ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

It’s a mercifully cooler day here in Parma, and I’m sitting with my windows boldly open at 11.30 in the morning, fans off, enjoying a breeze. I can honestly say that’s a sentence I haven’t been able to write for months, and I’m grateful to be able to do it now.

Last night we had another farewell gathering: they get smaller and smaller as people take off for their summers ‘n stages. About half a dozen of us were having a glass of wine together around 9pm when our chairs began to shake gently. We’d been talking about fast food, and although at first we suspected it was the Wrath of Carlini, we swiftly arrived at the conclusion we’d just experienced a mild earthquake (measuring 4.6, as it happens).

Oddly enough, I had been reading only on Sunday in my guidebook which told me that Parma’s duomo was

“erected on the present site by heretic bishop Cadalus, who later became antipope Honorius II, but was destroyed by the violent earthquake of 1117 that shook the whole Po valley and left only parts of the apses standing.”

We finished our glasses and headed into a breezy, almost chilly, evening and washed up at Sorelle Picchi, where I’d had my lunch, and this time ordered a big bowl of cappelletti in brodo, which were absolutely delicious.

While we were waiting for our food, we saw a man who’d stopped us on the street to ask if we’d felt the earthquake. He was in his seventies, I’d guess, and had his white table napkin draped around his neck: he and his wife, who hovered in the background, had been eating supper in their fourth floor apartment when they felt the vibrations and fled into the street, thinking Parma must be at the epicentre of some awful disaster, and were too afraid to go back inside. He paced up and down stopping everyone – passers-by, tourists, policemen – looking for some kind of reassurance. he disappeared eventually, but I saw him out on the street again this morning, still anxious but lacking his napkin.

Meanwhile I was spending some time today looking at YouTube videos and happened upon one for Unisg. It starts off well but then gets a little draggy with fuzzy tourist shots of Delhi and chops off suddenly at the end. But it was a delightful surprise:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBa_wQK9UfQ]

I’d visited Tribunale on Friday, though it has since closed for hols, and had a very tasty and interesting insalata rustica, made with warm cooked onions, slightly pickled, and pancetta.

Tammy and Sue came to visit on the weekend and we did our best to eat our way through the local offerings – what was left of them, as many places have already shut for summer holidays. We were enticed into Osteria del Gesso by fond memories, air conditioning (it was 38 degrees on Friday) and an “open” sign. Always good and often unusual food. Here’s my starter which was a salad of strips of something from the octopus family on a bed of farro (aka spelt or, I have read, more accurately emmer)

Next course for me was a nice bit of lamb with an apple marmelade. My companions had excellent tortelli di erbette – some of the best I’ve tasted.

Ombre Rosse has often served the uni crowd well; it seems to be open when all else is closed, and its 1,500 item wine list is entertaining reading. They have an unusual menu, from which I chose the quail salad with peaches and foie gras – an odd but pleasing combination:

Gatta Matta is always excellent, and we had some wonderful food there. I’ve become a huge fan of tepid octopus salads, and got to have a bit of that here

followed by some lovely steak

and some very boozy zabaglione – I think they’d emptied the Marsala bottle into it (and the effect was not unpleasant, though perhaps I didn’t need a delightful glass of passito on top) served with some excellent quaresimale (almond biscotti)

We finished our weekend with a second lunch at Sorelle Picchi, where my visitors made sure that the tortelli di zucca was in fact as delicious the second time as it had been the first (it was), and I had the triple-barrelled combination of tortelli – zucca, erbette and patate con funghi. All excellent. We washed it down with some inky cold frothy lambrusco. As you do.

How did it happen? A year flits by and all of a sudden it’s tearful farewells and no more pig farms, Unisg cheers, bus rides, charter airlines, wine tastings… how will we cope in the months to come?

The final week shaped up kind of like last week’s, commencing with an exam and then moving swiftly through food marketing, journalism and a great big party. We had lunch on a riverboat on the Po

(photo from Andy)

with Carlo Petrini and our university staff and dignitaries.

After the food we had a little wisdom from the brow of Petrini,

and then some goofy awards and another gem of a slideshow (so there WAS a reason for taking those – must be literally millions of frames – cameras everywhere we turned all year) by our animators Don and Marta.

Next stop was Polesine Parmense, where we revisited the scene of last winter’s visit when we learned about culatello di zibello.

(Photo from Andy)

We were attending the annual Spigaroli Awards (to local food heroes of various kinds) at the beautifully refurbished Antica Corte Pallavicina, which was about half finished on our last visit. It’s now ready to roll as a swanky agriturismo for visitors who want a short and scenic walk to their dinner at Al Cavallino Bianco.

But on Wednesday tables had been set up around the perimeter of the courtyard and the Spigaroli brothers, Massimo and Luciano, were busy seeing to the comfort of their hundreds of guests. The hay bale corral in the middle holds a flock of black piglets who made up part of the award, one for each recipient: the Spigarolis would raise, slaughter and cure them, so the prize – in good Slow Food form – would be years in the making. We had some wonderful culatello, of course, including two kinds made from white and black pigs, each culatello aged 36 months.

And a wonderful tortelli in brodo with some exquisite cheese filled pastas in a light and warming broth – bliss to be in the cooling air eating such things. Fortified, the guests then enjoyed the awards ceremony, which included a special prize for Carlo Petrini.

And then it was the last couple of classes – marketing and wine tasting from Matteo Baldi, journalism from Clodagh McKenna, the last lunch together,

the last bus home,

the last visit to Tabarro,

rounds of signings (our brand new copies of Slow Food Nation, serving as school autograph albums)

and some emotional farewells…

I managed to get myself to Bergamo last Friday on a trip of two trains. The first, from Parma to Milan was air conditioned (just) and equipped with curtains to keep out the worst of the heat on a day when the temperature was predicted to reach 41 celsius.

By the time we got to Milan it was, well, very warm out there, and I took my cue from the locals who were huddled in the coolish shelter of the underground passageway beneath the platform, swatting Milanese mosquitoes and waiting until the last moment to rush the trains as they arrived.

When one did, alas it was not air conditioned and you could choose either to pull down the shade or enjoy the hot rush of air from the opened windows, More cruel plastic seats. Fortunately the misery only lasted half an hour or so and then we were in Bergamo, and I fell gratefully into the hospitality of Nancy and Mike who met me at the station and escorted me to my hotel.

They would have helped me to my room as well but when the front desk clerk saw us heading for the elevators, she blanched and demanded to see their passports. I explained they were not staying, but helping me with my bags. After some further officious to-ing and fro-ing she said she simply could not allow three people to occupy a single room even temporarily, it was the law. Ah, Italian rules, How endless, peculiar and insane they are!

We then hopped on a bus and ascended to the citta alta: the prettiest, oldest and highest part of town, with excellent views and lots of wandering streets. We ambled through the pretty piazza with its Venetian fountain

and lions watching us from atop the colonnade of the public library, where Nancy writes on warm days looking out at the hills behind the city. We peered in at a couple of food shops and admired the local specialties on offer, and then sat ourselves down for a cooling beverage on the piazza. We supped at the Agnello d’Oro, including some casonsei, the Bergamo ravioli:

Saturday we ascended by funiculare, which was short but pleasant and had another amble through the warming streets before taking shelter in the church which houses the remarkable Tarsias by Lorenzo Lotto and Donizetti`s tomb with its weeping cherubs:

Then a second funiculare, way up to the top, where we tripped over a very fine lunch, lured in by the red water glasses and the stunning view.

Back down the mountain we went and found ourselves at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo where one of the featured artists was the very relevant Vanessa Beecroft, whose food diary, The Book of Food, was represented visually; she had somehow found the time to document everything she ate between 1983 and 1993. We also enjoyed a film whose name and author I forgot to write down, but which was a bit of visual poetry, white-garbed people creating fire on a disused airstrip in Essex, if memory serves.

Then back up the hill for some sups in a beautifully located but somewhat disappointing place, Antica Trattoria Colombina, recently given a thumbs-up by the Guardian which maybe spoiled it. Or maybe the chef was on hols. Or who knows. Anyway we enjoyed being out under the arbour of grapes and long beans…

Then it was Sunday and we managed a tour of Accademia Carrara, after which we were overcome by art, heat, sloth and hunger, and retired to casa Nancy e Mike where we lunched, napped, supped and slept. Before supper we had a reviving stroll in the cooling air and looked back at the citta alta in the sunset. The next morning I woke at 5.30 and began my journey back to Parma, which took till nearly 11 because of train problems. The problem, according the man sitting next to me and frowning into a fat book of train timetables, was that all the trains were late: the hot temperatures had deformed the rails. (Did it have anything to do with Sunday’s train strike? We will never know.)

I was thinking for a while there that the Parmigiani simply didn’t have sweat glands. Day after day we tender stranieri have been glowing fiercely morning and afternoon on the bus, while Italians of all ages dart here and there on bicycles, hatless, dry-skinned; on one shocking and typically overheated lunchtime we even witnessed one of the Italian students in a cardigan in the dining room. But yesterday’s trip home on the curtainless air conditionless bus, the afternoon sun slamming in through the big windows, we were all dripping and miserable. One might even think, on seeing passengers disembark, that we had all been afflicted by some mass incontinence. It is unbearable.

There, I feel much better, sitting at my steaming laptop, a wet towel draped over my shoulders.

We had a mixed week, a food culture/history exam, some branding, some sociology, but my personal highlight was a talk on the technologies of development, from Ugo Vallauri, who is ex-Slow Food and now works for Computer Aid in Nairobi, where he has been exploring means of development aid publicity using high and low technologies. He told us about the difficulties of using computers let alone internet in an environment where power supplies are patchy at best, and where internet access is prohibitively expensive even where it is available. The telephone and cabling infrastructure doesn’t exist, and so what access there is tends to use, like the much more influential medium of mobile phones, satellite technology.

Off to find some slightly cooler air in Bergamo now. As you’ll see, I’m crawling through back-filling my Spanish postings. Only a couple more days to go. Maybe I’ll finish next week.