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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 24, 2018 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Hell’s Santas (on Vespas)

Christmas Eve in our village is not for the faint of heart. Santas of all ages, sizes, and both sexes come roaring into the piazza on every type of Vespa bearing sacks of presents which they give to the waiting kids. The piazza, dominated by a huge tree, is packed with a pretty good percentage of the village population. Sometimes one of the Santas bears a striking resemblance to someone you know.

Some years the presents are better than others. One of the first years we were in Italy the Santas gave out soccer balls to the boys and Italian grammar books to the girls. Our little four-year old friend, in the photo, was obviously delighted to receive a present that would yield so many hours of fun.

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?

November 2, 2018 In Live By Nancy

The many time zones of one village

Time moves differently in Italy, I’ve heard people say. A friend from London says that the moment she knows she has arrived in Italy is when she withdraws money from the cash machine in the square, which seems to take about 30 seconds between each step of the process, it feels like geologic time if you’re not used to it.

We used to live in an apartment in old town over a little store. I’d go down each morning to get fresh bread for the kids’ breakfasts before taking them to school. The opening time on the store’s door is definitive: 7:30. One morning, I was still standing by the locked door at 7:45, when the owner finally showed up. I was getting nervous about getting the kids to school on time, so I said, trying to hide my annoyance, “I thought you opened at 7:30.” The very sweet woman who owns the shop replied, totally at ease, “7:30…7:45—uguale.” “Uguale” meaning “equal, no difference.”

The most obvious way that this, more elastic, sense of time plays out is when the bells of the village ring to announce the current time. From various places we’ve lived we’ve heard the bells from several towers tolling the time, twice an hour (depending on which bells are working). You’d think this would be a very predictable thing, and a cacophony every thirty minutes, but it’s not. Each bell takes its time, ringing in seven o’clock, for example, at 7:00, 7:07, 7:10 and up to about 7:12, then taking its turn again in 30 minutes. The half-past bells add an additional beat, with a different tone, before or after the count to signify the half hour. Except for the one that doesn’t, and just rings the hour bell again.

The bells get a bit more aligned after the twice annual shifts for daylight savings time, and then they drift further apart. Time, in a village, is all relative.

I’d like to get deeper into this story and report back. Does one person change the time on the bells or is it done by by different bell keepers? How do they decide which bell is the one that is most accurate, or does it matter?

But for now I want to leave you with a question. The next time you look at your phone or Apple watch to find out the time (when I often get a little thrill knowing I actually know what the exact time is), does it matter if time is relative or absolute, and is it true (and perhaps better) that 7:30 and 7:45 may, in fact, be uguale?

November 2, 2018 In Chow, Live By Nancy

Raining olives

We just pressed the olive oil from our trees. The days of picking are all-consuming: spreading nets under the trees, raking the olives off the branches by hand with small plastic rakes, pouring the olives caught by the nets into plastic crates, and moving the crates to safe storage until the olive oil can be pressed, which should happen no longer than 48 hours from picking. Thankfully, this year we had help, two Americans, a friend and her 19-year old son, coming to Italy for the first time.

The culmination of all of this work is going to the olive oil press, or “frantoio”.

The crates of olives are unloaded and weighed with great import, carefully watched by the others in line for the press. It’s a competitive “I have more olives than you” moment. We do respectably well, olives weighing in at over 500 kilos (over half a ton), in 25 crates. But soon we are put in our place by three very scruffy 40-something guys who came in after us, unloading about 75 crates. “Smug devils,” I think to myself. We eye them. They eye us. No smiles.

We settle in for a long wait. Turns out everybody showed up with twice the amount of olives they’d predicted, slowing down the process from an hour or so to about five. No English is spoken here, so my friends amuse themselves by watching the scene and playing with the various dogs on hand for the press. The guy who runs the press runs around in his black tracksuit, overseeing all.

He decides that our friends’ lack of Italian, and John and my limited understanding, does not hinder communication in the slightest when it comes to the important topics of life. He pulls us over to look at the olives unloaded by the three guys. “Idiota!,” he tells them, encouraging John and our 19-year old visitor to chime in with their opinion of the three. Turns out they had used mechanized rakes, getting a great yield, but bruising the olives in the process, and mixing in a lot more twigs and leaves than is desired. The guys didn’t blink, complimenting our smaller yield on the lack of leaves, twigs, and bruises. All are laughing and chatting away now. These guys remind me that Tuscan men seem to have a lot more fun than men in other countries.

The woman of the mill shows up with plates of freshly baked cookies, crackers, and bread, drizzled with just-pressed oil and salt, which she enthusiastically passes. Mr. Mill decides it’s time to get out the wine just as we are starting to pour our boxes of olives into the press, which is the last chance to pick out sticks, leaves, and any olives that don’t look worthy. We are all trying to do final quality control, leaning over the large open funnel leading to the grinder, while balancing our never-empty plastic cups of wine and a constantly replenished supply of bread with olive oil, crackers, and cookies that the owners watch carefully that we finish.

Our new press buddies in the background.

Finally the oil comes streaming out. It is a record harvest for us—more than 100 liters when we are finished with all the trees. Dark green and very peppery.

And to celebrate the owners decide that it is time to bring out the special grappa.

October 20, 2018 In Chow, Live By Nancy

Finding chestnuts. Bravery. And humanity.

I had this article about chestnuts completely written. Some very nice discoveries that I thought you would find interesting. Then I decided on Friday that I needed to double check a couple of things, and to get some video of the almost-worthy-of-an-amusement park four-wheel drive up a stream bed to get to my friend’s grove of chestnuts in the middle of the forest. I asked him if I could tag along the next time he gathered chestnuts, he agreed, then mentioned that it was his birthday and that a few other friends were coming to have a lunch in the woods.

Simple, right? These things sound so much easier in retrospect, and in print, then they are for me to do. I’m shy, I hate to impose, and am very sensitive that I can’t communicate in Italian with any measure of fluidity or nuance. My Italian is very much in the sledge hammer stage, and I knew I’d be in for an all-day Italian-speaking extravaganza. My heart was pounding with anxiety when I joined friends in the piazza to drive up the hill.

Chestnut Grove from Itch.world on Vimeo.

I also know that this is why I am doing Itch. Every week I am pushed to do more than I am comfortable with, more than I actually want to do, both in my Italian community, and in my creative life. I am creative, every day, for clients, but this is different. This is for me—I’ve never written, at all, before now. But have wanted to, my whole life. Every week is a new frontier, rough edges all around.

And my relationships in the village had reached a comfortable point. I now know hundreds of people, engage in short conversations, goodwill flowing in both directions, but it’s difficult for me to get deeper, for all the reasons above. Itch is a wonderful forcing mechanism.

So I found myself in the middle of the woods, at a long table surrounded by stumps, eating roasted pig parts rejected by the rest of the world but revered by the “real” Tuscans, debating whether truffles found locally actually count as authentic Tuscan food, and singing, yes, singing, helping friends learn the English words to “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” while a guitar was played. And with these sweet, kind, generous, secure, happy people it didn’t matter a bit if my conditional tenses are garbage, or that business development is taking longer than I would like, or that I didn’t know these people profoundly. I was at peace—accepted, included, encouraged, supported. At that moment on a Friday afternoon it was hard to imagine a similar scene unfolding anywhere else but this Tuscan woods. And I knew that this was the point of this post.

Here’s the original article about chestnuts, for your edification.

October 7, 2018 In Chow By Nancy

From the mouth of frogs

Many pastas come from very ancient traditions, but I recently discovered a pasta that is far more recent in origin. I’ve been intrigued by it since I spotted it on the shelf in a workers’ restaurant—the one with chef who rolls cheese for sport. The label reads “Bocche di rana”—”frogs’ mouths.” I thought I must be mistranslating until I bought a package and started looking closely at the pasta inside.

Frogs’ mouths pasta vs. its more boring cousin, the paccheri

The small, ribbed tubes of pasta are shaped a bit like a big rigatoni, or a paccheri, but the end of each pasta droops in a unique way that looks remarkably like how I could imagine a frog’s mouth moving when expressing a range of sounds and feelings.

I took it home and played with the pasta for an embarrassingly long amount of time, imagining them as frogs. I mean I didn’t make up voices or anything, but did look through most of the package finding the most amusing ones. It was an excellent break from thinking about politics.

I tried to find out more about this shape of pasta, but came up empty handed. (With the exception of a frog’s mouth being a kind of helmet in a suit of armor. Can you imagine going to war and asking your squire “Hand me the frog’s mouth and I will be ready for battle!”)

I drove over to the restaurant to talk with the chef’s son, who I had heard is friends with the people who started the small, local pasta company, called Toscodoro. He told me that he occasionally helps out with the pasta creation. One day they were trying to make paccheri, and kept failing because one side collapsed in unpredictable ways. And the frogs’ mouths pasta was born.

We love it—and its more more-predictably shaped cousin, paccheri—with any kind of meaty, chunky ragu sauce. The New York Times recently had a seafood recipe perfect for pastas shaped like paccheri, rigatoni or our frogs mouths, which sounds interesting to try.

September 22, 2018 In Chow, Live, Recipes By Nancy

Making gnocchi, and a film, in Italy

John and I have this idea to start filming local grandmothers cooking. A possible way to enter more deeply into Italian life, capture some of the spirit of Tuscan woman, and learn more about food.

We gather some savvy, younger locals and start brainstorming about people we can shoot. The grandmother who hunts? Possible. The grandmother who makes feather whips for the lingerie store? Very possible. For our first shoot we settle on two of our collaborators’ grandmother in a house in the countryside outside of town, complete with a huge watermelon patch.

The morning of the shoot comes. We are prepared to act with military precision, which is the norm for any shoot. The “call time” comes to meet our collaborators and head to the country. The meeting location changes. The start is delayed because breakfast isn’t finished. Their grandmother actually lives in the ancient center of town, not near the watermelon patch at all. We start to get nervous.

We arrive at their house on a tiny street from the 1100s and the grandfather, Franco, jumps into cooking action. Maybe the premise of the video, cooking grandmothers, needs to be reassessed?

Then it all starts to unfold. The constant lesson of Italy. You can predict nothing, control nothing, but just step back and enjoy the gifts of grace, ease, and warmth that the Italians offer. Which more often than not is so much more than you could have possibly imagined or engineered.

Anna, the grandmother, is everywhere in the kitchen at once. This gnocchi pas de deux has clearly happened hundreds of times in their kitchen. Both of them are cooking with a rare ease, barely even looking at the food as they cook.

While Franco forms the dough for the gnocchi, and then shapes and cuts it, he tells us stories about what is was like for families growing up as tenant-farmers in the years before the “economic miracle” of the 1960s (thanks Marshall Plan), with 30 people in a house, hunger, limited mobility, and the Padrone with total power.

The conversation ranges across centuries and topics, and the enormous mound of gnocchi dough melts away. Anna is taking away the cut gnocchi, boiling it, and then rolling it in oil to separate and cool, directly on the marble table.

Soon after we sit down with the extended family to eat. As it has been said before, “And it was good.”

This is, in some ways, one of the most unfiltered films we’ve ever done. It’s as close as we can get you to sitting down in a Tuscan kitchen for a visit. Please let us know what you think of this rawer kind of glimpse. And we hope you learn a lot about gnocchi along the way.

September 7, 2018 In Best Of, Chow, Recipes By Nancy

The pasta we can’t quit (and recipe)

When I want a mini-vacation—and lunch—I head to the sleepy Tuscan hilltop village of Monterchi. In the piazza at the top is one of my favorite family restaurants, Ristorante Al Travato.

It’s only open from-kinda-around-Easter to kinda-around-the-end of October, depending on the weather and the back health of Laura. The family first opens the restaurant on weekends only, then slowly builds, with the heat, to being open most days in summer, and then winds it all back down in the fall. What they do all winter I am not sure, although they’ve hinted it involves skiing.

Marco, Laura’s husband, finds the wines for the cellar—a cave that goes back into the medieval walls—and Laura cooks. Two of their teenage daughters serve (yep, beauties. We can even get our 14-year-old son to eat there whenever we want), while the youngest daughter rides around the square on her small, enviable pink bike.

Our family craves one dish in particular, at least once a week— Spaghetti Aglio, Olio e Pepperoncini—true Tuscan soul food. It’s spaghetti that’s properly al dente, loads of garlic, and a few really hot peppers, all swimming in olive oil.

While it’s simple in its ingredient list, differing opinions of how it should be made abound. You could say of Laura’s (off-menu version): “questo spacca di brutto” (“this chops off the ugly”—I know, the translation doesn’t help me either, but the kids say it means something is a big deal). Best of all for anyone who wants to bring a bit of Italian soul food into their kitchen, it’s easy enough to do tonight with ingredients you probably already have on hand.

Here’s a two-minute video on how Laura makes the definitive Tuscan comfort food.

A cooking note: you’re going to save some of the water from cooking the pasta when you drain off the rest. Also—do this before the pasta has reached the “al dente” (still slightly firm when bitten) state. It will finish cooking when added to the pan with the other ingredients (while the last bit of cooking water helps their flavors go inside the noodles).

September 1, 2018 In Live By Nancy

Spectacular spettacolo

Every August, in the Tuscan village of Anghiari, magic happens. For 10 nights in a row, a local square becomes the stage for a freshly-written play, part of a 23-year-old series called Tovaglia a Quadri. I love it because it is a highly improbable thing—that a village takes the time every year to create a fearless, sharp, witty, and poignant reflection of what it means to be a member of a small Italian village, in today’s world. Written by, acted in, and attended by locals.

Each year, the new production is a full-length musical, staged in a tiny square in town. The buildings around the square are used as sets, with actors popping in and out of windows and doors. In the middle of the square are long tables, covered with checkered tablecloths, where the nightly audience is served a three-course dinner. A new play is written every year—often mere weeks before—ensuring that the topics are current. The name Tovaglia a Quadri means tablecloth (tovaglia), with squares (quadri), but the word quadri also refers to a stage.

This year’s play was Ci Amazzon, which is a play on words of “ci amazzono”—”they are killing us”. It takes place a hundred years in the future after Amazon has won the latest world war, leaving a dystopian landscape of a village in which even the grandmothers are happy to have all their needs met online so that they don’t have to leave the house and talk with each other. It explores the tension of getting exactly what you want versus having fewer choices but a more engaged community.

Prior topics have included Anghiarixit—a referendum to gain independence from Tuscany —because, after all, what has Florence really ever done for Anghiari since 1441, when the Florentines bested the Milanese in The Battle of Anghiari, a crucial battle of the Renaissance? Another year the play provided a scathing and hilarious look at immigration with the villagers all eager to emigrate to Australia to start new lives and businesses, while being terrified of a black teenager who was found on the banks of the Tiber river. The villagers thought he was an African immigrant who fell off a boat in the Mediterranean and washed hundreds of miles upstream in the river. He turned out to be from the next village and had fallen into the river after a night of partying with friends. Another was about a World War II concentration camp located nearby.

The play has been happening every year for 23 years, and is the creation of co-authors Paolo Pennacchini and Andrea Merendelli. Andrea directs. The first few years were experimental, trying things like improvisational comedy. They wrote their first real plot in 1997, and the play featured a character talking about his memories. Paolo told me that in 2010 they decided to shift from looking at the past to try “to explain the things happening around us.” And the current hard-hitting format was born.

The town wildly embraces this annual tradition. There are 130 seats for each of the 10 shows and tickets sell out almost immediately. I went to buy mine the morning the tickets were available, arrived 15 minutes after the office opened, and found myself 66th in line. The entire process took hours!

I’ve noticed that many of the local businesses now sport “Ci Amazzon” stickers in their windows, taking the idea of the latest play into a lasting, physical reminder.

I can’t wait to see what they conjure up next year.

August 2, 2018 In Live By Nancy

Big cheese

Growing up in the United States, I somehow missed out on learning that there is an Italian sport that involves rolling cheeses. My first clue that my sporting education might not be complete is a photo on the wall of one my favorite workers’ lunch restaurants. In it, the chef is holding a large wheel of cheese. He’s poised to throw it, much as if he were about to roll a bowling ball.

My next brush with cheese rolling happened as I was driving down a Tuscan backroad on the way to the grocery store. I noticed a group of men—including the chef— standing together, looking very serious, all well-armed with large cheeses. I’d like to say that I instantly pulled over to find out more, but wasn’t brave enough—they were having such a good time among friends that it like intruding, and I’m not yet confident enough about my Italian.

The third time I spotted a cheese in play, it was a solitary man, practicing his cheese roll, and I wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass. I was with my fluent daughter, and she owed me one because I had just picked her up at the horse stable, so “we” found out when the next competition was happening and asked if we could come and film.

As is appropriate with cheese rolling, my search came full-circle when I interviewed the chef—whose picture hangs in the restaurant—about the basics of the sport. I was surprised that he has only been participating in this sport for three years—so for those of you who think “It is too late for me to learn to roll a cheese” there is hope yet.

Each team of two has a large, flat, hard cheese between them (could be pecorino, asiago, or parmigiano; but all the teams have to use the same kind.) They attach a leather strap around the cheese, which creates a sort of handle, that enables them to launch the cheese, rolling it down the road. The team who cheese goes the farthest with a predetermined number of throws wins.

Cheese rolling is an all-day sport. The day we came out to watch, they had been out rolling cheeses since 8 in the morning and would be doing so until about 7:30 in the evening, covering around 9 kilometers on foot.

Cheese rolling dates from Etruscan times (the local tribes living here pre-Roman times, whom Tuscany was named after). It’s even included in the Federation of Italian Traditional Games and Sports (figest.it), an organization that holds competitions and publishes the rules for about 15 ancient games like, tug of war, cross bow shooting, darts, and very obscure games like morra, which dates to the ancient Egyptians. (For a lovely little blast of morra: https://www.facebook.com/MorraMarche/videos/978697128831911/)

In cheese rolling there are five different weight classes—cheeses ranging from 1.5 kilograms (a little over three pounds) to 25 kilograms (55 pounds). Hurling a 55 pound cheese down the road takes serious training and muscle!

My favorite part is that the rules specify what to do if your cheese breaks during competition. First feed the spectators cheese, then you can replace the cheese and carry on.

Our chef friend says they always serve the cheese after it has had its moment of competition and that it is particularly delicious. The rules dictate that, after the competition, the winner provides everyone else with glasses of wine. But victory is sweet after all, because the victor gets to keep the cheese of the defeated.