wine plus a bottle of grappa, an Italian brandy; olive oil and honey, all produced at the winery. The kids got to try the wine, too, although all except Paul admitted they had yet to acquire a taste for the stuff.
As Maurizio prepared the wine-tasting, we were able to wander the formal gardens outside the the villa overlooking the 30-hectare property, a piece of classic Tuscan heaven both God- and man-made, with rows of just-developing grapevines interspersed with rows of olive trees. Maurizio marveled at how fortunate he was to be able to work in the countryside during the day and return to the bustle of his native Florence each evening. And he was humble enough to admit that even though he directs the nurture and harvest of all these magnificent plants, he can't grow anything in his garden at home.
Sunday, May 6, 2007
April 25 - A reunion with old friends
Prato is to Florence what Cambridge is to Boston --- a bustling city in its own right of about 180,000 people just northwest of its better known neighbor. It was there during World War II that my father, a U.S. Army counterintelligence officer, set up local headquarters in the home of the Giuseppe Rosati family. He became friendly with Mr. and Mrs. Rosati and continued that friendship with the Rosatis' daughters, Rosalba, Giuseppina and Margherita, and their grandson, Federico Cianchi. I had last seen Federico in 1981, when he was 10. He is now a lawyer and starting a real estate agency with a business partner, planning to marry next year and maybe even honeymoon in the US.
We had arranged to have dinner this evening with Margherita, her husband, Marcello, and Federico and met them at their home in Prato, where we renewed our Christmas-correspondence friendship in person and reminisced. Federico even produced postcards that my dad had sent him in the late 1980s of scullers on the Charles River in Boston and from a ski area in Vermont.
Interestingly, they took us to a restaurant in the mountains about 25 minutes north of Prato in an area that Sarah said reminded her of New Hampshire or Vermont. There were no tourists here, though; only locals enjoying the remains of a day off in the middle of the week with barbecues by the stream that flowed past the restaurant.
Our dinner conversation was an amusing and joyous linguistic stew of broken English, broken Italian, fluent English and fluent Italian as we compared mundane things like work and school schedules and daily routines, bemoaned the price of real estate, which is about the same in urban Italy as it is in Boston, and discussed global warming and its effect on Italy. It was an evening that was over all too soon, and Federico offered the most profound observation of the night:
"The time spent with good friends is never enough."
We had arranged to have dinner this evening with Margherita, her husband, Marcello, and Federico and met them at their home in Prato, where we renewed our Christmas-correspondence friendship in person and reminisced. Federico even produced postcards that my dad had sent him in the late 1980s of scullers on the Charles River in Boston and from a ski area in Vermont.
Interestingly, they took us to a restaurant in the mountains about 25 minutes north of Prato in an area that Sarah said reminded her of New Hampshire or Vermont. There were no tourists here, though; only locals enjoying the remains of a day off in the middle of the week with barbecues by the stream that flowed past the restaurant.
Our dinner conversation was an amusing and joyous linguistic stew of broken English, broken Italian, fluent English and fluent Italian as we compared mundane things like work and school schedules and daily routines, bemoaned the price of real estate, which is about the same in urban Italy as it is in Boston, and discussed global warming and its effect on Italy. It was an evening that was over all too soon, and Federico offered the most profound observation of the night:
"The time spent with good friends is never enough."
April 25 - A break from museums
We decided that we'd had our fill of museums and took a side trip to two cities that once struggled with Florence for dominance of Tuscany: Pisa and Lucca. Smaller and more manageable, they kind of made you glad that Florence won.
Since today was a national holiday celebrating the liberation of Italy by the Allies in 1945, Pisa was probably even more packed than usual, with plenty of Italian families mixing it up with American, European and Asian tourists.
The iconic Leaning Tower is more impressive than expected (certainly it's much larger than the one at Prince Restaurant on Route 1 in Saugus, Mass.), but the hordes lining up to take pictures of co-travelers "holding up the tower" and vendors hawking all manner of Leaning Tower tchotchkes are just as tacky as one might imagine. We were more than willing participants in the photo-snapping frenzy but let the Lucite Leaning Towers be.
Even if it weren't leaning, the tower's graceful arches and nearly ignored Duomo and Baptistery next door form a nice architectural trio, especially since they're fronted by a manicured lawn of a couple of acres that has signs clearly warning people to stay off the grass. Of course, people wilfully ignore the signs (their being exclusively in Italian doesn't help), and the police come by periodically to shoo the photographers and their subjects away. I wonder how many times this little ritual is played out in a day!
From Pisa it was a half-hour drive to Lucca, which has its share of tourists, too, though in far fewer numbers than in Pisa or Florence. The home of "Madama Butterfly" composer Giacomo Puccini, it's unlike any of the other cities we have visited: Its wall continues to have a practical use as a walking and bicycle trail. At about 30 feet high, it's the perfect vantage to take a stroll (you can perambulate the 2.5-miles around the whole city) and admire the architecture of Lucca on one side and the pristine Tuscan countryside on the other.
After our 40-minute walk, we found a fine gelateria run by Brits, the better to refuel ourselves for our trip back to Prato and Florence.
Since today was a national holiday celebrating the liberation of Italy by the Allies in 1945, Pisa was probably even more packed than usual, with plenty of Italian families mixing it up with American, European and Asian tourists.
The iconic Leaning Tower is more impressive than expected (certainly it's much larger than the one at Prince Restaurant on Route 1 in Saugus, Mass.), but the hordes lining up to take pictures of co-travelers "holding up the tower" and vendors hawking all manner of Leaning Tower tchotchkes are just as tacky as one might imagine. We were more than willing participants in the photo-snapping frenzy but let the Lucite Leaning Towers be.
Even if it weren't leaning, the tower's graceful arches and nearly ignored Duomo and Baptistery next door form a nice architectural trio, especially since they're fronted by a manicured lawn of a couple of acres that has signs clearly warning people to stay off the grass. Of course, people wilfully ignore the signs (their being exclusively in Italian doesn't help), and the police come by periodically to shoo the photographers and their subjects away. I wonder how many times this little ritual is played out in a day!
From Pisa it was a half-hour drive to Lucca, which has its share of tourists, too, though in far fewer numbers than in Pisa or Florence. The home of "Madama Butterfly" composer Giacomo Puccini, it's unlike any of the other cities we have visited: Its wall continues to have a practical use as a walking and bicycle trail. At about 30 feet high, it's the perfect vantage to take a stroll (you can perambulate the 2.5-miles around the whole city) and admire the architecture of Lucca on one side and the pristine Tuscan countryside on the other.
After our 40-minute walk, we found a fine gelateria run by Brits, the better to refuel ourselves for our trip back to Prato and Florence.
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