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Italy

Visitations and celebrations

The week has been largely social, beginning with my return from London on Monday. Tuesday we arrived in Colorno to find the morning class cancelled, so filled the time with a British and Irish cheese tasting – Berkswell, Caerphilly, Double Gloucester, Durrus, Stilton, Swaledale and even a little Vignotte, just because, well why not, we’re off to France this weekend. I’d brought some Dunkerton’s Cider to wash things down, and some oat cakes and digestives and Cornish wafers.

A big party on Tuesday night, which started with a rooftop aperitivo party – passing through a nicely decorated laundry line – here it is with Jess the artiste:

and on to an al fresco dinner at the Santa Chiara Trattoria, which featured traditional starters including torta fritta with culatello and prosciutto, and a parmesan torte drizzled with balsamico.

I was indulged in my year-long project to try every Barbera wine I can find (and this one was lovely). Then had a nice bit of duck followed by a fruit tart, as well as toasts and songs in many languages.

Next, I was blessed by visiting Canadians, although the difficulties of arranging a nice time became somewhat operatic in everything except musical elegance.

The day of departure the Parma B&B;, found online and booked a couple of weeks earlier, cancelled my friends’ stay… I guess on the positive side at least they actually let them know they were pulling the rug before arrival, but it was nearly impossible to arrange a room at such short notice, and so instead of a charming centrally located abode, they ended up in an airport hotel with a higher than expected taxi bill and no place to eat except the hotel restaurant. Not much of a welcome to Parma. (If anyone wants the name of that b&b; in the interests of avoiding them in future, get in touch.)

After that, Geoff’s plane from Canada was caught up in a strike and his connection to Milan was cancelled so he had a bonding experience with some similarly afflicted fellow travellers in their circuitous route through Geneva and onwards by train, while his lovely wife kept vigil in the Milan train station all day.

The whole week has been a kind of precis of what can go wrong here when you try to make plans.

I had tried to book a restaurant for the supper I thought we’d have together in Parma on arrival night, but the one I tried had, according to its website, closing days of Tuesdays and Wednesday lunchtime. I tried to phone but the phone was on fax. I tried emailing a reservation, but didn’t hold out much hope for a reply, so I stopped by Wednesday evening but the place was shuttered with no indication of opening times posted on the door. So I gave up. Luckily, as it turned out.

I then attempted to book a rental car, and thought I’d try to support local businesses by booking locally. After my opening remarks and my first “scusi?” to the voluminous reply, the helping hand at Maggiore used it to put the phone down on me. I gave up and went to Hertz, booked online and hey presto.

I also attempted to book an agriturismo we’d found online, which had nice pictures of its room but no room rates posted. So I tried emailing them (in pidgin Italian) to ask about room rates, but there was no reply, so I had a more fluent friend call on my behalf (grazie Corrie) and succeeded in landing the rooms. Which turned out to be first rate and we had a perfect stay at the gorgeous and welcoming Campo del Pillo. The owner was friendly and generous; when he saw us tucking into an al fresco antipasti of Pecorino Sardo and wild boar salame, he sniffed manfully and returned moments later with some 30 month old parmigiano-reggiano, drizzled with 35 year old balsamico, and accompanied by organic salame and spalla cruda.

A bella vista out the windows:

And the old grey mare…

Next on the agenda was attempting to book dinner at a Slow Food recommended restaurant, Il Capolinea. After numerous attempts over two days with failed phone connections, I finally got through. After my opening remarks, the other end hung up on me. Let’s say the sound quality was bad. In any case, I phoned back, and this time he heard me out and took my booking.

And we had a fantastic meal in very friendly and capable hands; a mixed starter of pork salad (insalatina di maiale), vegetable frittata, pickled onions, salame and culatello,

followed by roast lamb (coscia d’agnello biologico al forno) and roast beef (drizzled with balsamico),

accompanied by a comfortable selection of vegetables, followed by four star desserts: stunningly good fresh strawberries with gelato and balsamico; and chocolate mousse so good I wanted to lick the plate. Afterwards we made friends with a neighbouring table and were rewarded with a glass of nocino; and after that the proprietor brought us some beautiful dessert wine and exquisite almond macaroons.

Awesome. We discovered later that Castelnovo ne’ Monti is in fact a Slow City, so we were destined for a good meal no matter what, but I think we struck it lucky nonetheless. Scenic place, with its characteristic tabletop mountain, La Pietra di Bismantova, which is said to have inspired Dante’s Monte del Purgatorio.

We also discovered that the town is known as the City of Bells because of a long-standing bell foundry (Capanni Bells) where they’ve been ringing the changes since 1500.

On the way home today we paid a visit to the Museo del Sughero (cork museum) in the pretty Appenine spa town of Cervarezza Terme.

Industrial pasta, arab influences and the spoken word

Phew, a week seems to have got away from me. Wandering round Parma on Sunday the 13th, I came upon a big party right around the corner, on strada Farini, which had been closed to traffic and lined with street vendors, with nearby gardens and galleries open to viewing. All good street parties in Parma seem to involve strategic use of turf, and this one was no exception, going a step further, adding a fountain:

If the week before was visual, last week was, well, audio-visual. We divided most of our time between Barbara Santich, visiting from Adelaide to tell us about Medieval food history, and Simon Parkes, from the BBC Food Programme, visiting from London to talk about food radio.

We kicked off the week with an all-day tour of the Barilla Pasta factory near Parma on Monday. Oh no, we thought, a dreary day of PowerPoint presentations followed by endless trailing around to see more large shiny machines… but happily there was more to it than that.

Though we did commence, as all 21st century students surely do, by sitting helplessly in a room for half an hour or so, watching a series of mildly concerned staff members take turns having a go trying to persuade the projector to talk to the laptop, and when that didn’t work, trying another laptop, another staff member, another cable, and so on. Enough time had fallen off the clock to convince the plucky marketing chap to plunge in, armed only with a box of spaghetti and a head full of company history. He did very well off the cuff, and by the time the technology was awake he’d covered a good chunk of time.

We had technical talks too, which luckily followed a not-too-distant class in pasta technology, so we were old hands at distinguishing common wheat from durum, and were already aware of the legislation requiring the use of durum wheat for Italian dried pasta; we knew about different gluten actions in each, and of course familiar with potential major flaws in dried pasta. We heard about the work of the research department to produce the perfect balance of protein, gluten and yield in its various strains of durum. We heard that Barilla buys a large percentage of Italy’s durum production, and some of the rest from the US, where it has both mill and pasta factory. And we did see some big machines that were churning out a lot of strands of spaghetti, and were treated to a large lunch of pasta.

Back to the halls of learning on Tuesday, in Barbara Santich’s classes we enjoyed a walk through Medieval foods: heard about some of the foods that were prepared for feasts and how banquets began; and reviewed the astonishing number of days set aside each year for fasting and religious observance that affected foods. We looked at some recipes that had made their way down the years from early cooks such as Apicius, and talked about some of the spices that have pretty much disappeared from Italian food, like dill, cumin, mint, coriander and asafoetida; heard about the influence on cuisine from Arab traders who introduced such foods as citrus fruits, buckwheat, cane sugar, spinach, eggplant and lots of spices to the Mediterranean.

Next, Simon Parkes had us work on a six minute radio piece, which was a challenge to complete in two days. One night, really. It involved the use of some sound editing software which worked better for some of us than others but we had fun with it and enjoyed listening to the final products on Thursday afternoon.

And at that point I flew away to London for the weekend.

Watching food

Mostly a visual week, this. We’ve had a series of talks on food television from the Swiss film maker Annette Frei Berthoud, who’s been showing us various clips (including a bit from Mondovino) and documentaries. We had one yesterday about cacao growers in South America, which talked about Kallari organic cocoa from Ecuador, and the Presidia product cacao nacional.

A couple of classes were cancelled this week and replaced with documentary screenings. Monday we had a Canadian film that our Don worked on, On the Road to Bocuse d’Or. Yesterday saw the return of Stefano Sardo who showed us several things including the Sierra Club’s neat little education tool, The True Cost of Food, and then the wordless and sobering Our Daily Bread which is something to see if you have ever wondered whence cometh those tomatoes, pork chops, apples, eggs, cucumbers..

Most shocking to me in Our Daily Bread was seeing the industrialisation of work: evidently the design of industrial food production facilities builds in the isolation of its employees. These are not jolly production lines where the workers banter across the conveyor belts or bond over coffee break; here we have blank-faced drones in full hygiene kit arranged so they never face one another and probably couldn’t speak if they did for the factory noise and the ear protection; handling fruit, vegetables, chicks, piglets, animal corpses and a whole lot of machines in an efficient, dispassionate flow. Do they take breaks together or are they always sent off in sequence so as not to interrupt the production chain? I wondered how the designers of these factories had managed to divest from their consciences and their planning all those great 20th century concepts like job satisfaction, employee motivation, team-building; they’ve stripped these jobs down to a cold essence. The perfect 21st century environment for an alienated 21st century workforce?

Journalism, food geography and a mighty fine picnic

We had the entertaining guidance of the Guardian‘s very own Matthew Fort to speak to us last week. I have been to many a talk on how to write and on selling your writing, but it never hurts to have a few stern reminders from a guy at the top, like: you can’t call yourself a writer if you don’t write every day. His chief tip is to try to elicit three reactions from the reader: ‘I never thought of that’; ‘that’s really useful’; and ‘I really enjoyed that’.

One side-comment he made stayed with me: British food shops are shooting themselves in the foot by keeping bankers’ hours; the only food shops open at times when their customers are able to shop are the supermarkets, and so they win the business. A remark that goes for other places as well; but he praised Italian food shops for staying open in the evening so that working shoppers could patronise them on their way home. Here in Parma most shops open between 8.30 and 9.30 and close for a very long lunch (12.30 till as late as 4.30) but then reopen for evening trade, until about 7 or 7.30 – which is indeed convenient, seen in that light. Not the first thought in my mind when I finally emerge to do my shopping on Saturdays around noon, but I guess that’s my choice.

We finished our week with Colin Sage, an environmental geographer and crusader for raw milk Irish cheeses. He talked to us about food geography, and specifically about some of the regulatory issues around raw milk cheeses that are helping to draw a scientific noose ever more tightly round the food we are able to buy. He referred us to Marion Nestle, a name that’s been coming up in various places and readings, and mentioned a useful article by our hero Michael Pollan about the rise of a whole new evil that goes by the handle of nutritionism. And he left us with the suggestion that maybe it’s time to grow our own food.

He called on us to shift away from thinking of ourselves as simply consumers having our choices limited and being passive recipients of what might be less and less a ‘whole food’ and more and more a nutrition product. We need, he says, to become food citizens with an active role in asserting values and creating an environment for our own sustenance. Increasing transportation costs mean there will be a higher and higher cost for our food: the current system is unsustainable. We need to be responsible and involved in how and where food is sourced, and grow some of our own food if we can. He advocates alternative food networks: perhaps develop small scale cooperatives for sharing food resources. Fair trade needs to go further than chocolate or coffee, and develop in such areas as fruit that we’ll never be able to grow in northern climates.

Oddly enough I had been listening to a Food Programme piece from last February on much the same theme, where the speaker, Colin Tudge, advocated a “world-wide food club” – a cooperative relationship between good farmers who really want to produce good stuff, artisans, bakers and brewers who are prepared to produce good food from it, and people who are willing to pay for good food properly produced.

Colin Sage has also spent time looking at the structures around our food governance, and is uneasy with his findings. The bodies that research and govern our food supply are suspect: there are well publicised funding relationships between business and research (academics and scientists) and government which is problematic for impartiality: when funding determines what is being studied and how the results may be released, that limits what we can truly investigate and report in all that we need to know about our food. The ‘cosy relationship’ that exists between business and regulatory bodies in terms of who heads them (but where do you find the expertise to head regulators if not in the industries they come in to regulate?) can be causing problems again in impartiality. And food sovereignty means that countries that need to feed themselves are using their own resources to grow export crops, which are more lucrative, but create a world in which food is being grown as animal feed or fuel while their own populations suffer hunger and malnourishment. Sobering stuff; the more so when so much of it is literally echoing down this year, repeated with variations by our speakers and in our readings.

With all that on our minds it could have been hard to gather the strength for a Labour Day picnic in the park but we managed. We spread our blankets on a sunny day in a quiet, walled garden overhung by chestnuts in full flower with a few bouncing dogs in the background – and later in the afternoon some curious soundtracks (Frank Sinatra?) coming from the puppet show in the courtyard of the Castello dei Burattini. One by one we set down our wares, explaining why they were not adequate, which ingredients we’d been unable to find or adapt, why the recipes had not worked as we had hoped, why they didn’t look the way they were supposed to; and one by one we ate the offerings with delight and mutual encouragement. Even halfway through our year it can be a scary thing to share humble food among our ever-more gastronomically enlightened selves. But we all agreed we must do it more often.

Bologna, Mantova, Parma


A few more pictures from Bologna, where the walls have faces…


Bologna birthplace of murdered poet and film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini.

On Thursday I thought I should make a little extra effort to get to Mantova/Mantua, which I’d wanted to see for a while. I seem to have managed to time my visit with that of every school aged teen in Northern Italy; the place was thronged, mobbed and ringing with the particular, unrestrained, and unmissable presence of the massed Italian adolescent. A sound that is even more penetrating, I was to discover, when situated inside a palace or town square. Yeesh. Worst of all, whether or not it was down to their presence, I found that the Ducal Palace’s Camera degli Sposi was closed for the day, except to those with reserved tickets. Bummer and a half. I bought the postcard but somehow it was not the same.


I did wander around the pretty garden of the Palazzo d’Arco, and because you cannot go through the rooms alone I had an odd and silently escorted tour of my own. I liked the kitchen, whose walls were covered in pots and pudding molds, and was grateful not to have to think about polishing a collection of that size.


Pizza Primavera, in Mantova: rocket and tomatoes.


Mantova, lots of water.


The other day in Parma. A lot of horse meat on sale here.. what would Peter Pan say?


And what about these guys: before I found them, they went out of business. Parma not ready for Tex Mex pizza?

Easter break

Well it’s nearly over, our two weeks of blissed out sunshiny whateveritwaswedid. Most of my classmates took off for foreign shores: Copenhagen, New York, Istanbul, Montreal, Seoul… I stayed in Parma, mostly, just to be different. And just to have a look round the galleries and museums and churches which I haven’t done, waiting as I’ve been for a visitor to do it with. And I finally had one and here are some of the things we did:

Visited Osteria del Gesso, one of the local thumbs-up dineries. I had a very good meal there, but an even better one a night or two later at Ristorante Mosaika, a little placed I’d walked by a few times and had been wanting to try. We both had selected menus (I had the meat, Meli had the fish) and they were, in our favourite word, celestiale. They started us off gently with some deliriously fresh and beautiful balsamico-drizzled buffalo mozzarella, and delicate rounds of crostini with fresh green pesto; moved us smoothly on into starters (a wonderful rabbit terrine, and a salt cod puree whose salad came with a stunning soy-wasabi dressing) and pasta (gorgeous gnocchi draped with lardo, and a delightful tagliatelle freckled with fresh green herbs and strewn with shellfish)

and mains (tender white sea bass with clams and olives, and for me, meltingly pink lamb);


polished us off with warm, soft chocolate cake…

and for me a nest of perfectly ripe strawberries tossed in citrus and served with gelato.

To work all that off, we went nutria-spotting, checked out some puppets, popped our heads into the Baptistry, the Duomo, and every other church we came upon, except the desanctified ones (which were several); had walks in the Parco Ducale and Parco della Cittadella, sampled gelato from Grom and K2, had a drink in Web ‘n Wine, saw the Aga Khan masterpieces exhibition and peeped round the corner into the Teatro Farnese.

Then a day in Bologna, where we saw the Museo Civico Medievale and the Museo Morandi, the Chiesa San Stefano, the Basilica di San Petronio, and still had time to stumble upon an excellent pizzeria and have a sampling of gelato (from Gelateria Gianni, branches which seemed to materialise at every turning). We expired on a sofa somewhere and had a drink and a few olives before returning to Parma. Where we planned our assault on Milan the following day.

Of course we visited first the Duomo, and then wandered about looking for lunch, which we found at Bellavista Cafe – the food was excellent – the seafood plate disappeared a little too quickly to capture;

the pizzas looked amazing as they went by; the apple cake was delightful.

We then ambled through the Castello Svorzesco for most of the afternoon and never really got to the end of it. Meli had an hour to sprint round the Pinacoteca di Brera while I rested my feet and sipped a spremuta d’arancia.

And then Meli took to the skies from our very own Aeroporto G. Verdi, where the approach roundabout must have the best topiary ever: