Nancy, Author at Itch.world

Nancy, Author at Itch.world - Page 16 of 19

A three-minute escape to Italy.

Tuscany, travel, medieval village, Italy, festivals, celebrations, customs, cooking, recipes, living in Italy, moving to Italy, visiting, visit, restaurants, language

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December 14, 2018 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Ho! Ho! No.

I recently returned from London where I completed my tour of duty of some of the centers of the holiday universe: Regent Street, Liberty, Fortnum and Mason, Covent Garden … No one does Christmas like the Brits. Masterful holiday lights, bustling crowds, beautiful ornaments and decorations for the home, special things to eat, and, of course, everything you could imagine to buy as gifts.

thanks to Jeff Moore and Time Out

Then I returned home. Our valley is a kind of anti-matter to the London-style Christmas. The first few years we lived here I was stunned by the fact that there was virtually nothing to buy. Or to decorate the house with. Or to wrap presents with. Present options in our piazza include special housecoats to clean in. The farm stand has gift baskets with green peppers and celeriac. And there is this knitted lamp shade. The Santa (shown above) from the grocery-store-anchored mini mall sums it up.

There’s panforte, panettone, and things with truffles, but they can hardly compete with the goods on display in a big city. (There are exceptions to everything, of course. The family-run Busatti linens sold in the valley are revered around the world.) There’s none of that frenzied shopping bustle and long lines, except at the butcher.

I love this more relaxed version of Christmas. It was easy for me to think that my identity was defined by the presents I gave and how well-decorated my house was, but this world has offered up a different way to be during the holidays. Last year when I went to the sports store to buy ski wear there was only one set of choices, and you are lucky if they had the right size. There isn’t that treadmill of decisions about brands, performance, price, taste, and style.

Despite the lack of commercial Christmas cheer, I’ve never felt it more deeply. Everyone you meet greets you with an “Auguri!” and kiss. While running errands tonight I stopped by a church from the year 700, a stone’s throw from our house, while they were setting up the nativity scene. It gave me chills.

And this grabbed my attention as much as the lights over Piccadilly—what’s really going on in this life-sized manger scene near the piazza?

December 14, 2018 In Live By Nancy

Learn to be an Italian driver

John and I had lived in Tuscany for just over a year when we realized that our American drivers’ licenses were no longer valid in Italy. Unfortunately, we discovered the process of getting an Italian license is one of the most rigorous in the world. There are 10,000 possible questions on the exam. You get randomly assigned 40 on your test, which you have to answer in 30 minutes, and get four or less wrong to pass. And it is only in Italian.

The best way to approach this challenge is through a “scuola guida,” or local driver’s school. It is a sort of rite of passage in which sweaty teens and terrified expats are on a level playing field.

Our instructor for the written test thought it was better if John and I were taught apart from the teens, in a kind of “special” student way. We, and one other friend, arrived three times a week to a typical classroom with rows of desks and a big screen up front. A noticable difference from the usual classroom environment was the tire calendar with topless women on the wall.

Every week our instructor would run through his slides, a selection of possible test questions, and try to mime and convey in very loud and slow Italian what the question was about. John and I had been married for ages by that point, but we discovered a new aspect of our relationship—that we became cut-throat competitors when academic superiority and glory were on the line. Who first yelled out “vero” or “falso” to a question became a matter of pride.

The questions are intentionally tricky. “When you happen upon an unfortunate by the side of the road with a possible thoracic spine injury do you move them to an incline of 30-degrees?” “Does a 50cc. scooter have brake fluid?” “Is a pregnant woman required to wear a seat belt?” Sometimes I understood the question, but had no idea of the answer. Other times my language would reach its limit at an important moment: “When your car stalls within 10 meters of a train track do you cojidhfp immediately?” (Answer key: vero, vero, falso, and I still don’t know.)

The best part of this process was the relationship between the instructor and the class. It’s hard to imagine the lack of ego, endless humor, sense of equality between instructors and students, and amount of abuse that is coming your way when you enter the classroom. Our daughter, Donella, is currently taking the class and says that all of them laugh nonstop.

The class was asked: “If you happen upon an unfortunate by the side of the road, who is on fire, do you extinguish the person or wait for the fire to go out?” The instructor advised, while rubbing his hands together and with an evil grin, that actually “falso” might be the appropriate answer, because with a little olive oil, rosemary, and garlic … There’s a kid in the class who is the latest generation of a long line of morticians in our village. Unfortunately, for him, much discussion in class is about the possible dangers of driving—some possibly fatal. With great glee, the instructor always extrapolates to the worst outcome, then refers to the situation as being great for the mortician’s business.

This week one of the instructors was telling off someone in the class for an answer he thought was stupid, and kept yelling “Curse on those who teach you,”—implying himself. It reminded him of a recent trip to the post office that had amused him greatly. He was looking for parking, noticed a car leaving, and put on his turn signal to wait for the spot. The other driver seemed incapable of getting out of a parallel parking position—spending several minutes moving back and forth without making any progress. The long line of waiting drivers were getting impatient. Finally, our instructor got out, knocked on the window, which was rolled down, and he was greeted with a big smile. He told the woman how to get out of the parking spot. Turns out he’d taught her how to drive two years ago. He thought it was hilarious that she still couldn’t park.

December 8, 2018 In Chow, Live By Nancy

Italy in London?

On a recent trip to London I visited an Italian restaurant, Bernardi’s, which I’d read about in a Bloomberg review.

A starter arrived with some focaccia and olive oil and I started to talk with the waiter about the oil, which was surprisingly fresh and peppery. He told me was from Puglia, the only source for real olive oil, according to him.

He’d moved to London five years ago, and was soon to make his first trip back to Italy since he’d left. During the five years his extended family had visited nine times, including his 98-year old grandfather, who was a builder (“muratore,” or literally “builder of walls”) and is illiterate. His grandfather had never traveled much in Italy, let alone been on a plane, until his grandson moved to London. He’s now confident in airports, and loves to come to London, where he walks for hours, comparing building techniques. My waiter friend had just bought his first flat in his new home. Somehow his move had not only worked out well for him, but given a gift of adventure to his whole family.

Even in the middle of Marylebone I realized, yet again, what I love about the Italians. I remembered John telling me about the Italian woman he’d met on a plane, who had moved to Australia, who said that the thing she’d noticed most about the Italian diaspora is that they always land on their feet. I think that has something to do with a certain lightness about life.

On my walk to the restaurant I happened to pass a hotel where I’d stayed with my parents when I’d first moved to London for a year right after I’d graduated from university. Seeing the hotel brought back the feeling of fear my parents and I had in our stomachs that week—at the time, London was as foreign to my family as Mars. Looking back I can’t believe that my parents had the kind of trust in me (and the universe), support, and courage to let me listen to my heart and move. I am sure they knew in their souls that what they were seeding would eventually take me far away from them. That year in London ended up being one of the greatest adventures, and most important experiences, of my life. And it did result in my moving far away, permanently.

Bravi to the parents, and grandparents, who have the courage to set their children free to find their own paths, and find ways to expand their own worlds. May I be as bold.

November 30, 2018 In Chow, Recipes By Nancy

Pasta! The Golden Tagliatella scandal

Have you ever looked down at your plate of tagliatelle bolognese and thought to yourself “The dimension of these noodles look slightly wrong?” No? Me neither. There is a very good reason for this, at least we naively believed. And with this, your pasta education continues.

Foodie friends of mine told me about their trip to Bologna, which for primarily one thing, a viewing of the Golden Tagliatella. Turns out that deep in Bologna’s Chamber of Commerce is something that I guarantee is more interesting than what’s in your neighborhood Chamber of Commerce. (Let’s just start with the building, the Palazzo della Mercanzia—Palace of Merchants— a gothic building that dates from 1382.)

What is there is the official measurement of a tagliatella (singular). It’s a noodle, in pure gold, housed in a wooden box. You need to make an appointment to see it, which judging by what my dogged friends went through, is quite difficult.

grazie al comune di Bologna per la photo

One only can wonder about what crisis of tagliatelle prompted the need for this particular measurement, which was installed on April 6, 1972, by the Italian Academy of the Kitchen. “Any other size, would make it lose its inimitable character,” says the charter.

But we had bigger questions on our minds. Does what you buy in the store actually correspond to the golden noodle? Or is all of this a marketing coup? (Even if they really don’t seem to market it and you have to make an appointment to see it?)

The specifications are eight millimeters cooked and seven millimeters uncooked. (This is precisely 12,270^th part of the height of the Asinelli Tower, a landmark in Bologna.) Length is not specified, by the some inexplicable lapse.

We purchased three different brands of tagliatelle at the local store and measured. Turns out that none of the tagliatelle we purchased logged in at seven millimeters. The reality is an average of just over five. Marketing coup it is!

In case you are not too disillusioned, here is the official recipe, notarized, copyrighted, and sealed in the Chamber of Commerce, for tagliatelle bolognese. (Sent you to a translated version for simplicity.) This ancient recipe was finally agreed upon and formalized on October 17, 1982, ten years after the golden noodle was installed at the Chamber.

Bologna is a beautiful and interesting city to visit in Italy, by the way.

November 30, 2018 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Let’s talk about money

Death, sex, money, obscenities—the rules are hard enough to determine in your native culture and language. I find discovering how another culture handles them a constant fascination. The Tuscans are in-your-face frank about so many things that I would have expected that money would be near the top of the list, but there seems to be this slight reluctance to demand payment mixed with honesty, the assumption of honesty on the part of customers, and a lack of urgency about getting paid that I don’t yet fully understand.

So many examples… Lola, our dog, was very sick this summer, which required once or twice daily visits to the vet for a month, complete with blood tests, IVs, and ultrasounds. She was finally declared cured so I asked to pay. The vets said they were busy with other things and to worry about it later. I followed up a series of calls and texts to get the bill, and a month or so later they finally totaled it up, texted me the total, and I was able to pay them.

In this area of Italy, when you eat at some restaurants you don’t get a bill. You go to the register and recite what you had and they tell you how much. Simple when it’s a couple of people, but groups of kids commonly go to these places —like 15-20 people—for birthday parties and other celebrations, and then go up, one at a time, and pay for exactly what they had. And it all seems to work.

At first, I thought these types of experiences were simply a function of being in a small town, but then John went to a medium-sized city about 45-minutes away to rent a rototiller for a few days. They load this three thousand euro piece of equipment in the back of the car and jot down his first name and phone number on a piece of scrap paper and he drives away. No deposit. No credit card taken. No ID. And no surprise when he returned it two days later.

One year we found a Christmas tree (late) tall enough for our living room even further away from the house. The guy cuts down a 15-foot tree to size, carefully loads it on the car, we choose a second smaller tree, and then realize he doesn’t accept credit cards. His solution is to give us his bank account number so that we can transfer money to him later rather than having to worry about finding cash that evening. “Con calma!” “No hurry!” he yells after us as we drive away with the trees.

One day the car needed gas so I stopped at a local station. It was cold and I didn’t want to pump it myself so I pulled into full serve. The older guy who owns the station came out, waving me to back up and move the car over to the self-serve pump. I assumed that it was because the other pump was broken, but no, he says “That one’s too expensive!” and proceeds to fill the tank himself.

My daughter, Donella, and I returned to this station about a month later badly needing windshield washing fluid. We had just filled the car up at another station where they were out of the fluid we needed, so we stopped here. I went in to buy a bottle and the same man comes out, insists on filling up the fluid reservoir, and washing all the windows for us, then charges us one euro for the solution. We pulled out, a little stunned, and Donella’s reaction was “How can this world even exist?”

I have no idea how much we owe our dentist at the moment, post braces, wisdom teeth surgery, and multiple cleanings, but we will get it all sorted out, at some point. And the price is always more than fair.

The Tuscans often pride themselves on being furbo (crafty, fox-like), and thrifty, so I find it hard to reconcile these traits with this seeming lack of urgency about getting paid, and an assumption that people will pay. Homogeneous culture? (But we are clearly outsiders, albeit with the “right” kind of passport.) Or perhaps a desire not to contaminate daily life with too much fixation on finances? I haven’t got an answer for you now, but will write more as I learn.

November 23, 2018 In Live By Nancy

An Italian Thanksgiving takes a village

November, 2012. It’s our first Thanksgiving in the village. Six weeks earlier we’d moved into our rented home for the year. The entire place consisted of four nuns cells, and the wide corridor connecting them, in a convent from the 1600s in the “new” part of town. We decided to celebrate, and boldly invited over 20 new friends, some of whom had never celebrated Thanksgiving before.

We had a lot of logistics to solve. Where was everybody going to sit? How do you get a whole turkey in Italy? Was it even possible to cook this much food in our tiny kitchen, which took up half of one of the 12′ by 12′ nuns cells, the small dining table claiming the other half of the space?

Then it all started coming together, as friends started to pitch in to help. There’s this wonderful organization in Italian villages, the pro loco, whose only charter is to plan and run village parties. This organization is well-staffed and equipped. One friend explained our lack of tables and chairs for a big party to the pro loco, and they lept into action, delivering five banquet tables and two dozen chairs to our door. This sounds much easier than it was, as our door was on the third floor of this ancient convent, reached through a massive front door from the street, down a long, dark, wide entry corridor that led into the open cloister, across the cloister, up three flights of twisting stairs, then down another corridor. Finally our door. Miraculously, two days before the event we found furniture from the village stash leaning against the walls.

Now for the turkeys. The butcher in the square said he’d never sold a whole turkey, but he’d call a farmer and make the arrangements. When we went to pick them up he disappeared into the walk-in cold storage and then two large turkeys were pulled to the front of the shop, hanging upside down on hooks mounted on the overhead track that runs the length of the store. These were not your average Butterball, all neatly trussed and demure. Nope, these guys had reached rigor mortis totally spread eagled, wings and legs splayed. He stuck each one into its own large plastic bag, but neither bag was large enough to contain the whole bird without various limbs poking out.

Our friends own a linen company, Busatti, and offered to bring the linens they used for parties. Another friend had a small apartment, with an oven, down the hall, so we were able to spread cooking between two apartments. An earlier visitor from California had brought cranberries in her suitcase. A few pumpkins are grown in the Valley and could be turned into pies. All the tables fit, end to end, in our long corridor.

It always feels slightly odd to be away from the U.S. for Thanksgiving because life in the rest of the world carries on, oblivious to the holiday in the U.S. It’s hard sometimes to make it feel special. But this Thanksgiving I will always smile about. I am still thankful for these people, and this place—but that first year was a revelation, realizing that somehow we’d landed on our feet in our new life in Italy.

November 22, 2018 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

I park, therefore I am

The Tuscans are astoundingly pragmatic about life and I delight in seeing how this pragmatism plays out in daily life. Take the act of parking, for instance, which seems to be elevated to a fundamental right of freedom and self-expression. If there’s a large section of pavement across from your favorite bar, which happens to be a striped traffic island, who says it can’t also be a perfectly good place to park? After all, no one is supposed to be driving there, anyway, and a traffic island is a waste of good real estate.

As an overall rule, the lines painted on the pavement of parking lots are only vague suggestions of where cars should go, or how many cars fit in the lot. Many, many more can fit in as long as there are good manners and common sense used about never blocking someone in.

There are a number of parking lots I have noticed with no exit. The only way out is to backup the length of the lot, hoping no one is coming in at the same time. This system accommodates more cars in a lot and everyone just works around the inconvenience for this reason.

This is one of my favorite parking moments, for so many reasons. It’s a car from the official driving school (the one John and I took driving lessons from, which is a whole other story…). This parking lot is full, so the driving school instructor decides to park illegally in front of the trash dumpsters. What isn’t in the photo is that there is a huge lot right next to this one that is nearly empty, but you have to pay 70 cents to park there, so clearly it’s much better to ignore the no parking zone and park in front of the dumpster.

But the real story is that all of this somehow works. The driving instructor knows when the trash truck comes by and will need access to the dumpster, and that it is fine to block it for now. The police wouldn’t ticket for the same reason—you can’t really expect someone whose office is opposite and is constantly in and out of their car to park in the pay lot.

About a month after we’d moved to our village I’d parked the car in the square overnight, as we often did. When I returned the next morning I was surprised to find that it was now the only car there, and that the weekly market had sprung up surrounding it. Even more surprising, we hadn’t been ticketed. It turned out the police knew the car of the new Americans in town and cut us some slack because we weren’t yet up to speed on the fine points of village living, like what days the main square is emptied of cars for the market.

I love all of this, and it makes me frustrated when I come back to the U.S. and the rules of parking lots feel rigid, with no opportunity for creativity, common sense, and freedom of expression. In any given parking lot there is so much wasted space because people are parking only between the lines. I see parking opportunities everywhere, just ripe for seizing, if you are willing to break the rules.

November 15, 2018 In Best Of, Chow, Roam By Nancy

No tips here

After our trip to the mother of all caves we were hungry. Nearby we found a village, Pierosara, with 140 inhabitants, a monastery from the year 1,000, and a wonderful restaurant, da Maria.

We came in about 2:45, very late for lunch, even by Italian standards. A woman greeted us and I tried to tell her that we would eat quickly, but somehow it came out that we wanted to eat right away (and be done quickly). I saw her face fall and felt the temperature in the room drop suddenly. I reached deep in my Italian language warehouse to explain that I was worried about their closing time, that we were so late, and that we would keep them. Everything shifted.

We were shown to the last table—every other was packed for a lingering Sunday lunch. We had fresh, homemade ravioli with truffle sauce and a steak, and were both completely unhurried and warmly welcomed. As the restaurant emptied out, we were one of two tables left, and they began to set up for dinner.

I started to think about the difference between service in Italy and the U.S. (and elsewhere in the world.) The kind of ease and sweetness we often experience was so different from the forced “Hello, my name is Andrew and I will be your server. How are we doing tonight?” kind of greeting. Her disappointment when she thought we wanted to hurry the meal (even if our lingering resulted in their inconvenience), the absence of pressure to leave so they could “turn the table,” the lack of any pretense; it’s all fundamentally different. I’ve rarely felt a forced note here in a restaurant, unless I am in a highly-touristed center.

It often feels like you are being invited into someone’s home, with the equivalent sense of a meeting of equals. I think a small part of this is because service is always included, as a “coperto,” or cover charge, per person. In the U.S., discretionary tipping may add to the feeling that dining out is merely an economic exchange of money for food and service.

But I think it really has to do more with something core in the Italian character that has fascinated me since we moved here six years ago. Italians simply seem more secure and full of self-respect than Americans (and from what I’ve seen, of Brits) where you are only as “worthwhile” as your university, last project, round of funding closed, academic paper published, weight, brand of shoes…

This Italian ease in the world is a tonic for my soul, and something I will be studying, with mouth agape, for years.

November 15, 2018 In Chow, Live By Nancy

Bringoli: in praise of fat spaghetti

In Italy, it seems as if nearly anything is a possible subject for a celebration—I think it’s part of what makes the culture so joyful. One of the key celebrations around these parts is to honor a really fat spaghetti, called bringoli. And because I am dedicated to deepening your knowledge of pasta, you get to celebrate bringoli too.

I wouldn’t have guessed that fat spaghetti would be highly seasonal, but apparently it is, and late autumn is its moment. November 11, specifically, La Festa di San Martino. Apparently Martin, a Roman soldier, was standing guard one bitterly-cold night in 335 CE, and gave half his cloak to a very underdressed merchant. He spent the rest of the night freezing and hallucinating. In the morning, he promptly converted to Christianity.

I think he’s one of the better saints because there are great feasts in his honor all over Italy, celebrating the new wine, various local cookies, meatballs, and even one for radicchio, up near Venice. But here in the Valtiberina (Valley of the Little Tiber—the headwaters of the famous river), La Festa di San Martino means it’s the time for bringoli.

It’s an unassuming little festival, with several volunteers in one tent cooking bringoli with either a meat or a mushroom sauce, served up in a little plastic bowl. The actual cooking happens behind a kind of screen, which is mysterious. Perhaps it is to protect proprietary village secrets. The volunteers served our two portions with ragu, and were running behind on making the mushroom sauce for our third serving. By the time the mushroom bringoli was ready they decided to replace our original two with hot ones, as pasta is not something you eat cold.

This being Tuscany, there are plenty of open fires—when they grill something, the Tuscans do it over a fire that they’ve burnt down to embers, rather than using charcoal briquettes, and there are elaborate grilling carts to make it possible to keep a fire producing usable coals all evening. Over the flames volunteers roast sausages and toast bread that is rubbed in garlic and drenched in olive oil. (If you take hard, white Tuscan bread and toast it until it gets a little charred over coals, the bread not only gets slightly infused with smoke, but gets a texture not unlike sandpaper, which lets you grate down a half a clove of raw garlic when you rub it into the bread.) Other fire tenders roast chestnuts.

As you sit outside in the cold, huddled over your fat noodles and drinking Vino Novello (Italy’s answer to Beaujolais Nouveau) in an arcade under glowing, buzzing fluorescent lights, Italian village magic happens. Everybody is out and socializing, from a couple of four-year old girls twirling in the middle of the street, who clearly believe they are in charge of the whole event, to the packs of teens aware of every micro-movement of their peers, through to the old men and women, laughing with people they’ve known since childhood.

It’s my daughter’s favorite festival of the year, topping even the polenta and fried bread ones. Her friend, who is now studying in Venice (a good four-hour train ride away), came down for the weekend just for it. “He gets it,” she said. It is a unique time when everyone who appreciates anything good in life gathers together to enjoy local food at its simplest and best. It is also a celebration of community and the heart of our town. It’s rare to see anyone from outside town, but you’re almost guaranteed to see everyone from within.

To make your own, feel free to substitute pici, although they are in no way similar, the locals tell me. Top with a lovely ragu or a porcini mushroom sauce.

November 8, 2018 In Roam By Nancy

Discovering Genga (and a big womb)

I am never sure what we will discover next. Like when we bought a house that we thought was from the 1700s, and then figured out, during restoration, that it was originally a defensive tower, probably built in the 1300s.

We were curious to discover more about the house. Somehow one thing led to another, and on just-another-Sunday we ended up a road trip to a part of Italy we didn’t get know, called La Marche. The whole adventure was kicked off when older villagers who told us that, when they were kids, they were the last of many generations of kids who called our house “La Genga”, meaning “a fortified home in the unsafe wilds outside of a walled village.”

John delved deeper into the history of the house, and the word “genga.” His research yielded information about a nearby wilderness in La Marche, with a village called Genga. So we went.

La Marche has some rougher, more primal topography than Tuscany. Our destination was midway through an impressive, deep canyon, riddled with caves (like 40 kilometers of them), called the Frasassi Caves. At the mouth of the largest cave, Pope Leo XII (who came from Genga), built a church in 1828, known as the Tempio del Valadier. But the story of the cave is much older. A sign along the trail up to the church tells of the site’s original purpose as a Roman temple dedicated to women and maternity.

After a 700-meter walk straight uphill, when we arrived at the mouth of the cave, I could see why both the Christian and the pagan would have existed (and battled it out) here. This cave is, unmistakably, like walking through a birth canal into a womb.

I have always wanted, in moments when I’ve needed psychic self-care the most, to embrace that “I am made of stardust, I can create life” vibe but have always found the thought hollow. But standing in this dark, round, circular chamber I felt it. Through time. And especially as a woman. And I can see why the Romans would have come here, and why the Pope would have needed to slap a tall, domed Christian church (albeit beautiful) right at the exit.

And before the Romans, deeper into the caves, why someone, roughly 20,000 years ago, carved a Venus statue from a stalactite.

There’s another shrine at the site—the Sanctuary of Santa Maria infra Saxa was carved into the stone face of the cliff to honor the Madonna in 1029.

It is gorgeous. And seats about four.

The ground between the church at the entrance of the cave and the “womb” at the end is extraordinary. Every spare rock had been picked up and placed into a series of small cairns, which constantly change and evolve as rocks fall and new visitors come. The result was this pristine scene, and somehow these cairns don’t seem as self-indulgent as they sometimes can.