Soup, Italian Style · Jan 29, 06:14 PM by James Martin
I made this Italian soup the other day. It was made from stuff in our back yard. You see, Martha had planted arugula a few years ago. Arugula is a weed, so it’s spread itself all over the place. We used lots of it in the soup. We also have some scrawny potatoes sometimes, but used a couple from our local farmer. He doesn’t put all that poisonous crap in them that industrial potatoes have to add in order to keep the little buggers from forming “eyes” on their long journeys in trucks across the globe. We had some bread that was about to get used as a doorstop, it was that dried out—so we used that in the soup, too.
Now I’ve made it sound like we made a junk soup outta stuff lying around that the vermin hadn’t gotten to yet. That’s not entirely true. We sort of used a recipe from Marcella Hazan out of her fantastic cookbook called More Classic Italian Cooking. We use this cookbook a lot. Its been to Sardinia. Its spine is in worse shape than mine, and I’ve labored in little square holes in the ground as an archaeologist armed with a dental pick. You can see what’s left of the book in the picture below.
The soup we made is cucina povera at its best, this concoction of chopped potato, torn arugula and stale bread, all cooked in water. (Yes, water, no broth.) But the kicker is that great drizzle of olive oil you put on top of the soup as the bowl in front of you steams up your glasses. Even the poor had olive oil, mostly. They might have had to hit the social circuit, cut a bella figura, did somebody a few big favors, but they could get the oil, you betcha. And olive oil that’s made by someone with a satisfaction motive instead of a profit motive can bring a dish of such “found” ingredients alive. If you are stuck in America it’s likely you’ve never had decent olive oil from Italy.
You have to know someone. I don’t mean one of those corporate “persons” but a real human who makes olive oil from olives.
Anyway, I was thinking about this ingredient. I mean the soup is outrageously good, better by far than the sum of its profoundly ordinary parts. It seems to me that a lot of cucina povera is like that; there’s one simple ingredient that surprises you because you can’t quite figure out why the dish in front of you is so damned good.
Like real life, you can’t have strong arbitrary prejudices or hate surprises or you’ll end up like one of my dig directors, who swore each and every day that if she ever found a single sliver of anchovy in a dish I made for her she’d rip my testicles off and throw them over the fence to the dogs. One day I made her a pasta different from everyone else’s and she got curious—so much so that she dug a fork into my pasta and declared it “delicious,” demanding that I make her some pronto.
So I took some garlic, some oil, about three anchovies, a tablespoon of tomato paste, some parsley and some red pepper flakes and made her the sauce, tossing some spaghetti into it and giving it a flip or two. After presenting it to her she slurped it down, licked the plate clean…and then licked the pot clean.
“What’s in this?” she demanded.
“Well, if you must know…anchovies. Lots of anchovies. It’s the star of the dish,” I explained.
She began to retch. It was a sort of fake retching, which is less pleasant to watch than real retching.
“You, you, you’ve poisoned me,” she said, holding her throat.
Americans are funny people.
Another surprise ingredient Italians use in their simple cuisine are the little capers you find on plants that like to grow between rocks in southern Italy. One of the reasons you can’t get real Italian food at a joint like the Olive Garden is that American diners there found capers “too unexpected.”
What’s wrong with unexpected? TOO unexpected? What’s that?
Expect some unexpected ingredient when you encounter real Italian food. I know it sounds funny, but really, make eating a Zen experience. Just let the food happen. Don’t give me any of this, “it’s too unexpected” or “it’s too green” as Olive Garden diners speak of pesto.
Really. I’m warning you. A cook might do you some harm. Watch out especially if you have testicles and there are dogs nearby.
How can a food be “too green” anyway? I give up.
Here’s something to read: Olive Garden Struggles With Diners Afraid Of Capers, Pesto
AFRAID?
Soup, Italian Style originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Jan 29, 2012, © James Martin, 
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Everyone Goes to Florence, Italy · Jan 19, 11:43 AM by James Martin
Who cares that Italy is going broke? Who cares that the economy everywhere that isn’t China or Germany is in the toilet? Folks like you and I have been hiding out in Florence hotels at a rate greater than ever before.
12 million hotel rooms in Florence province were filled with tourists and their spawn last year, according to The Florentine. Up over 8% from the year before. The city’s hotels did quite well, too. Over 8 million people slept in them. Or at least paid for them (dearly).
Perhaps tourism can save Italy. Of course, for that, there’d have to be a weak Euro, or better yet, a feeble Lira. Not only that, but every destination would have to be as popular as Florence.
It’s true that you can’t find as much art crammed into as small an area as the city that calls itself “Firenze.” But if you have a car and don’t mind narrow, curving roads there sure is a lot to discover in the rest of Tuscany. For real contrast, you could go up to little Sant Anna di Stazemma and find out about the massacre and what Spike Lee was trying to convey. If that’s too rural and remote, you could visit one of Italy’s most beautiful hill towns, Pitigliano, also spectacular in its setting. Heck, I’d stay a while and walk the Vie Cave, the Etruscan rock sculpted paths.
But enough. Yes, there’s art in Florence. But if you want to know a bit about the world, from the plight of Jews in Pitigliano to the plight of the resistance in Sant Anna, to the world of artisan cheese making, you’ll find it all within the friendly confines of Tuscany.
So spread out. Together we can stimulate the economy of Italy to make sure it lasts for a while without folks being forced to sell off ancient artifacts or pickpocket every last tourist.
But then, if you must go to Florence, we have Florence Weather and Climate Information just a mouse click away.
But you know, this is Italy, and even in Tuscany there are exotic islands awaiting your bags. Heck, you might think of renting a vacation house on Giglio and watching the cruise ships waddle by. Or maybe not. Still:
Giglio Island Vacation Rentals
Everyone Goes to Florence, Italy originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Jan 19, 2012, © James Martin,
Do You Need a Car to Visit Italy? · Jan 4, 12:44 PM by James Martin
It always amazes me when I see Internet writing types who’ve used bold text to spout loudly the unequivocal law of the Italian countryside, “you definitely need a car to see Italy right!” If you research, you’ll likely find that these are people who have bought a house in an agricultural wilderness and turned it into a Bed and Breakfast that train-riders can’t visit because the tracks don’t go anywhere close to there. It’s a vested interest thing.
There’s also a romantic side. Every Italian tourist’s noggin has been graced with a portion of memory devoted to an endless loop revealing a red car gloriously shredding the asphalt between idyllic Tuscan villages over and over again. The top is down, the exhaust note is throaty, and friendly folks wave encouragingly as you zip along with Italian verve. It’s a virus caused by overindulging in Italian Romantic Comedies and taking to heart the hyperbole found in tourist brochures. Really.
These days (sung sadly to a tune by the Duke), you “don’t zip along much anymore.” Not legally that is. Millions of Euros worth of autovelox cameras make sure that zipping is kept to something you do when your trusty steed, parked discreetly, is approached by the constabulary just as you’ve finished getting amorous with your sweet honey. “Nothing to see here, officer…”
Presumably the fees extracted from the jauntier drivers pay for the machines. It doesn’t often work out like that, but these days folks are increasingly willing to go into debt to keep everyone else in line. “God,” they will explain, “wants them to.” And so you will likely find yourself and your rental vehicle in frequent lines, except in Italy the line of cars you wait in is called a coda or a “tail”—except you don’t want a piece of this one…
There is another problem with driving these days. The price of fuel has skyrocketed. Taxes, you see, have been added to rebuild the towns that bad weather has crunched. And, remember, the prices have skyrocketed from stratospherically high prices we now think of as reasonable. We are a flexible people.
I’m not trying to scare you from renting a car and driving your butt off. It’s just that it might be time to consider the train. It’s (relatively) cheap. It lets you off near the center of cities—bypassing the industrial crap that rings them—and you don’t have to pay attention to anything you don’t want to pay attention to.
I mean, look at what’s on a single rail line: Torino to Trieste. It’s like a box of assorted chocolates, these sweet and compelling cities and towns: Torino, Vercelli (known for risotto with frogs!) Milano, Brescia, Verona, Padova, Venice. And you pay just a few Euros to travel between any two of them. You can spend weeks along this one rail line without thinking you’re missing the “real Italy.”
And in Italy you’ll find passes that integrate the public transportation experience, from boats to metro to buses and trains. In little-visited Lazio, for example, you’ll find the BIRG Pass that will save you money and make getting places darned easy. Check with the local tourist office wherever you land.
And don’t think the train stations themselves are seedy little stink-holes like some in the US. Both Venice and Florence stations have been named in one of those ubiquitous Top Ten lists of train stations in Europe.
So, no, you don’t need a car to visit Italy. You can get to some mighty sweet places on the train.
Do You Need a Car to Visit Italy? originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Jan 04, 2012, © James Martin,
Popular These Days
Instagram - Travel Pictures Oddly Rendered · Dec 29, 10:53 AM by James Martin
Perhaps you’ve heard of Instagram. It’s a simple app for the iPhone and iPod Touch that makes your crappy cell phone pictures look like crappy old pictures through filters that change the color and framing. That’s an Instagram picture of yours truly up there on the right, looking all critical and curmudgeonly as usual. If you click the picture you can see it horrifyingly large. Do so at your own risk.
Picture sharing isn’t new, but Instagram does that pretty well, too.
So what’s special about Instagram and why would you add it to your travel story recording arsenal? I mean really, we live in a world in which a huge number of people on vacation choose to lug around massive SLR cameras with massive (and massively expensive) lenses screwed into them, a chiropractor’s dream. Most of these photographers are willing to debate the absolute perfection of their picture output right down to the last immaculate pixel. Who’d want manipulated pictures made to look like they were taken with outdated 1920’s technology?
Um, well, ok, look over there to the right. It’s a simple picture of a tree, reflected in a pond on a friend’s property. I’ve walked this property many times with a DSLR. I’ve never taken this picture with it. I’ve never even thought about taking this picture. Yet I love how it came out. So what’s that all about?
The combination of my iPod camera with its primitive, fixed-focus lens is like a comfort food we’ve enjoyed as children, a box camera un-boxed. Instagram’s filters are the gravy that links us from digital light storage back to chemical transformation of crystalline film coatings. Photography as a narrative medium is now reset back to its primitive beginnings. Images matter. Strong, graphic images—colors desaturated (or oddly oversaturated)—are the things of memory. It’s not about the beetles crawling on the tree’s perfectly rendered bark that you might get with $5000 worth of expensive digital photographic equipment, it’s about the soul of the tree, the symmetry of it, the power of it; it’s about nature as we might never have seen it before but nature as we remember it, low-def, dreamily unsharp. It’s your world, upside down.
The primitive nature of Instagram forces you to look at the common things around you differently. It’s not about forcing you to see in high-definition something you didn’t know you wanted to see—it’s about matching the environment of your own vision. It’s a whole different thing. The pictures, it seem to me, are evocative—if you think about it while you’re taking them.
That’s Martha’s fave on the left. It’s simply a tree hanging over Cache Creek. Nothing more. A darkness, the erotic and ominous dark of a winter’s day, is reflected in it. I hope it sends a shiver down your spine.
But what about this manipulation? It’s dishonest, isn’t it?
Art is all about matching the output to a vision. It’s never about the reality we believe in. Good art is about something else. It’s about different reality, a different way of seeing.
Take Ansel Adams. The magician with a view camera is responsible for getting a huge number of folks to believe that his output presented to you the absolute finest representation of reality you could possibly squeeze out of a big negative.
You can fool all the people all the time, you know. I once spent a day with Ansel Adams. There isn’t a photographer I can think of who didn’t spend more time thinking about new and better ways of manipulating a negative. The man spent an inordinate sum of money on electronics to measure what was going on in that chemical deposit altered by light. His dodging and burning instructions were legendary for their complexity. I’m not kidding, if you saw a straight print of “Moonrise, Hernandez” selling for $12 you’d probably walk right past. It’s not that good of a photograph. Really. Reality sucks sometimes.
So think what you can do with the limitations of a cell phone camera. It might make your eyes seek out better images. Who knows?
I can’t wait to get my low tech photo equipment to Italy. For now, here is the start of my Instagram gallery.
The app on the web: Instagram
(And, um, yes, I do seem to have a tree fetish. I’ll get that worked on. Promise.)
If you’re still convinced that high-tech is the way to go as long as it easily slips into your pocket, the Canon Powershot S100, a camera I’m lusting over, is finally available on Amazon: Canon PowerShot S100 12.1 MP Digital Camera with 5x Wide Angle Optical Image Stabilized Zoom (Black)
Instagram - Travel Pictures Oddly Rendered originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Dec 29, 2011, © James Martin,
Sartiglia Remembered · Nov 28, 05:56 PM by James Martin
There are two Sardinian Festivals you shouldn’t miss. Both of them rely heavily on horses. L’Ardia di San Costantino turns a man grateful for the grace of God in his life into Constantine, a saint in Sardinia, where he and his two flag bearers take on all comers in a daring and dangerous route on dirt roads around a Sanctuary devoted to Constantine.
Then there is Sa Sartiglia, which I attended earlier this year. If you go and see everything, you’ll be drained. From the one-hour dressing of the leader, Su Componidori, to to parade, to the competition in which riders at full gallop try to skewer a star with a lance, and then to another parade, and then, as the sun sets, a stunning display of horsemanship takes place with riders doing things on the backs of horses you never would think possible, called the race of ‘pariglie’.
And yes, congratulatory kisses happen even to masked men.
In any case, I was reminded of Sartiglia when Antonio Sanna friended me on Facebook and told me of his films.
One of them, Aspettando La sartiglia, is all about dreaming and waiting for the spring event, with some of the things we’ve been talking about. You should watch:
And he gave me the link to some of the television coverage of Sartiglia
And below is my video of Sartiglia, starting at the dressing of Su Componidori:
The reason I’m bringing this up is that if you want to see this amazing spectacle, you’ll need to start planning now. The dates should be in February, but they haven’t been set yet, so check with the foundation linked below.
The Foundation of Sa Sartiglia website has a lot of information on the festivities.
Here is a list of user-rated hotels in Oristano. We had a pleasant stay at the Mistral II and it was close to the action but not too close to be noisy.
Sartiglia Remembered originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Nov 28, 2011, © James Martin,
Big Coffee · Nov 10, 05:33 PM by James Martin
UNESCO recently declared Viennese Coffee House Culture as “Intangible Cultural Heritage” which evidently means the practice is somewhat special and worthy of mention (and perhaps preserving).
But, come to think of it, where folks take their coffee is really and truly a sign of the values of a culture. I was thinking this as I was awaiting my simple cappuccino at Koffi, a wonderful Palm Springs coffee house. The reason I was thinking while waiting was because the waiting part was so much longer than the waiting part in a caffe in Italy, and thus the flood gates to my active imagination were opened by the rusty mental wrench of boredom; dangerous, to be sure.
Being a journalist, I used the time to analyze the actions of the Barista at Koffi. And there he was before me, flailing away, elbows flying like a fiddler’s at a dance. All this motion to make a coffee drink was new to me. There wasn’t the elegant flow of an Italian fronting the gleaming machine with a tiny cup of perfect brew cradled in his hairy sausage fingers.
What caused all this animation? Well, it’s the choices. You can’t, of course, get a single cappuccino at Koffi. No, the small is a double. This is America. We have big coffee. Live with it.
So here’s the thing. The Barista can’t just shove the Koffi cup under the spigot like an Italian would do. You’ve got to direct two streams of coffee into two metal containers, one for each dose. The humongous cup you’re about to receive with your cappuccino lolling about in it is the size of something maybe destitute giants would demand at their local soup kitchen. It could double as a helmet, in case of enemy fire or heavy rain. In any case, it couldn’t be shoved under those delicate spigots without doing them grave harm.
Once the coffee is unloaded into the big cup-pot from its two cute metal holding pitchers, it’s time for the foaming milk stage. In Italy, the barista has a big pot of warm milk with foam by his side, a tiny portion of which he instantly nudges into a cup on request, stopping to give the pot a shot of steam if you ask for your cappuccino “caldo” or hot. Impossible in America, where folks ask for low fat, non fat, one percent, two percent, fat, soy, and other things only remotely related to a cow’s teat-squeezings (or not at all). Sometimes folks ask for a combination of the real and the imaginary milks. (The three calories they save with this strategy means they can have an extra half-teaspoon of Budweiser with their next meal, which will undoubtedly consist of something deep fat fried.) In any case, the coffee guy has to lift gigantic containers of real milk and fake milk as the customer has demanded it, checking the ticket to get the right proportions, and pour them into the foaming container. Then he foams away, a fresh foam for every order.
All of this takes much time, of course, which is probably why you need a coffee so large you can hardly gather the strength to lug it to a table. Nobody would want to go through such time-consuming nonsense again.
So, anthropologically speaking, we can draw from this the conclusion that real Americans value choice over, well, tradition. If I were a real coffee curmudgeon, I’d say they valued choice over the taste of coffee.
Well, ok then: I’m a real coffee curmudgeon.
Really, my coffee was fine. Next time I might try the half goat milk half yak butter with sprinkles version though.
I suggest you dip your toes into the various types of coffee culture in Europe, from the elegance of Vienna’s Coffee Houses, to the um, elegance of Turin’s Historic Caffes. Then stop in a working man’s joint and have a coffee. It’s different. And we celebrate differences, don’t we?
Shouldn’t we? Because coffee is big all over.
Big Coffee originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Nov 10, 2011, © James Martin,
Getting Fed by the Big Boys: High-End Dining in Italy · Oct 4, 02:09 PM by James Martin
Every once in a while you have to step back from your position that the be all and end all of food was developed by penniless housewives whose husbands could only afford to bring back a bovine gall bladder or testicle or some such after a week of hard labor at the mine. Sure, it’s amazing what those women have done over the years with the internal organs and hanging bits. But you have to wonder, “what can big money buy that’s significantly better than mamma’s carefully conceived testicular meat balls?”
You needn’t wait; the end of the spectrum opposite my beloved Cucina Povera was recently represented in the NYT: Cucina dell’Arte: High-End Dining in Italy, which takes us on a culinary tour of a handful of high-end restaurants.
I was happy the author included Combal.Zero, a restaurant I’ve had the great pleasure to have eaten at and enjoyed. David Scabin in still at the helm, still playful, and still playing around with the idea of turning tradition on its collective ear. (I disagree, though, with the statement, “Both Combal.Zero and Cracco put Italian traditions through the paces of Mr. Adrià’s so-called molecular gastronomy…) as David Scabin told me specifically that he had no interest in molecular gastronomy, but then again that was in 2006. Still, the article offers no evidence for the claim.
In any case, what magnified my giddiness was the idea that the restaurant was still open and chef Scabin was still, evidently, on his game. When you write about food in Italy, you have to live with the fact that unless someone writes you and that email manages to get past the spam filters, it may be that you’ll never hear of a restaurant closing, or getting bought up by a corporate entity focused on profit and meatless meatballs. You can’t possibly eat at every restaurant you’ve ever written about every year—and live to tell about it I mean.
So tonight I’ll make a little toast to Mr. Scabin, who never lost the notion that food should be fun, especially high-end food which tends to be served, at least in America, in rather morgue-ish environments with a confusing plethora of stabbing and cutting objects designed to befuddle the user who is made to use them to keep the food from ever touching his fingers, a dubious goal for sure, especially when it pertains to food.
Know what I mean? If not, why not read my review from 2006 (and be aware prices seem to have gone up): Combal.Zero Review
Fun food. Beaucoup Bucks. Can life get better than this?
Getting Fed by the Big Boys: High-End Dining in Italy originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Oct 04, 2011, © James Martin,
Abbey of Santa Croce in Sassoferrato · Sep 23, 09:37 AM by James Martin
Sassoferrato—I’ve mentioned it before—is quite a place. There are lots of things to see and do in the little village in the little-touristed Marche region of Italy.
Just outside Sassoferrato is the Abbey of Santa Croce, dated to around the second half of the 11th century, and probably the work of craftsmen from Lombardy. The bell tower you see in the picture is later, and was possibly added to protect the church; it appears as if a “shell” has been built around it.
Many of the columns in the Abbey church come from the nearby Roman site of Sentinum, which you can easily visit on the same day (see below for a visitor guide and an article on the delights of “hidden Italy” in Sassoferrato).
In the middle ages there was a pilgrim’s hospice nearby, and the church displays a terracotta statue of the Pilgrim St. Rocco with the characteristic scallop shell attached to his coat. St. Rocco is a protector against the plague and all contagious diseases.
There are signs that the Knights Templar protected the church, and carvings attest to their presence.
There’s lots of evidence that the spot the abbey sits upon has been sacred for a long while; the church was built over a Temple dedicated to Mithros.
The protection this abbey got is evident in its incredible state of preservation. The brilliantly colored altarpiece you see above hasn’t been restored, only years of candle soot has been removed.
The portal, which you see to the right, is hidden, the stone frames carved with floral, animal and geometric motifs—quite interesting animals, as you’re likely to find on nearly every Romanesque Church!
Below are some more pictures of the column capitals and a detail of the door frame. The first picture, I’ve been informed, is a carving depicting a knighting ceremony.
While we visited, we found out that another part of the abbey was planned to be built into a spa.
Sassoferrato Visitor Information
Finding the Hidden Italy in Sassoferrato
Where from here? The Frasassi Caves are nearby.
Check out Hotels in or near Sassaferrato
Abbey of Santa Croce in Sassoferrato originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Sep 23, 2011, © James Martin,