Tuscany, travel, medieval village, Italy, festivals, celebrations, customs, cooking, recipes, living in Italy, moving to Italy, visiting, visit, restaurants, language
The Beast From The East II weather front just roared through bringing some real cold to the valley — on a couple of nights temperatures were down to -7°C (19°F). John was up early one morning and noticed one of our elderly neighbors walking up the hill to town, despite the ice and strong wind. John mentioned it to me and said that he was surprised to see him out, braving the cold, but I wasn’t puzzled. A more important need was calling, something that weather and a pandemic can’t suppress — coffee with friends.
Groups gather throughout the day at the cafes. Current restrictions dictate that cafes are only open for takeout so people stand outside, holding tiny paper cups with a shot of espresso, and try to drink while pulling aside their masks the minimal amount possible. But mainly they talk and laugh, exchanging gossip, news, and complaints. When my favorite cafe is allowed to serve inside a group of older men gather in a back room to smoke, play cards, and bet. It’s a room stained dark with smoke, but also mystery and intrigue. I hesitate to enter it even when they aren’t present as it feels like I am trespassing.
Teens hang less at the cafes and more in the pedestrian tunnel that runs through the foundations of the tower on the wall, complete with the town’s ancient water well. They are often smoking, mostly tobacco but sometimes pot, and seem unable to keep their tough teen personas intact faced with a “buon giorno”, answering with a smile. If I squint I can easily see them in sixty years, still together.
If not outside a cafe, the old men gather under the portico near the ATM. This spot is most crowded on market day, every Wednesday morning, and on Sunday morning when they get kicked out of the house so that Sunday lunch can be prepared. Most have known each other since school days and still have much to say to each other.
To socialize this much you have to get to where the gang is. Our neighbor is not alone in his frequent walking trips to the village, which although only a couple of hundred meters, is breath-catchingly steep. Our house is between town and the cemetery so we see the steady parade of older people going down the hill and back up for their daily visits to the graves. The elderly who live in the historic center navigate cobblestones, tiny staircases in the houses, and steep streets. They walk to stores and the pharmacy; most of their needs are met within meters. I marvel at their mobility after growing up in the states where there seems to be a universal acceptance that after a certain age one needs to move to, as Mom’s retirement community euphemistically called it, a “level-in”.
After being here nearly ten years I credit these two things, the insatiable desire to socialize and frequent walking that requires stamina and balance, with the vitality and spark that I see in the older people. Not to mention that only Japan’s population lives longer. I aspire to age like this and will try to follow their graceful lead.
Almost ten years ago, when we moved here, I wondered if my sense of being gobsmacked by beauty several times a day would last or if I would just grow used to it. If anything, it has grown stronger.
I’ve been surprised that our appreciation is matched or even bested by the Italians bred, born, and raised surrounded by such beauty. I’m in a couple members-only Facebook groups for the village where the main topic of conversation is how beautiful it all is, accompanied by lovingly taken photos. These will be followed by a few dozen comments laden with beating heart gifs and responses like “Spettacolo!”. The mayor often chimes in. (The community gets most of its news from the mayor’s personal Facebook posts — you have to be friends — usually leading with a Covid update for the town, and followed by cheery reports about a new sidewalk going in or improvements to the basketball court. He’s the first non-Communist mayor since The War so he has a lot of suspicion to overcome.)
This love of place all came to an exciting head over the last few weeks when the village found itself in a social media competition for the Most Beautiful Village in Tuscany. We are far off the tourist map, unlike places like Cortona, Montepulciano, or San Gimignano which, in the humble opinion of the village, have ceased to exist in any meaningful way except as tourist destinations. Despite our lack of fame we somehow ended up in the semi-finals against Volterra, a shocking turn of events. All stops were pulled out as pleas went out to everyone in the village to flood the competition with their favorite village photos. We won that round and were in the final competition against Massa Marittima. They have just a few things to their advantage — a cathedral, prehistoric artifacts, a castle from the 9th century, a church founded by St. Francis himself, and a vantage point on the Mediterranean, but the villagers fought a strong social media war of images and vote coercion of friends and family and WE WON!! It even made the national papers. Now we can get back to the real work at hand deciding with the mayor how high the basketball hoop should be on the newly repaved courts.
Not that there aren’t the fair share of box stores and car lots around here, but it matters that we live in the shadow of a thousand-year-old village in a beautiful valley. Untouched nature is breathtaking but there’s something about the long interplay between people and the land that floats my soul. That the village is constructed of stones that were sitting right here so that the color is perfectly matched to the surroundings. The tiny cobblestone streets worn down in the middle by centuries of foot traffic. The patterns that the plows make in the rolling fields. This all matters deeply to me.
There’s also beauty in sound. I love falling asleep to the noises of owls, foxes, deer, and wolves, and waking up to the sound of roosters and church bells. I know many would fight me on the last two but I am adamant that roosters and church bells are lovely sounds at just the right distance — so they don’t wake you up but you can appreciate them when you are awake.
It’s not just me. John, of course being the epically visual guy he is, is constantly touched. But it does surprise me a little that the kids notice and comment so frequently. Those moments when we’d be driving an angsty teen to high school and they’d point out the window and say “would you just look at that.” I was driving Sebastian to the airport to return to school in the UK last September and I stopped the car so that an old man could cross the street, pushing his bicycle. After he crossed in front of the car he stood in front of an old stone building in his oversized puffer jacket, gave us a huge smile and a wave, and then pushed off on his ancient, bright pink bicycle. Sebastian’s comment, “That was beautiful.”
In this odd moment we find ourselves in let’s never forget how important it is to appreciate the beauty around us, be it the steam from a cup of coffee, fog over a valley, or a smile from a stranger on a bicycle.
Between the virus, the dark, and the cold, life’s palette is smaller. Nothing big and dramatic about Itch today, but I did want to talk about several things that are keeping me going, a couple today and more next week.
— Walks. I really, seriously, need to take a walk every day. Fortunately, even with our ever-shifting kaleidoscope of lockdown colors (are we red, orange, or yellow today? — sometimes it’s all three in one week as the government rides the throttle), getting out of the house to walk the dog is consistently authorized. Lola and I usually walk a trail in the valley which used to be a railway line. Somehow this same route doesn’t bore me as I can watch the shifting of seasons, weather, and crops. I often see the same set of locals and their dogs. The Czech Wolf Dogs (a breed that is half wolf and half German Shepherd and popular among 20-something men) need to be avoided, but the other dogs are friendly to Lola, including the Pitbull we met yesterday. My biggest challenge on the walk is to keep Lola from rolling in seemingly irresistible wild boar shit, which is singular in its smell and stickiness in adhering to the coat of the dog. Yesterday I was not successful. After four shampoos Lola is mostly clean.
In the fall, until the first freeze, I often see solitary old men on bicycles who head to a patch of dense woods. They look furtive and avoid conversation and eye contact on the way into the thicket in a manner that alarmed me before I realized what they were up to. After they emerge from their secret foraging spots with baskets of porcini they are very talkative and want to show me what they’ve found.
Looming in the mountains in the distance is the unmistakable peak of La Verna, one of the monasteries founded by St. Francis and where, legend has it, he received the stigmata. It’s also the spot where I very illegally spread a tiny bit of my mother’s ashes, not because she was Catholic, or would have appreciated the sardonic fascination I have with the place, but because it does feel like an otherworldly and holy place. And it’s nice to give her a nod and greeting on the walk.
Occasionally I am joined on the walk by unexpected company. I started talking to a flock of sheep in a far field and the conversation went in a very unexpected direction.
I’d rather not have an intimate conversation with a wolf, who at any moment could be a special type of unexpected company on the trail — their tracks are everywhere. I often wonder if they are watching me while I walk. I think because I grew up in a suburban wasteland in Florida the fact that we coexist with wolves in close proximity thrills me and makes me deeply happy. The locals mostly agree. Friends who have had a couple of their goats killed still support having a healthy population of wolves. A couple of days ago a local man posted to the village Facebook page a photo he’d taken of a male and female wolf crossing the main road into the village at 9:20 in the morning and running into a field. The comments were filled with humor and delight.
— Anticipation. In the fall we planted 400 tulip bulbs. I think about them a lot during the freezing winter nights and cannot wait for them to visit us the Spring.
Our friends and former neighbors in Berkeley have decided to become our neighbors again, this time only part-time, and are purchasing the house at the end of our driveway. In addition to looking forward to a time in the future when the house will be alive with friends and family, I am excited about being involved in another renovation project. It is a joy to make an inhabitable, unloved house into something magical, and to reunite the two properties, which were legally separated only a few years ago, in spirit.
I discovered an odd thing when we restored our house. When working with a structure that is several hundred years old, and land that has been worked for thousands of years, it’s clear that the current moment is just a small fraction of its history. I would have assumed that makes whatever we do to the house seem less important, but somehow the opposite is true, because it is not just about the choices pleasing us today but there also is some sort of obligation to the future. I start thinking of alterations as changes that will ripple into the next several hundred years and leave a faint whiff of the choices, pleasures, values, and tastes of us. Just as the several layers of exposed paint I am looking at in the room where I am now bring me closer to the occupants of this same space who redecorated these walls in the 1700s and 1800s. And upstairs we can look into the frame of a former window, which is now incorporated into an interior wall. Back before our house was renovated into a villa in the 1700s it was a tower and the window was on the exterior and afforded a beautiful vantage point over the valley all through the middle ages. It’s easy to think of the person who originally created the window, and of the person hundreds of years later, and hundreds of years ago, who decided to seal it up to create another room on the other side.
Being in this flow of history seems to be especially helpful right now as it’s guaranteed that this all shall pass.
It has been a long time since I have been stoned. So long that I can’t even quite remember the last time, but it was before marriage, before kids. So, when one of my children suggested that we all get high as a family over the holidays, it seemed a fitting thing to do at the end of 2020.
First there was the task of actually acquiring the stuff. I gently remind my readers that we are not in a U.S. state where this activity is easy and legal. We live in the equivalent of Cincinnati circa 1963. And there is a pandemic with restrictive movement orders, in case your forgot.
My child, through friends and contacts, located Sketch (his alias has been changed to protect his real alias) and we arranged a bus stop rendezvous a couple of miles from where we live. The offspring and I took off into the dark, with many warnings from my husband about the likelihood of a routine stop by the police to find out why we were on the road during the “orange” zone limitations. (I have somehow acquired a “reckless” label recently from John, which may have something to do with my Chamonix adventure. But who doesn’t occasionally need to be rescued by a helicopter?)
We devised a cover story that we were merely picking up pizza at a restaurant near where our connection would be waiting. I insisted that we actually did order a pizza so that our alibi would be airtight. This was much to the shock of the restaurant which was clearly having a slow night and had probably made one other pizza to go that evening.
We pulled up in the bus zone and there was Sketch, wearing a black hoodie pulled all the way up. To the relief of my progeny, as there was not one other person awake in a 2-mile radius, no secret handshakes were needed. These had been practiced, along with a carefully (and apparently mandatory) averted gaze.
We got the goods, and the pizza, and headed back to the house. On the way we stopped at a large and well-stocked tobacco vending machine to buy rolling papers and filters. We thought we had it all set.
Then came the hard part. I’m so out of touch between being such a mom and living eight years in Italy, which is behind the times in these matters, that I’ve missed out on a few basic life skills. It turns out that rolling a joint is a lot harder than it looks in the movies, or when some unimpressive yahoo hands you one. They have air gaps, come apart, and the filter is always in the way. I worked on doing dishes while one of my descendents turned to YouTube for answers. There is a vast library of information filmed by experienced 14-year olds in their bedrooms, but none seemed to solve our problem. We were over an hour into this and had not yet successfully inhaled anything.
We then went to Plan B. The apple bong. Very popular on YouTube. This involved using advanced tools to tunnel a set of intersecting channels into a regular old apple. This actually got us somewhere although we did end up almost singeing off some facial hair trying to light the tiny bud balanced atop the apple.
After all this a mild effect was felt and it was time to watch Blades of Glory. I remembered that I really hate smoking anything and rarely need to feel more tired, but it was all very pleasant.
We wish you a merry end to 2020 and a much, much better 2021, hopefully filled with some unexpected adventures.
(And thanks to Anna-Sophie for the glorious sunrise photo from her window, which happens to overlook our house.)
Living in a country that is all about eating local sometimes we want to run wild and eat things that aren’t produced within 50 miles of where we live. I’m sure this is not a problem in faraway, exotic places like Rome or Milan, where I bet they can buy whatever they want, but in our rural village, to pick an example, our cheese choices are restricted to fifty shades of pecorino. A nice French-style goat cheese? No way.
My summer adventure introduced me to how great a real fontina cheese can be—produced by a certain breed of cows eating native grasses in the Val D’Aosta in only select pastures, with the cheese created in the hallowed, ancient tradition—and we decided to try ordering some from the tiny cheese shop we’d found in Aosta, Erbavoglio, that said on their website that they do mail order.
John jumped into action and was emailing back and forth with the cheesemonger. He was in the middle of telling me that he needed to write to the store again as he hadn’t heard back about the order when the doorbell rang.
At the front gate was a large package. From Erbavoglio. The puzzling thing is that we hadn’t given them any payment information at all. But here was our cheese.
John emailed them yesterday to ask how to pay. They haven’t gotten back to us yet.
We did a documentary for HP interviewing a bunch of people who had worked directly with Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, who created one of the greatest company cultures of all time. One story that has always stuck with me was that Bill insisted that the tools were left unlocked and available 24-hours a day. People thought he was nuts—employees will steal stuff. His response was that of course a few would, but the pleasure and creativity that the rest would have from being able to test out ideas (and the resulting products which made them hugely successful and profitable) would more than outweigh a few bad eggs. My favorite local linen maker ships all over the world and is giving Itch readers a 20% discount. And a great moment with cheese.
Our experience in Italy, which granted is a rural one, is that payment almost always works on trust, and more often than not we have to ask the dentist, or the carpenter, or in this case the cheese store, for the amount and how they want to be paid. These moments fill me with delight. The extraordinary sense of trust that people will do the right thing, and by god I am sure they usually do.
I’ve been having fond memories of how our village came together to help us celebrate our first Thanksgiving in town in 2012 when we were living in the small apartment in the convent. We may be in a different house now, in a pandemic, and not celebrating with family and friends, but some things remain the same. I went to the butcher today to pick up the bird I’d ordered for the two of us—”the smallest turkey at the farm, please”—to find this behemoth waiting for me. (At least the butcher refrained from asking me any personal questions. He recently asked a group of women customers, all 80 and up, “How’s sex, ladies?” They were delighted to be asked. More moments with the butcher here.)
I carried my bird through town, legs sticking out from the large plastic bag the butcher had wedged it into, to the wonder and amusement of most onlookers. It was market day and I went to my favorite cheese stand where they were fascinated by this little-known, foreign tradition—there are very few Americans in town. “How long to cook it? What is this “stuffing” thing you do? Do you really eat squash for dessert? How do you say ringraziamento again in English? Leave it here with us while you get a coffee—it is too heavy for you.”
The Etruscans get a bad rap. When the Greeks and Romans wrote the history of their time they intentionally left the Etruscans out. In the case of Rome, the victors get to write history. The result is that even my daughter, Donella, has a disdain for the Etruscans after spending five years in the Italian school system.
We live on an Etruscan road (the little lane above) and it’s made me curious to know more, as does living with the Tuscans and noting how different they are from the people of other regions—where did this difference come from? I’ve been investigating and here are ten reasons that I’m intrigued by this ancient civilization. (The Etruscans lived from 900 BCE to 89 BCE in present day Tuscany (and far beyond), and gave the region their name.)
1. Women were equals. Woman were literate and some were noteworthy scholars, they participated freely in the public sphere, became judges, dressed in any way they chose, and participated in banquets as equals to men and could drink, dance, and lounge on couches. The contemporary Greeks and Romans thought these women’s rights were scandalous. They kept their own names when marrying and people buried in Etruscan tombs were identified by their mother and father’s lineage. Women in art were represented with their heads on the same level as men, and as having the same torso size, which is clearly a physical exaggeration, but conveyed equality. When the Romans dominated the Etruscan culture women lost all these rights.
I visited the tombs at the Necropolis in Tarquinia (and took a private 2.5 hour tour) and in the Tomb of the Leopards (480-450 BCE) three couples are shown at a banquet. The pair on the right especially grabbed my attention. I think it is one of the most beautiful images I’ve ever seen of a couple’s relationship. There is such energy, enjoyment, and engagement in their body language.
2. They chose equal city-states over centralized power. The civilization was a federation of twelve equally-powerful cities. Key to Etruscan success was the idea that it was better to specialize, cooperate, and trade rather than fight amongst themselves for power. This made them very successful and wealthy. Cities specialized in different things, like mining and metal work, ceramics, food production, or cloth production. This specialization let technology surge ahead, which increased food production, which let more people specialize. A virtuous cycle.
3.Thefashion was amazing. For several centuries when the Romans wanted to say someone was really stylish they’d say someone dressed like an Etruscan. In the painting above the women are wearing three different patterns of cloth: stripes, polka dots, and stars. And check out the center musician from the same tomb as he walks through a field of olives with two other band members. His clothes are amazing, billowing backwards as he walks forward. And his shoes are marvelous. The Italian gift for designing clothes and shoes started early.
Etruscan jewelry is also beautiful. I love the things that started with the Etruscans and endure today. The town of Arezzo remains one of the top places in the world for gold processing and design, and its Etruscan predecessor was famous for metal work, including jewelry. Look at these Etruscan bracelets.
4.Italy with no olive oil or wine? The Etruscans brought the cultivation of grapes for wine and olives for oil to Italy from their contacts with the Greeks at the end of the third century BCE.
5. Romans would not have been the Romans without them. The Etruscans predated the Romans and then were subsumed by the Roman Empire in 89 BCE when the Romans stamped out their rights, culture, and language. The Etruscans got the alphabet and numbers from the Phoenicians and passed them on to Rome. The Etruscans also taught the Romans hydraulic engineering, city planning with streets in a grid, fashion (including the toga), architecture (temple design and the Etruscan adaptation of Doric columns) and more. Two of the last Roman kings were Etruscan. The most famous statue of Romulus and Remus and the she-wolf—the symbol of Rome—was created by an Etruscan.
6. They were the creators of the red-checkered table cloth. Some Italian traditions run deep. Check out what the lounging couples are sitting on in the painted scene above.
7. These guys got around. I am always amazed when I learn the extent of trade relationships that existed thousands of years ago. The Etruscans were one of the major players. They traded with Greece, Turkey, Egypt, the Phoenicians, and even the Celts.
8.Social mobility was celebrated. Although they did have slaves, apparently freedmen and women had many opportunities to cross occupations and social classes. One third of the paintings in the Tomb of the Leopards is about this topic. The same figure is repeated four times, starting on on the left as a naked slave and ending up on the right as a well-dressed member of society coming to the banquet.
9. They had great taste. More revered Greek attic vases, or kraters, have been found in Etruscan tombs than anywhere else, including one of the most infamous pieces of art the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has ever had, the Sarpedon Krater. This piece of pottery was looted from an Etruscan grave in 1971 and the Met illegally bought it a year later for the most they’d ever paid for a piece of art. The Krater was repatriated to Italy and moved from its centerpiece position in a Tiffany-designed case to a more humble Italian museum very near where it had been found.
The Etruscans also made Kraters that have been found in Greek tombs.
10. Precocious artists. The fresco is badly damaged, but look at the nuanced leg muscles on the guy on the right (and the shoes!). Predates the rediscovery of perspective and portrayal of anatomy in the Renaissance by 1400 years. And the door to the underworld actually has plaster relief working with the painting to amplify a 3-D effect.
If you are still with me in my rabbit hole I applaud you. If you want more I found this, this, and this helpful as good overviews of the Etruscan civilization.
When I was heading out for my walk today I spotted this amazing rainbow and John was able to get this photo out our bedroom window. It reminded me of what my mother used to say when I was really little and we spotted a rainbow. “That’s God’s promise that he won’t kill all of us again by using water. It will probably be fire next time and we will all be burned.” Why she thought that this would be a good thing to tell a small child would fill a book, which I do not intend to write, but my mother did have a gift for worrying. It’s a good thing that a pandemic, divinely sent or not, never crossed her mind.
The days are getting shorter, as are our leashes. Life had pretty much returned to normal in Italy over the summer, albeit with the new accessories of masks and hand sanitizer. Outdoor spaces and nice weather were abundant so it was easy to eat out, catch a drink with friends, or have a morning coffee pretty safely. Stores have been open and operating normally for months, although it is required to be masked and sanitize before entering. But it was kinda easy to let worry subside, fill up on socializing, sunshine, and freedom of movement, storing away those experiences like bits of gold for the soul. And when cases were averaging a couple of hundred a day, out of a nation of 60 million, this felt appropriate. I felt so very lucky when friends and family in other parts of the world have remained in virtual lockdown since spring.
Things have changed. As temperatures have started to drop cases are surging again. There is a new worry and seriousness on people’s faces. Even though everyone has been 100% masked in the grocery store throughout the summer there was a lightness and normalcy that’s fading fast. Fewer people are stopping to chat, the contents of carts are getting bigger, and eyes above the masks look concerned.
The slide back to a lockdown is happening quickly. The first sign I had that things were getting serious was when the Italian government announced a couple of weeks ago a warning that Sunday lunches were of grave concern. This may seem like an odd government warning to people outside of Italy but here Sunday lunch, culturally more than Friday night drinks or Saturday evenings out, is the main event of the week. Families gather en masse with everyone in attendance from babies and toddlers to recalcitrant teens to young families through to the very elderly with much conversation and hugging. Although a lot of lunches occur in homes it is almost impossible to book a restaurant Sunday at lunchtime. If you are lucky enough to get a place you often find you are sandwiched between long tables with dozens of people, all related. There’s a loud din as people from one end of the table are trying to catch up with others across six or seven people in the middle. Kids are underfoot everywhere. And it is a wonderful thing to behold. And a petri dish in action. If I happen to be driving on a Sunday around 1:30 the roads are empty. Stores are deserted. It’s like Superbowl Sunday. This tradition is starting slipping a bit — several families of Donella and Sebastian’s friends don’t do the formal Sunday lunch anymore — but Sunday lunch is still ubiquitous enough to merit a nationwide government warning aimed at the very heart of Italian culture.
This primal need to be social extends to schools. Keeping schools open is of the highest priority for the government, partially due to the impact on the economy, but also because it’s felt that socialization is one of the primary benefits of school. There’s a phrase in Italian i bambini devono stare con i bambini, children should be with children, as that’s the only way they will learn the rules of getting along in society. As of right now most schools in Italy have students back in the classroom. There was an interesting article in the New York Times, written by an American pediatrician/parent living in Italy. The article quotes an American, Mary Barbera, living in Florence with a 7-year old daughter attending a local school. She describes the elaborate safety procedures and parental co-responsibility pacts that are in place. “Personally, I think Italians have a better inherent sense of common good and taking care of each other. They understand that in order for people to be well, everyone has to follow the rules.” And from what I’ve seen locally, which is reflected in the article, there is a willingness to trust the system and other parents, and take some risks, in order for the kids to have this important socialization that was missing when academics were online.
But it is fairly inevitable that with cases surging in numbers similar to the spring that we, no matter how much we are social creatures, are headed into a dark period of more isolation as winter sets in. Some things are definitely an improvement from the spring, downloads of the trace and track app Immuni have been impressive. The app monitors via Bluetooth everyone you are around, how close you are, and for how long. If you are positive you self-report to the app which notifies the people who have been in your vicinity and might have been exposed, all anonymously, so that tests can be administered. Testing in Italy is free or low cost and widely available. When a traveler arrives at a major airport or train station there’s a tent where you can get a free, rapid result COVID test. Rome’s Fiumicino Airport was the only airport in the world to be given 5 stars by SkyTrax COVID-19 Airport Rating. Despite all of these impressive things the testing numbers are looking bad — 11,700 new cases today which is similar to the worst of the spring, although thankfully, hospitalizations and mortality are still lagging the earlier wave.
When I went for my walk my Italian neighbors clearly weren’t thinking of this beautiful rainbow as a sign that the next time God was displeased he might wipe us out by fire, or pandemic. They just thought it was beautiful. Four people had come out of their houses and were standing in the middle of our small lane taking pictures with cell phones and smiling in delight.
Although we had one of the toughest and longest lockdowns in the world I read today that 84% of Italians feel prepared to face what comes next and “are ready to face the health emergency and restrictions.” Once again I am impressed by the resilience and grace of this culture.
Since I had such a memorable adventure on the Chamonix side of Mont Blanc I felt it was only fair to give the Italian side a chance so on the return trip to Italy we stopped in Courmayeur for the night. We had work to do. Largely involving cheese.
Before this trip I’d asked Edward Behr for advice about food in the Val D’Aosta. (Edward edits and publishes The Art of Eating, which is one of my favorite publications on food and wine.) One of his recommendations was that we track down a Fontina maker in the mountains. Challenge accepted.
To do so we needed to add on an additional night in Courmayeur — not a hardship as we’d landed in a nurturing, cozy, and rustic place, Maison la Saxe. The six-bedroom inn was in a rustic farmhouse from the 1700s, one of many houses in a tightly packed cluster literally in the shadow of Mont Blanc. When I say tightly packed I mean the tiny lanes between the houses are about an arm’s width across. I asked the owner, Raphael, a guy in this thirties who was born in Courmayeur, had lived all over the world, and then returned to the village to restore and run the inn, and he said they were built tightly together not for defense but warmth. It’s the kind of place where my stone shower had a window thoughtfully installed with a view of Mont Blanc.
I enlisted the aid of Raphael for our Fontina search. He called a Fontina maker who invited us up the following morning. Up is a description I chose carefully. It took us 40 minutes to go just a couple of kilometers above the town of Aosta on one of the curviest roads I have ever driven. Pretty soon we were at eye level with the highest peaks and surrounded by green meadows. It was the closest to heaven I will probably every get.
Raphael had given us coordinates of where to park which was an unmarked grassy area at the top of the road. We then had to actually find the cows and cheese-makers. We asked at a tiny restaurant and were pointed to a hiking trail leading ten minutes straight up through the pastures to a small barn, the summer home of Azienda Agricola Quendoz.
The cheese maker took us into a small room with a huge copper cauldron to show us how it’s done. The cheese maker was originally from Morocco and had come to this spot, fallen in love with it, and moved here to take care of the cows and make cheese, more than a decade before. I can see the appeal of this life.
True Fontina comes only from here. To be recognized as “Fontina” (which has DOP — protected designation of origin — status from the EU) the milk has to come from red-pied Valdostana cows who graze only on these mountain grasses. They are milked twice a day and the cheese is made twice a day as each batch has to be from a single milking. The milk is heated in large copper cauldrons, enzymes and rennet are added to produce curds, the cheese is separated and drained, and pressed into a wheel-shaped molds. It’s brined in salt for two months and then set aside to age for three more months, frequently turned and salted. We tried the just ready Fontina along with a much more aged version and they were complex and interesting, not at all like the boring cheeses marketed as Fontina from other countries. This was nutty and buttery and wonderful.
Then on the way back down we got to meet some of the girls.
I wanted to write this article this not because I thought you needed to become Fontina aware, but more because I wanted to share this place of beauty and peace and a glimpse into a different way of life.
Trip notes:
If you are ever in Aosta but don’t have time to make it up the hill Raphael also pointed us to a small cheese shop downtown with a surprisingly large selection and a big cheese cellar in their basement (photo below) called Erbavoglio Antica Latteria. They put together a delicious tasting for us and looks like I can also order from them. I see more Fontina in my future.
Ed Behr also recommended Salumeria Bertolin in Arnad, just as you enter Valle d’Aosta. I stopped on my way to France and loved it. A wide variety of mountain salumi and delicious tasting board. I was fascinated by one that looked like a salumi but was made from beets. When life gives you beets…
I thought that after I was rescued by helicopter on Mt. Blanc my adventures were over, but I was wrong.
The next day I left my cozy hotel in Chamonix and drove to a place I’d found to stay outside of Vézelay, in Burgundy. I’d chosen it quickly and pretty much randomly. Exterior looked impressive online, it was well-positioned for my final sprint into Paris, on the edge of a huge national forest, not too expensive, and oddly it had rooms available on the last weekend of summer break — a major time for travel for the French.
To get to the hotel I drove through some truly beautiful countryside. Rolling hills of cut hay, old trees, tiny stone villages, small rushing rivers, and white cows in green fields. I get to the Château d’Island and it is as stunning as the pictures. The parking lot was empty except for one other car when I arrived. After a few minutes of standing in the parking lot an older man came out and led me to the base of a staircase in a tower. A woman came out, and instead brought me into the bar which was clearly never used and had me write my name and the date on a slip of paper. No ID or credit card required.
She led me to another staircase and up three flights of stairs to a room in the attic. It was then that I started to notice the smell. It was similar to the scent of a grandparent’s house that had been shut up for a long time, but like there had been generations and generations of grandparents who feared fresh air and replacing any furniture or upholstery. It smelled like death.
I loved my room, tucked into the corner of the attic, with an amazing array of beams, including one that grew out of the middle of the top of the mattress. There was a dormer window set near the floor with a wide sill where you could sit, touch the roof tiles, and gaze over the gables and gardens.
The woman then showed me around the rest of the house, including a salon that had original paintings from the 1400s, when the place was built, and the breakfast room with a fireplace almost tall enough to walk into, topped with copper. It was all stunning. It felt somehow naked — like nothing had been touched in centuries. An endangered species of place before it gets Relais-et-Châteaued. I was in heaven.
I left to go a few miles into Vézelay for dinner and when I returned I drove right past the hotel by mistake. It was easy to do this because the whole place was dark. Really dark. I parked, now the only car in the lot. They didn’t mention how I should get in after hours so I was relieved to see that the door to the tower was wide open, lit only by a couple of glowing green nightlights.
I get to the room, lock the door, open the window to get some fresh air, and get ready to go to sleep, placing extra pillows around the beam that’s even with my head in the middle of the bed in case I roll over quickly in my sleep.
All went well till the bat flew in.
When I first heard the loud rustling noise I thought a rat had come along the gutter and hopped into my open window. I was relieved when I turned on the light and saw it was just a bat. I pulled the covers over my head and tried to go back to sleep which turned out to be impossible because I’d hear the whoosh of flight and feel the lightest puff of air as the bat flew close over my head about every half hour. The problem was in the forest of beams in the tall peaked ceiling there was no way to tell whether it had left or was still in the room. And the window where he’d come in was near the floor and small. After several hours awake I got an ingenious idea, or at least it seemed so at the time. I turned on my iPhone flashlight and placed it outside on the roof, shining up, hoping it would attract bugs, which would attract the bat. I don’t know if this worked, or exhaustion took over, but I finally did get back to sleep for a couple hours.
The interesting thing is that after my Paris stay, when I am making the return road trip back to Italy with two friends, we book an overnight at a hotel in prime Burgundy territory, right outside Beaune. It is lovely, we have one of the best meals I’ve had in forever, sleep in comfortable, well-appointed rooms that are clean and don’t smell of death. And it is uninteresting and soulless. I realize my friends and I need to backtrack about an hour and a half to return to the Château de la Mort. Fortunately my friends are really good sports and trust me. No other guests were there when we arrived and the hostess showed us every room — quite the endeavour as it involved a huge mass of keys and considerable time to lock and unlock each door. Each was completely different and widely varied, as did the level of the château’s unique smell.
One of our favorite moments occurs over our two breakfasts. They have classical music playing from a station with a considerable amount of static over speakers that must have been from the 1970s. When this aria came on my friend had to capture it. We decided it was a fitting soundtrack of the place.
Although my friends were definitely aware of the rough edges, I interviewed them last night over some wine and captured their stream of consciousness memories. “A vanishing place that will never be again.” “There was no ‘show’. Most hotels feel like they are putting on a show, but not here.” “A privilege to see the unrenovated place before it is renovated beyond redemption.” “Unusually relaxed — more relaxing than being at a spa.” “Like time travel. My room had a desk and chair in front of the full length window set up to write letters.” “No pretension. It’s pure, not packaged for tourists.” And my personal favorite — “weird as shit”.
Trip Notes:
Château d’Island is located between the gorgeous villages of Vézelay and Avallon.
Château de Saulon is the place we stayed outside of Beaune and very near the famed Route Vins. Looks amazing on the homepage picture, but marred on the other side by the addition of an glass eating area and glass elevator. However their farm to table restaurant is worth a trip to Burgundy by itself.
Lunch at Olivier Leflaive, one of the top white wine makers in the world. We ate and tasted a about 10 glasses (between us all) of their wines. We tried two Puligny-Montrachet 1er Crus were from the same row of grapes in the same field, but one bottle was from the top of the rolling hill (a 2015 Champ Gains) and another bottle was from the less-arid bottom (a 2015 Renferts). And they tasted completely different. We also had a glass of a wine from the same field which is available only in the restaurant because so few bottles are made and it was breathtaking. For you wine buffs, just to brag, it was their Les Pucelles wine from 2011.
I’m going to do another Itch on Vézelay and Avallon because they are that good.
