Final days in my Bologna. Arrivederci!

Coming home in Three days.  Troppo tristezza. Certainly, mixed feelings abound. I love my home in the woods and it's just weeks away from planting season in the garden - and there is NOTHING like a spring/early summer in Canyon. So that's all good. But I will deeply miss Italy.  Living here for 3 months  (four of the last 12) has been like a dream.  A long slow languid early morning dream that I am fighting the need to wake up from,

After Rome, the last month has been in a mountain town outside of Bologna, just a quick scoot down the mountain on a train. We've gone into "town" three times this week for aimless wandering, and on my birthday for an amazing cooking school. Winter in Bologna is beyond compare.

Some photos of the Appennino Bolognese, Toscana, and Bologna

Vado

Il Doumo, Bologna

 

Siena!!

And what did I love the most?

Oh gawd, more lists.....

1.  No crowds. Nessuno. We were able to see one of the largest churches in the world with zero crowds. The Duomo San Petrino was originally designed to be even bigger than St Peter's in Rome till the Vatican put the brakes on that by buying the surrounding land and throwing up buildings to block the expansion of the duomo. Size does matter, I guess. Impressive, with a functioning sundial inlaid into the floor precisely located to catch the sun through the high windows and show the passage of time. I've got no pictures of this church (though I did get photos of the Duomo in Siena) as admission was free and photo taking cost money and like a dolt, I thought, heck, I have zillions of Duomo photos who needs more. I should'a spent the 2 Euros on a photo pass.

Siena; Perhaps the most beautiful place on earth, again with zero crowds. It was like having paradise on loan for a few days with a private showing.

2.  Food.  Bologna is the culinary capital for good reason and to wander it's central district's side streets is to find centuries of foodie culture still vibrant and very proud. I finally found a Ferretto for rolling my own pasta, though I will hand make some variations on the advice of the woman at the pasta shop in Rome. The one I bought is perfect for penne but a bicycle spoke and/or the tines of an umbrella a will give me variety in size for making some of the southern pasta. The future of pasta fresca in Canyon is high.

2.A  Cooking school was life-changing in my approach to flavors and to alter and amend my overall use of my spice rack. I feel like I now stand at the doorway of knowledge. I should have done this trip thirty years ago, I would be living a very different life, I think. I certainly wouldn't be making my living by staring at a laptop screen 12 hours a day.

  

3. Local history.   The Appennino area is rife with history close by. From the Etruscan village remains (best value museum and archeological site ever)  from 11,000 years ago outside of Marzabotto to the walking tour of the Marzabotto massacre of partisans and civilians in 1944 by the German SS -  largest massacre in the European theater in WWII, to the medieval, 12th century untouched village we drove up to the top of the Apennine ridge to see, this area is a must-see.

The town of Vado itself was kind of a bore. Closeted, dull, streets devoid of people.  basically a bedroom community for Bologna and Sasso-Marconi workers. Beautiful and quiet, but not really anything you need to walk through more than once or twice. There is decent pizza to be had when you can find the pizzeria open, though even the one grocery story has random hours known only to locals.

A great place for a quiet month of rest and excursions into the countryside, but I don't think I'd ever want to live here. Which leads me to my next thoughts.

Of all the places we'vee seen in our stays in the last year, what spoke to us the most strongly? If we ever decide to ditch the US permanently, where would we happily land?

But first, the answer to the question I posed to myself and Patty last night. What was the top, penultimate moment of the last three months?  What made you feel the most Roman/Italian and is something you'll remember and carry going forward forever?

I'll go first as I gave both of us as long as we needed to answer the question and I'm up and awake first.

In Rome we went daily to a bar for caffe just steps away from our apartment and became friendly with the staff. Two things happened that I won't forget.  #1 one night we stopped in for cocktails and I noticed Fabio the bouncer was glued to a small screen which I could tell from a distance was streaming a soccer match. I went over and watched for a bit. I asked who was the other team and he said Firenze.  I said Roma A Morte!! and got a laugh from all the bar guys grouped around watching. I told them, Sono American e non so cascio. The next thing I know they've drawn me into their circle and with arms around my shoulders are explaining the match. Male bonding extraordinaire. At the end of the night as we were leaving. Fabio gave me the shirt off his back.  Literally. A Bar Gianicolo shirt. I'll treasure it forever.


My other unforgettable moment was standing on the Ponte Sisto and gazing at the placid Tiber and St Peter's cathedral in the dying sunlight. Pure magic. I fell deeply in love with Rome and in particular the Tiber in that moment.

 Patty's moment is similar. On the same ponte, looking the opposite direction, one evening walking home at sunset we saw a murmuration of Swallows.  Not a single flock, but dozens of Flocks swirling and diving and spinning in the golden light above the Tiber. It was mesmerizing as more and more flocks joined in the dance. Every human on the bridge was transfixed and we watched it till the light began to seriously fade and flocks started leaving, having had their fill of bug dinner. Truly a magic moment.




So where would we choose to stay permanently should we decide to bug out of the US - or at least decide to do a, 6 months in the US, 6 months in Italy?

A great question and not an easy one.

Rome
We both fell deeply in love with Rome. Deeply. The culture, the food, the history, the people we met, the way it respects itself.  Every restaurant and there are thousands, treats you like royalty, wants you to walk out happy and prides itself on what it produces. We literally did not have a single bad dining experience in Rome. The Romans live immersed in centuries of history, you can't avoid it, and they respect that past. There is no subway, no underground, as if you dig anywhere you're going to disturb history and unearth bones, The pace of life is fast, but still holds onto the Meditteranean/Italian feeling of Dolce Vita. It's not a myth. It exists. An afternoon coffee, wine with lunch, close the shop for a few hours to go home for pranzo or take a nap. the work will get done in its own time. This exists along with the vibrancy of maybe the greatest city in the world. Art galleries, museums, and priceless antiquity - right outside your door and around almost every corner.

Rome is a strong contender.

The South
We also fell in love with the south last Spring. we traveled from Rome to Napoli and Salerno, then to the far south and Puglia, all the way to Lecce.

The food is beyond compare, the people super warm and friendly and the beaches! It's a climate and a laid back lifestyle of water, beauty, sand, limoncello and homemade pasta that I could really embrace. It's also a strong contender in a retirement type mode.  Buy a house, tend to the garden, make pasta, limoncello and press my own olive oil. Then sit on the terraza and sip prosecco while playing guitar every afternoon.  I could live that lifestyle for a long time.

Salerno.  I had the best meal of my life in Salerno and met the nicest people of all my trips to Italy.  Also, it's proximity to the Costiere Amalfi is a strong reason to make our home in this region.  I think ideally would be a home 10-20 kilometers south, on the coastline from Salerno.  Driving into the city would be nothing and reaching the Amalfi coast for our visitors would be maybe an hour tops - though I recommend visiting Amalfi by boat on a sunny day from the piers of Salerno.  A better day you will not find.

Napoli
For the same reasons. A culture that truly realizes La Dolce Vita,  that is incomparable and has food to die for (best Gelato in Italy), history, art, and music. And a hub to travel anywhere in Italy or the Meditteranean simply by hopping on a train or boat.


The North
Toscana and Emilia-Romana have a lot to offer, but not sure I'd want to live in such a tourist hub. We were here in Nov-Feb when crowds are thin to non-existent and that was lovely. But fill those dreamlike Tuscan roads and villages with gazillions of tourists and I'd want to disappear as quickly as the Etruscans,  I think the north will always be un posto che adoro visitare. Not to live.

Given a money bomb dropped on me and unlimited choices, in the best of all possible worlds, I'd live on the coast a few kilometers south of Salerno and also own an appartamento in Rome.  Summers at the beach and Amalfi,  Winters in Rome.

More research is clearly needed and I don't see any money bombs looming so I may have to improvise. In any case, home soon and one final picture that sums up the whole trip - if that's possible.  The Tiber as seen from under the Ponte Garibaldi on a picture-perfect Autumn day

Fun Facts from the countryside

Things I've learned on this trip, especially since I moved outside of Rome, in no particular order of importance or relevance.

1.  Folks in tiny towns seem to have markedly more trouble understanding my attempts at speaking Italian than do folks in the bigger cities.  

I thought it was a fluke but after a month in the sticks in a village so small it lacks even a single restaurant beyond a pizzeria I'm finding myself having to repeat myself two or three times in the simplest of linguistic transactions. I mean, last night in the pizzeria, I was ordering a pizza from a menu posted on a wall.  By the way, amazingly pizza; they offered over 70 choices of toppings and a just great, thin crusted tasty pizza. but I digress.



I literally only said:

"Buonasera, Vorrei due pizze. Un Verdure e un Casa," while half pointing at the huge wall menu 3 feet away where it listed, Verdure (veggie) and Casa (Speck, mox, pomodori).  The young woman behind the counter looked perplexed.

"Que cosa?"

"Due pizze, Verdura e Casa."

What pizza do you want, she said? switching to English.

"Io vorrei un verdura pizza. verdura," I persisted, speaking a little slower and louder (apologies for beginning to act like a slightly boorish Americano). She still looked confused.  I said it again, this time pointing directly and decidedly at the word Verdura on the menu.

"Oh Verduuura"   E calda?"

"No, Casa, per favore. E due birra," again pointing directly at the word Casa on the menus listings and at the two beers I had pulled from the cooler  She then seemed to get it and worked the cash register and told me it would be 18 euros.  I paid and said grazie refusing to give up on communicating in Italian.  Instead of the usual prego, I got a, "Thank you, and enjoy your meal."

After nearly three months of working on my language skills, I felt deflated and somewhat defeated.  How could I have backslid so far from daily conversations at Bar Gianicolo  and stores and museums and ristorantes across Roma, and even dreaming in Italian sometimes to not being able to do something as simple as ordering a pizza in Vado from a huge menu on the wall in a place that only sold pizza?

BTW, it was amazing pizza from that wood-fired oven.  I love Wandy's pizzas:

Ok sure, my pronunciation of Verdura lacked a super emphasis on the U, more of a soft U as in <uh or ugh> and not the verdooora as she pronounced it. But it wasn't that far off and it was the only listing of the 70 or so beginning with a V or sounding anything like the word verdura.

Then after brooding about it for half a day - yes, I'm a brooder.  It hit me. There were multiple factors at play here,

#1 Accent. I'm completely and enthusiastically self-taught.  I don't hear my American accent but I'm certain it's as glaring to a native speaker as it would be to me If a person from France or Russia or Italy who is only just learning and experimenting with their self taught English to ask me for directions back on the street in Berkeley. My Italian has sometimes the wrong syllable emphasis, the American style of lazy and fluctuating vowel pronunciation and likely a half dozen other flags that I might never know until I fully immersed myself in the language for years.

And factor #2:  In a small town in northern Italy where tourists are light, even in the high season, the young women behind the counter may have been caught off guard by my caveman Italian attempts at her language.  Although it all sounded fine to me and I understood her well, I probably sounded to her like I was saying "voray oon pizzuh vohduhrah, par favore."  Gobbeldy gook.  Not her fault at all.  In Rome, tourists are a year round, everyday event and not just from the US, but from all over the world. The Roman ear is used to hearing Germans and Brits and Americans mangle their language and their ears and minds are ready to do the internal translations. Not so much a young person working the cash register and phones at a small village pizzeria on a rainy Saturday night in January.

Update:  two days later I'm in a cab in Bologna and the driver has zero problems understanding me and we even had a nice conversation when I asked about the different words for a train station and which was the correct one to use in certain situations. He told me and gently corrected my wrong pronunciation of Ferrovaria and earned himself a nice tip for his consigliere a mio provato la Iinqua Italiano,  This totally supports my theory behind factor #2.

This most certainly explains why I've felt like pretty much every place I've been in during our time in the north, that people are staring at us. An Americano couple is a rare thing to find in a mountain town in the middle of January, and no amount of subterfuge will allow me to fully fit in the way I sometimes felt in Rome. Our accents and speech patterns must be explosively telling.

One other quick example stands out.  In getting gas during a drive to Parma, far off the A1 or major highways, I pulled into a gas station.  Almost all petrol stations have full service here and it's kind of nice not to have to jump out of your car in the cold and wind and rain to pump gas. I was ready with my window down when the attendant walked up and I said one word, one word as I had many other times to make my needs understood.  Pieno.  Full. I wanted him to fill up the tank to full. I said it before he fully got to my window as I knew from previous fill-ups he would walk up and say Pieno? and I would say, Si, Pieno per favore. Easy as pie,

It worked apparently with none of the pizza shop confusion. He said Prego and went about filling up my tank, taking my card and bringing me back my card with a receipt.  He then said, Thank you, have a good day.  Wow, busted as an Americano again from a single word. My accent must be atrocious. Hahahaa

Pro-tip for me going forward, be more careful as an E pronounced more like a soft I of an Uh  or not pronouncing an I like EE, can dramatically change the word's meaning.

2. People in Italy don't know what a chopstick is or how to use it. 

While driving across the Emilia-Romagna region today (lovely, btw), we got hungry and stopped at a place called Arte Cafe for lunch.  Oddly, as we got closer we realized that in the small rural town, this was a Japanese restaurant, specializing in sushi.  While I had zero interest in sushi, they DID have a pranzo un pressi, 3-course Italian food lunch special for a whopping 9 Euros.  I couldn't pass up the chance to get a primi, scondi and contorno cooked by Japanese in a small farming village. So in we went. Friendly folks running the restaurant, all Japanese from the cooks to the servers.  Obviously a famiglia ristorante. AND it was packed with locals for lunch.  A very good sign.

We both got the Italian plates prix-fixe menu and as we thought it would be, it was wonderful, prepared with art (It WAS the Arte Cafe) and was just flat out satisfying.  As I wrote in an earlier post, that is what, to me, makes Italian cuisine so wonderful, every ristorante, regardless of location, large or small operates on such a high level that it's seemingly impossible to get a bad meal. I may one day have to write a book on searching for a sub-par eating experience in Italy. But again, I digress.

Like I said, the Art Cafe was full to bursting with locals having a Saturday lunch and from my rough estimate, not a single other table was having the un prezzo pranzo speciale. They were all having sushi rolls and nigiri.  That's understandable.  Everyone likes to dine off the reservation sometimes and the sushi did look awfully good. I just come from the Bay Area in California, the land of amazing sushi everywhere and I wasn't about to give up even a single of my Italian meals to something I can get any day at home.

The sushi was served on cute little wooden boats with sails and oars of chopsticks, but the thing I noted and I looked at nearly every table, was that not a single Local was using chopsticks.  They were using knives and forks to carefully slice their rolls or nigiri into bite-sized chunks then forking them into their mouths. It wasn't a lack of skill I don't think. No one was even trying. I didn't see anyone actually take the chopsticks off the boats. I don't think they understood what they were for. It was just so odd to see them eating sushi rolls as if they were a filet mignon or saltimbocca.

I felt like standing up and holding a using your chopsticks seminar, but I was afraid no one would be able to understand anything I said.  I know, I'm getting a syndrome about it.

A presto!

Vado a Vado

Small village life is so different from Rome. No more walking out the door and being immersed in history or 20 choices for a Cafe within a 10-minute walk. Dinner plans are no longer, lets just walk and find something that looks good.

In fact, Vado, a small town on the Reno river about 20 kilometers from Bologna is like a nearly empty Oasis.  It has a few hundred people, quieter than quiet streets, a couple of bars that seem to be open or not open entirely on some hidden schedule known only to locals. The one bar I've seen open almost always actually IS a bar and is full all the time with local denizens drinking and spending time that I imagine seems very slow in passing to them. 

The good news: People are still friendly and dressed like real people, not fashionable mannequins.  I'm actually kind of overdressed for village life, I suppose. While in Rome I was a typical slovenly Americano. Har. I may never get it right.

There is good pizza with a huge selection slipped out of a lovely wood-fired oven just up the street at Wandy Pizzeria.  I recommend the Mare Mista pie.  Octopus, mussels, mushrooms and random fish.  Just lovely swashed down with a weak Beck's beer. Patty had a salsiccia and mozzarella pizza.  Equally amazing.

There is another pizzeria, Alessandro's. We'll check that out later on. this week With only two in a small town, just two blocks apart, I  imagine the competition for customers is a steep hill to climb - which bodes well for quality.

Yesterday, we found while walking the streets, a square with an open-air market with amazing looking produce.  There is some life here after all it seems, but oddly we were the only people walking and browsing.  Just us and 5 or 6 venders.  It was only 1pm so I felt like it wasn't late/shut down time, but maybe it's a first thing in the morning dealio. Or maybe an afternoon thing and we were early. More research is necessary.

So that, pretty much, is all there is to Vado. A bedroom village to the larger towns of Marzabotto and Sasso-Marconi, not to mention Bologna. The main feature here is quiet. I've never been in such a quiet town. I thought our home in Canyon was quiet, but with vehicle traffic and bike riders wheeling by and having conversations while riding, Canyon is100X louder than Vado. I can hear dogs barking a half-mile away and hear an approaching car all the way down the hill, long before it gets to my oddly named street. Via Colli.  <- Neck street. This is a fine place to work and write.

My workspace, outside in this marvelously sunny January is just amazing. I hope this weather holds for a while. My little secret garden is a sanctuary.








The other great feature is being on the first steps of the Appennino Bologna, which you can see in the background of the photo of my outside workspace.  The AP is the mini alps that stretch between Bologna and Firenze which are just stock full of tiny mountain villagers and million dollar views (next to abandoned stone houses from a century or two ago). We spent all of last weekend driving to little towns and the countryside is just lovely beyond belief.  Not to mention the 9th century BC Etruscan town archeological dig and Museo we visited in the town of Marzabotto and the 12th-century untouched to this day village of Scolo. National heritage sites, both of them. The following pictures capture a bit of the grandeur.  But this is a day trip well worth taking.  And not only for the history, but for the tiny trattoria we found in a small village named Vergatto - a trattoria so small and local that it had no menu, Just, here's what the cook whipped up today, I hope you'll like it.  Of course we did.  A locally sourced ragu and homemade tagliatelle in front of a fireplace.  I think they had ravioli too, but as the server rattled off the options, I was hooked at <ragu>.

That's maybe the only thing that bums me a bit about Vado,  Not a single trattoria or osteria. I was really hoping to find a place close by for a regular meal.  But the one supermarket type place has an amazing macceria and formaggio section, so we're not suffering.

Enjoy the photos.  We're taking a third pass at the Appennines tomorrow, then it's Siena for the weekend.

A presto!

In no particular order, because I'm feeling lazy today: