EATING DANTE

PUGLIA
[i]Pugliese food, more than any other region in Italy, would probably be described as the most Italian. If it were possible to say such a thing. Pugliese food represents the essence of modern thought behind Italian food – take a single ingredient and try to capture it unique character, and bring it to the fore. You may eat the best meal of your life in Puglia.
Puglia’s most famous pasta is the sublime "orecchiette," the “little ear” shaped pasta often still made by hand and served with cime di rapa, bitter turnip tops tossed with anchovies. In fact, most of the pasta, including cavatelli, a flatter version of orecchiette, are served with vegetable-based sauces. Often, however, they are laced with a touch of something else, such as spiced lard, some stock, or even a meatball or two.
The pane, bread, of Puglia is legendary, and some of the best bakers in Roma and Milano are of Puglian descent. By far, the best pane is cooked in a wood fire. You may also come across taralli, which can be like tiny circular pretzels or as big as a doughnut. They can be crispy or just crusty, but they always have a hole in the middle.
World Food Italy, Lonely Plant Books, 2000

After dinner, I took the train back to Naples. Early the next morning, I checked out of my hotel, collected the car from its spot deep in the bowels of the hotel’s garage and got the hell out of Naples. I headed toward a town in Puglia called Foggia. There is not much to Foggia, but I did stop in a restaurant that was a self-service hot plate kind of place and had the most amazingly delicious lunch. I selected roasted red peppers that had been stuffed with breadcrumbs fried in olive oil and garlic, a ball of that amazing mozzarella bufala and a salad of tomatoes with basil, olive oil and pepper. What a light but really delicious lunch.

My knee is really starting to hurt from all this walking, so I didn’t explore Foggia much. Instead, I stashed the car in a secure parking lot and got on the train to head down to Bari on the Adriatic coast.

Bari is deep into what is known as Greek Italy. I read up on some history of this part of Italy on the train. It seems that Greek settlers colonized the at least part of Puglia during the centuries before Rome swallowed everyone else in the region. I had come to Italy expecting to find Roman ruins on every street corner but that simply isn't true. Although Roman power eventually extended all over peninsular Italy, its presence was often very lightly felt in some places. You can tell this in part from the absence of Roman names for the cities.

Puglia is one of Italy’s breadbaskets. It is a land with very rich soil and every inch of it is cultivated. Olive trees even grew in places on the sides of the railroad tracks, and every home seemed to have an olive tree and some grape vines in the back yard.

Being on the seacoast, Bari is famed for its seafood and the dinner I had there proved it. I ordered zuppa di pesce, expecting a replay of the dish I had eaten in Pescara but it was nothing of the sort. The entire dish, which was served in this huge platter, consisted of muscles and tiny clams that we would call cherrystones. The other ingredients were garlic chopped into very small pieces, fish stock, white wine, olive oil and parsley.

It was amazingly good and it had so few ingredients. It looked huge when they brought it that I said to the waiter, this is for one person (questa e per solo uno?). He laughed and said yes. Oh, I forgot the last ingredient, squares of bread that were brushed with extra virgin olive oil, then grilled and placed in the stock. It really wasn't that much to eat. Both the clams and the mussels were very tiny. For the main course I had grilled lamb chops that came with a wedge of lemon. It was amazing how the lemon changed the flavor.

I wandered back to the hotel and caught the train the next morning back to Foggia, then drove to Caserta, which is between Naples and Rome. My plan to drive to the tiny village of Colle Felice, which is where my mother's parents were from. It was raining pretty heavily and as I headed into the mountains the rain got heavier and the cloud cover got lower. About halfway there I was driving so slow the car was in third gear because visibility was so low and I was crawling. It was a non -starter so I turned off, had lunch in a little place and headed back.

The restaurant was very nicely done up, with fancy lighting and waiters in black vests and bow ties and a maitre d' dressed in a white tux. I thought oh boy, this is going to put a crimp in the budget. But the menu was very reasonably priced and the place was packed with local families out for Sunday lunch. I had only the pasta course, which was spaghetti tossed with crushed tomatoes, and olive oil, shrimp and cremini mushrooms and tiny slices of pancetta, Italian bacon. The dish was called spaghetti alla mare e monti, spaghetti from the sea and the mountain. This was only the second time a dish came with pieces of garlic in it. In most of the north of the county, the garlic is removed before dishes are served. As Mario Batalli always says, Italians like the flavor and smell of garlic in their food but they don't necessarily want to eat pieces of it. Well, seems they do in Campania. Tomorrow, I light out for Rome and turn in the car.
The next day, I awoke early, skipped breakfast and headed for Rome. My first stop was the Fiumincino Airport. Europcar had given me the choice of turning in the car at a city location or at the airport, some 30 miles from Rome proper. Thinking that that an airport would be far easier to find than a street address in the city, I chose the airport. Stupid. Really stupid.
The airport is not only far from Rome, it’s bloody difficult to find, given that it hosts international airline flights. There were no end of airplanes to be seen, wheels down, approaching the area where the field was purported to be located. In addition, cars streamed toward the place that signs, in Italian, of course, indicated an airport could be found. Coulda fooled me.
I got onto a ring road around the airport, and searched for the sign that would tell me where to turn in the car. And kept searching. Ring roads, as the name implies, go in circles. As did I. Endlessly. I could not find the car rental return area. I wound up driving clear off the airport grounds and onto a narrow road that ran through the bowels of an industrial area that looked like something out of a post nuclear holocaust movie. It was the first time in Italy that I saw a large collection of semi-trucks all in one place. That place was behind all those trucks on a very narrow, two-lane road. It was unusually straight and ran on for miles. When I finally got back to the highway, the only on ramp was heading in the wrong direction. I got on the road and turned around at the next off ramp. Then, I promptly got lost again and spent another half hour finding the highway again.
At that point I decided just to start all over again. I drove north until I found the exit for Fiumincino, then retraced my path. This time, I pulled over at a taxi stand and offered to pay the first driver I found who spoke English to lead me to the car rental return. He complied gladly. It was the best 10 Euros I spent on my trip.
Once at Eurocar, I had some paper work formalities to attend to. In a bout of hand-to-hand combat with a very narrow parking garage I had left a number of dings and scratches in the car. I had also knocked a strip of plastic off the passenger side door. That strip spent the rest of the trip in the car’s trunk. Now, I had to fess up to the rental clerk about the damage. In a rare burst of foresight, I had signed up for lots of extra insurance when I rented, and the damage caused nothing more than some temporary embarrassment.
My next trip was via train into downtown Rome. My hotel was supposedly right around the corner from Rome’s main train station. “Right around the corner” is a flexible concept when one is lugging four pieces of baggage. It actually took me only 10 minutes to find the hotel but it was raining and I was soaked thoroughly when I dragged myself through the hotel’s front door.
I had anticipated that the closer I got to Rome, the more expensive and skimpier the third-class hotel accommodations would be. Nothing I saw from the front lobby of the hotel led me to revise that idea. In fact, the place didn’t even have a real front lobby, just a street level entry foyer, and the elevator didn’t even come down to that level. Just to register, I had to drag my bags up two flights of stairs, cram them into what I had by now learned to anticipate would be a tiny elevator and go up two floors to the check-in desk.
There I was met by an urbane looking gentleman of indeterminate age who formally welcomed me to Rome and to the hotel and asked me for my passport. I fished it out of one of my bags and turned it over. He handed me the key and I struggled with my bags back to the shoebox of an elevator. Not once during my stay in Italy did any hotel staff offer to help me with my bags, and this character was no exception. The elevator stopped one floor below mine, so I had to drag the bags up another floor, unlock a door and go down a corridor to my room.
I anticipated that my room in a three-star hotel in Rome would be small, but this one was a new adventure in small. The bed was a narrow strip along one wall, the bathroom, tinier than most people’s closets, was across from it. Beneath a window between the two extremes was a small desk with a lamp and a copy of the Rome telephone directory and a bible. Nice touch.
Room was admittedly immaculate, but some “thoughtful” staffer had, of course, opened windows in the room and in the bathroom. So, I began my stay with my by now familiar mosquito hunting ritual. In perhaps the sole example of good pre-planning for the trip, I had packed some of my own towels, a useful precaution as it turned out, since Italian hotels stock towels the size of dishtowels in the U.S. I fetched one of mine and began slapping at mosquitoes lurking in corners near the ceilings in the room. That done, I took a quick shower, changed clothes, and headed out to explore some of Rome.
If one is a Roman Catholic, devout or otherwise, one’s first stop in Rome is going to be Vatican City. Why fight it, I thought. The hotel clerk turned out to be far more helpful with directions than he had with luggage. In response to my question about how to get to Vatican City on foot, he produced a map and drew in a route in red ink.
Thus armed, I walked down four flights of stairs – that damned elevator made me claustrophobic – made a right turn out of the hotel door and headed for the seat of Catholicism in the world. It was a longish walk and the day was warm, so I stopped a couple of times to buy drinks and once at a small bar to buy a snack. The bar served a variety of sandwiches, all of them toasted. The Italians seem to toast everything that can be placed between two slices of bread. In fact, one variety of isandwiches is called “toast.” It isn’t the sort of toast that those of us in most of the English-speaking world call toast, two slices of toasted, buttered bread. It is a small, thin sandwich made with wide, thin slices of bread. Fillings typically consist of a few slices of prosciutto, a bit of lettuce and some tomato. I never saw any food in Italy served with mayonnaise.
The bread is brushed lightly with olive oil and placed on a machine that toasts both sides at once, hence the name. Calling the sandwich “toast,” seems to be part of the mania in the Italian commercial world for assigning English names to things.
Another common sandwich type sold in bars was the “pannini,” which in fact is the Italian word for sandwich. Pannini were the closest things to what we in the U.S. call heroes, submarine sandwiches or grinders, depending on what part of the country we eat them in. The Italian version was much smaller, with far less filling than is common in our sandwiches of that type. My pannini that day held only three ingredients, prosciutto, thin slices of – what else? – Roma tomato, and a thin slice of creamy cheese that melted beautifully in the toasting machine.
The sandwich came in a little envelope of waxed paper, the better to keep my fingers clean as I ate it – nice touch that. I had an espresso with my sandwich and thought once again that the only culinary disappointment on my trip had been Italian coffee.
Not that there is anything wrong with espresso but it comes in a tiny serving that is – barely – a mouthful. The quality of espresso varied greatly from one region to another. Sometimes it was delicate and delicious. Other times it came across like a mouthful of caffeinated mud. And cappuchino was a stunt, a slightly larger mouthful that consisted mostly of air and milk foam. In grudging deference to American tourists, many Italian hotels and restaurants served something called “café Americano,” which tasted to me like nothing more than strong espresso brew diluted with hot water. Rarely was I ever served either cappuccino or espresso that was really hot. Long before the trip ended I yearned for a tall cup of Seven – 11 or Starbucks coffee served hot enough to generate a lawsuit.
Lunch having been disposed of, I walked the five blocks to the central bus station and took a bus to Vatican City. My first view of St. Peter’s was both awe inspiring and a bit disappointing. Television makes every place look bigger than it really is. St. Peter’s was no exception. Seeing it up close and recalling the many TV images of people crammed into it for Vatican special events I realized those people must have smelled each other even in the open air. St. Peter’s Basilica lies at the back of the Vatican piazza, an open area laid out in a sort of semi-circle. Behind it, the Basilica’s many statues of saints and Vatican dignitaries from the past makes an impressive back drop. There was only one entrance open into St. Peter’s and there was a long line of tourists waiting for their chance to view the inside. I hate waiting in lines, so I began circling around the area, looking to hookup with a guided tour.
Groups of people clustered around guides, many of whom sported microphones that broadcast their patter to the members of their groups. Stupidly, I had neglected to look into hooking up with a tour guide back at the hotel, so now I was reduced to trying to find a group just starting out. The guides identified themselves to their flocks by tying bits of colored cloth or ribbons to their umbrellas and holding them aloft. At times, the area was filled with people trailing along behind men and women holding aloft these decorated umbrellas.
It was possible, of course, for tourists to get into the Vatican through the public entrances without being part of a guided tour, but the lines of these unfortunates were enormously long. A few discrete questions revealed that the unofficial estimate of wait time on these lines was up to six hours, and as it was already past noon and the Vatican’s doors closed at 4 p.m., this seemed like a losing option.
I was hanging around somewhat despondently near a small café on a side street when I saw a youngish woman, umbrella on high with colored cloth waving from its tip, leading a group of people inside. Intrigued, I followed. Jennifer, as I learned she was named, was signing up people for a group tour of the Vatican. The café was sort of her central recruiting station. I had learned to doubt the ability of Italians to identify Americans on sight but I knew immediately that these people were from the U.S. I tagged along into the café just as Jennifer began her spiel. Her tour was three hours long and cost 25 Euros. As I had no other options, I ponied up my money and got a little brochure that described the tour.
Jennifer spoke fluent Italian but with such a pronounced American accent that even I could hear it. She collected our money while simultaneously addressing the guy behind the counter as “carrissimo,” and ordering an espresso. She might have an American accent, but she could schmooze in Italian with the best of them. Without missing a beat, she switched back to English, telling everyone to gather round while she did a quick head count of her chicks. A few of the tour group were quite elderly and Jennifer told them to speak up if she walked too fast for them. She pointed to the colored cloth on the tip of her umbrella and told us to look for it if we lost sight of her. I figured if she walked as fast as she talked, we were in for the full aerobic tour of the Vatican. As it turned out, she did.
After gulping her coffee, she ran down the rules. Talking in the Vatican should be done sotto voce and was disallowed completely in the Cistine Chapel. Similarly, photograps are also disallowed in the Cistine Chapel. This news produced a few protests, but Jennifer pointed out that it was a Vatican rule and not subject to dispute or negotiation. This bit of genius, she explained later, followed a decision by Vatican officials to accept a donation from the largest Japanese photo agency, the money to be spent on restoration. In return, the Japanese agency had been given exclusive rights to photos from the Cistine Chapel. Nice deal, if you’re an art piece in need of restoration but not so hot if you are a tourist in the Cistine Chapel for perhaps the first and last time in your life. That bit of wisdom imparted, Jennifer took off for an entrance to the Vatican reserved for tour guides, her ducklings hobbling along behind her.
We left the café, turned right then left, and walked the length of an enormous line of people awaiting entry through a public gate. We collecting a few venomous looks as we cruised past the line and entered the Vatican behind an American lady with an umbrella held over her head. Once inside, Jennifer gathered us around her and laid out the plan for touring the Vatican.
Since talking has been outlawed in the Cistine Chapel, Jennifer took us to a courtyard somewhere on the Vatican grounds and gave us a sort of pre-lecture on what we would see in the Chapel. The courtyard was crowded with other tourists and guides, all getting the same rundown in various languages, including one group hearing it in Japanese. I wondered how some of the terms translated into that language. The Japanese-speaking tourists were all listening to what she said with rapt attention, some nodding in agreement with some points their guide made, so they must have been getting something out of it.
Jennifer led us to a group of panels lined up against a wall. These were perfect representations of the Cistine Chapel ceiling. Using a pointer, she began to lead us through some of the information that Michaelangelo had put into his paintings nearly 500 years ago.
Michaelangelo, Jennifer informed us, painted the Cistine Chapel ceiling during two distinct periods in his life. The first he did as a young painter in his 30s; the second he produced in his mid-60s. The differences in technique and representation, she told us, could be seen in how he painted and the way Michaelangelo laid out his narrative.
For the benefit of those who’ve never seen the chapel ceiling, Michaelangelo painted on its surface the story of creation. The “panels” show a curious evolution, beginning as smaller and crammed more tightly together, and becoming larger and spaced more widely, a product our guide told of us of the artist trying to finish the job before the Pope of the time, Clement VI, got totally fed up with the time and expense the job was requiring.
Michaelangelo was a Tuscan, so he was a bit of an outsider at the court of the Vatican, and he had enemies who resented his talents, not to mention his having gotten the job, and who sniped at him constantly, criticizing his work and whispering poison about him in the Pope’s ear. But he got even in his artistic way by using the faces and bodies of some of his more strident opponents in his depiction of the condemned souls being cast into hell. One critic, a rather prominent thinker of his day, he portrayed in a panel as a donkey, complete with donkey ears and hooves, as God consigns him to the outer darkness. Once our history lesson was complete, Jennifer led her charges inside the Vatican itself.
We walked through a door and went down a long, rather narrow corridor, lined on both sides with gorgeous tapestries. The ceiling of this corridor was also painted with various biblical and religious themes, painted by artists less luminous than Michaelangelo, but still magnificently done. Photos were allowed here, but no flash attachments were permitted, apparently out of fear that thousands of flash exposure would cause the colors of the tapestries to fade.
The corridor led to a door, through which dignitaries awaiting a papal audience would pass. The overall effect was awe inspiring, as it was no doubt intended to be. The Pope, especially in the Middle Ages, when much of this art was produced, was truly a Prince of the Church, and protocol required that visitors pass through levels of increasing opulence until they arrived in the august presence. Or anyway that’s how Jennifer explained it.
She led us to another part of the Vatican, where were displayed the large collection of statuary dating back to Roman times. Our guide took great delight in explaining to use why the male statues were missing certain anatomical parts. Pope Pius the VIII apparently took exception to this “pagan” art that displayed women and especially men in their natural state, that is, nude. Incensed by the presence of all this marble genitalia in the Vatican, he ordered the men to be shorn of their parts, in the name of decency.
When we arrived in the Cistine Chapel, it was mobbed with tourists. Despite the ban on talking, their was a steady buzz of conversation that never died out entirely, despite the efforts of the Vatican guards who circulated among the crowd, intoning, “No talking, no photos.” A few people tried to sneak some shots of the Chapel ceiling or the altar. Caught by the guards, they were hustled out of the Chapel and their cameras confiscated.
I sat on the Chapel floor and gazed at the ceiling for nearly an hour. Every once in a while, when the guards were distracted, I used the zoom feature of my digital camera to get a close-up view.

LE MARCHE

Le Marche is the smallest of Italy’s regions being, according to one guidebook, only about the size of Rhode Island. It is a narrow strip of a city that reminded me of Virginia Beach in winter. Much like that city, Pesaro’s strip was largely empty, and there was certainly no shortage of available hotel rooms. The city had that deserted look that often comes over seaside resort town during the off-season. Many of the restaurants I passed during my stroll down the main drag from my hotel were closed and Pesaro turned out to be one of the few places in Italy I had a tough time tracking down a decent meal. It was also the first place where I saw dogs running loose and dog feces on the sidewalk. It was not an auspicious introduction.

I finally found a sandwich truck, ironically in the parking lot behind my hotel. I bought a pork sandwich, which was really delicious. I had not however, come to Italy to eat something I could have whipped up in my kitchen. I had a glass of wine at a neighborhood bar and went to bed early. The next day after a breakfast of hot rolls and cappuccino, I decided I had sampled what little Pesaro had to offer in winter. I checked out of the hotel and decided to head for the Abruzzo and another, more sizeable seaside town called Pescara.

THE ABRUZZI (Abruzzo and Molise)

I left Pesaro at first light the next morning and made for the Abruzzo. That headed me back into the mountains. I passed through numberless small towns. As I passed through one of these, the road narrowed, and I pulled into a service station to gas up and get some coffee. Heading into the little café attached to the gas station I passed a couple hunters coming out of it. They were tacked out in camouflage clothes with belts of shotgun ammunition around their waists. They headed toward a small pickup truck where a large dog sat quietly.

In the café was a selection of locals drinking coffee and eating brioche. One elderly man, already smoking a cigar, ordered an espresso. The guy behind the counter topped up the old guy’s coffee with a slug of Sambuca, the Roman anise liqueur. The guy saw me watching and winked at me. I got my cappuccino, without the topper, and headed out.

Driving out of town, I passed a lingerie store called “Sexy Shop,” a nationwide chain of women’s underwear stores, sort of like Victoria’s Secret. This place was in the middle of nowhere, but it had its own Sexy Shop. The name struck me very funny and I pictured the two hunters stopping off in there, browsing to pick up something for the wife. The image started me laughing so hard I had to pull the car over.

The name of the store highlighted something that I had noticed all over the country. English has a sort of cache in Italy, especially used in advertising. Once, in a pharmacy in Udine, I was half listening to a radio spiel for perfume. The announcer stopped in the middle of the ad and said “alluring woman,” in English, then switched back to Italian. Another time I was driving in my rental car listening to an ad for the radio station I had tuned into. In middle of a torrent of Italian the announcer said “One Station, One Nation.” There must be perfectly good Italian phrases for all of the above but Italian advertisers must feel that using English to say them adds something.

The amazing thing about the Abruzzo was how the mountains marched right down to the sea. My drive toward Pescara took me up a twisting highway. To my left were towering hills, sculpted by Italian farmers who were obviously hipped to the advantages of contour farming. To my right, towering rock walls sprang up right from the edge of the highway, often enough covered with fine wire mesh to prevent rock falls.

The other remarkable thing about this region was how empty it appeared. The emptiness of this mountainous region was broken only by a few towns perched at the tops of hills or nestled in the gaps between mountain ridges. Typically, the road I was on was the only one through the towns I passed and I couldn’t help but notice that every inch of soil near a town was under cultivation. There was no shoulder to the road so the farms came right up to the road, and it was in the Abruzzo that I first concluded that the national motto of Italy should be find dirt, plant something, eat it.

In early afternoon, I pulled into the city of L’Aquila, which translates to the eagle. I parked the car and headed off to see the sights. There was some sort of street fair going on and a number of streets had been blocked off and given over to street vendors, who were selling everything they could think of. There were clothes vendors, a guy selling luggage, multiple vendors of jewelry and plenty of people peddling foods. I passed a trailer selling pastries and I was immediately intrigued by one cookie for sale called “van dei morti,” dead man’s bones. They were anise cookies that are twice baked to make them extra crispy. I tasted one, and it was delicious so I ordered some. There seemed to have been some kind of miscommunication because I ended up with a pound of the things.

I wondered where the name dead man’s bones could have come from. What the hell could be the connection between a corpse devoid of flesh and a cookie? According to one book I consulted on the subject, the name came from Roman times, commemorating a devastating Roman defeat at the hands of Hannibal. The battle took place around what is now called Lake Trasimeno. Tens of thousands of Roman Legionaires died there. Exactly why a cookie should commemorate them is something that will probably never be known.

After eating four of them, I hadn’t even made a dent in the bag. I put it on the seat next to me and in early afternoon I headed out of L’Aquila almost due east toward Pescara. The ground rose steadily as I headed into the part of the Abruzzo that contains Italy’s largest national park, and a huge dome of rock called the Gran Sasso d’Italia, the huge rock of Italy. The Abruzzo is perhaps the wildest part of Italy and the Gran Sasso is the wildest part of the Abruzzo. The area teams with wild game such as boar and various members of the deer family. It’s a favorite hunting spot for Italians from all over the country. One result of this inheritance is that the Abruzzo’s cuisine teems with game dishes.

The day was calm, almost totally without wind and the Adriatic was flat, glassy and the most incredible blue. I had to stop and admire the view so I left the highway and drove to the top of one of these nameless hills, parked the car and got out to look at the view.

Far below me, a tiny ship beat its way slowly across the face of the sea, leaving behind a tiny barely discernible wake. Across the water lay Eastern Europe. That was for another trip.

Pizza and palm trees make an odd combination but palm trees lined the streets of Pescara and pizzerias were certainly in no short supply. This city is one of the places Italians themselves go to when they want a cheap seaside getaway. Make that relatively cheap. The scenery leading into the city was spectacular. The highway descended steeply toward the Adriatic. Fingers of mountain marched directly toward the sea and ended in spectacular cliffs. Here and there cities perched atop the hills, sometimes spreading partway down their sides.

Pescara is another of those long, skinny cities that lay along the Adriatic. It reminded me of Virginia Beach, down to the two main drags that ran arrow straight from one end of the town to the other, lined on the seaward side with tall palm trees. Like many a seaside resort, the beach was lined with shops and the Italian equivalents of fast food restaurants, mostly pizzerias and places that advertised fried fish and similar attractions. On this first day of November most of these places were closed. The summer season was over but it was too early for winter visitors to have arrived in force.

Pescara was one of the few places in Italy that I visited where Italians from elsewhere in Italy seemed to out number tourists. My hotel was filled with Italians and their children, obviously taking advantage of Pescara’s attractions to have a cheap vacation. After dropping off my stuff at the hotel, I went out to explore the town in the warm early afternoon sun.

Within four or five blocks of the downtown, which was dominated by high-rise hotels, the surroundings became more residential, with small homes and apartment buildings, groceries and green grocers. Back to the tourist area, I cruised the main shopping area and admired the high-end shops the fashionable Italians strolling in and out of them. I was hungry, so I popped into a small restaurant and had a snack, a type of lettuce called radicchio stuffed with a bread crumb and mushroom combination, then brushed on the outside with olive oil and grilled over a wood fire. It was just enough for a snack and unbelievably delicious, given the small number of ingredients.

Back at the oceanfront, I sat on a bench and watched a group of Italian college kids toss a frisbee around. There was a large central square one block away from the oceanfront. I wandered around it looking at the magazines and newspapers on display at the newsvendors. Italians, like most Europeans, read newspapers in far greater numbers that do most Americans. The newspapers from the country’s major cities, Rome, Milan, Venice, etc. circulate nationally and are widely read. This day, the newspapers were full of America’s presidential election. Even with my limited Italian it was pretty clear that most of the stories seemed to be pretty uncomplimentary to Mr. Bush. Our European “allies” seemed not to appreciate our president’s muscular approach to foreign policy.

I was also startled by the sexual frankness of so many of the magazines I saw for sale at the kiosks. I’m not sure why I was so surprised, since watching Italian satellite TV at hotels where I stayed around the country should have clued me in to the fact that Italians are less, well, inhibited, about matters sexual.

One of the first things I noticed was that Pescara’s many attractions didn’t include distinguished architecture. In a land where duomos and magnificent basilicas dot the landscape with astonishing frequency, Pescara lacked them entirely or anything else that would cause a visitor to stand transfixed with awe. The most remarkable thing about the city was its natural surroundings, the blue Adriatic on one side and Appenine bluffs on the other side.

The other thing remarkable about Pescara was the food. Italians are generally seafood mad and in this city, perched alongside the Adriatic, seafood was raised to an art form. Nevertheless the rather large number of semi-clad babes on the covers of magazines displayed prominently came as something of a shock.

Late in the afternoon, I wanted something more substantial to eat, so I set out to find an outdoor restaurant. I stopped at one, really it was just a small pizzeria, or so it seemed. Picture my surprise when I had one my most memorable meals at this little, unimpressive looking place.

A waiter spotted me reading the menu posted outside the restaurant and came over to try to wheedle me into sitting down. He addressed me in Italian, something of a relief even if I didn’t understand all he said. At least he wasn’t speaking to me in German. I was too embarrassed to walk away while he was wheedling me into buying a meal there, so I allowed myself to be led to a table. He handed me a menu, placed a basket of fresh bread on the table and retreated to a discreet distance.

The menu wasn’t very extensive but one item caught my eye, a fish soup, called zuppa di pesche in Italian. Fish soup on Adriatic coast seemed like it might make for an interesting meal, so that’s what I ordered. The waiter complimented me on my choice, this time in English, so I guess I was giving off subtle clues as to my country of origin.

It took about 20 minutes for the dish to arrive. When it finally did, it was worth every minute of the wait. The soup came in a two-handled tureen that had obviously come straight out of the oven. It radiated heat. It was a peculiar thing, but few dishes I ate in Italy were served piping hot. Lukewarm was the rule except for soups, which by contrast often came boiling hot. The zuppa di pesche was no exception. It was far too hot to eat right away, so I took a slice of bread, dipped a corner in the broth and took a bite. The result was ecstasy.

The soup came with four squares of toast standing upright in the soup. They’d been brushed with olive oil, grilled and then stuck in the soup. I ate them first and practically fainted they were so delicious. By then the soup had cooled enough to start eating it.

Sticking a spoon in the soup was like starting an archeological dig – uncovering layers. The chef had started off with fish broth, then layered in small shrimp, crayfish, something called a frog fish, the exact nature of which I thought was better left unexplored, sea bas, sardines, and prawns. The last items to be added to the soup were mussels and clams, which cooked the fastest.

In typical Italian style, the fish were whole, heads and all, in the soup. Since the chef had prepared the soup in layers, I ate it that way. I finished off the clams and muscles, and then started in on the crayfish and shrimp. After them, I ate the finfish. The sardines had an entirely different taste and feel than do the ones that come packed in oil in cans. These were full-sized fish, and cooked perfectly. Even the bones were soft enough to eat. Italians believe that cooking a fish whole, bones and all, adds an element of flavor to the soup. Who was I to argue?

When I got to the bottom of the soup, I had another of those face-in-the-bowl moments. I contented myself with sopping up the dregs with some bread. Broth, finfish, shellfish, a few herbs and spices; that was the whole show. It was almost like witchcraft, the way Italians could take a few simple ingredients and churn out something so heavenly.

And zuppa di pesche isn’t exactly Italian haute cuisine. A few days later I read in one of my guidebooks a discussion of living in Italy and learning to cook Italian style. The author commented snidely on zuppa di pesche as something that every Italian cook had in his or her bag of tricks. Well if that was true, I decided Italy might just have a houseguest for life.

I left Pescara early in the morning on Tuesday and headed south. Driving through the Apennines, the spectacle was amazing. It's easy to forget just how mountainous a country Italy is. This was so-called “peninsular Italy, perhaps the most mountainous section of the country, except for the far north.

The highway, very sensibly, followed the contours of valleys between the mountains, and as I looked from side to side I saw towns on the crowns of hills and flowing down their flanks. A hell of a lot of this part of Italy is simply empty, consisting of mountains and smaller hills covered with what looks like scrub pine. As I approached a town, I would find tilled fields carved out of the hillsides, some still growing winter vegetables and row after row of vines. Abruzzo isn’t much known for wine, so these may have been table grapes.

The weather had finally turned decent, and I drove through mountains that were for the first time unobscured by mist and clouds. On the road around me, the produce of this region was streaming towards the cities of the south on articulated trucks packed with artichokes and one truck towing two trailers packed with fennel.
 
As I got further south I noticed an ominous change. The highway began to be littered with trash, the first time I had seen this in Italy. Ahead of me the tops of the mountains were again obscured, but this time by a muddy brown haze that could only have been pollution.
 
When I got past Rome, I headed onto a feeder road into Casserta, the regional capital of this part of Campagnia. My father's parents came to America from this region in the late 1890s, from a little town called Afragola. I passed the exit for it on the A1 but didn't turn off. I had planned to explore that a little later, although a friend from Italy had told me before I left on the trip that the area had been largely destroyed during fighting between the Allies and German forces during WWII. Nothing was now left of the old farming town, he had told me.

As I drove into Casserta looking for a hotel, my heart sank. The city was dirty, littered with trash. And the drivers were living up to the reputation of drivers in the south of the country, that is, crazy. People passed on the right and changed lanes without signaling, went through red lights and gave no quarter to pedestrians, all completely the opposite of how drivers behaved in northern Italy. I so disliked the look and feel of Casserta that I drove back out of town and back onto the Autostrada headed into Naples. For the first time in this country, my spirits were low.
 
I took one of the northern most exits for Naples and immediately regretted it. The streets were twisting, hilly and incredibly congested. People double and triple parked and their appeared nowhere to park or even pull over. Delivery trucks seemed simply to stop wherever they were and unloaded their wares, regardless of traffic, whose drivers leaned on their horns, shook their fists and shouted curses. I spent half an hour circling aimlessly, not seeing even one hotel much less a place to park, so I managed finally to find my way back to the Autostrada and went further south, to an area near the city center.
 
As I drove into Naples proper, I remembered my mother's complaints when she toured Italy in the early 1970s. She had commented bitterly about how dirty everything was. I recall being amused at the time, imagining her driving around the country saying "Why don't they clean this place up?" By the time I got to the area around the central train station, I was muttering the same thing.
 
Naples' streets are incredibly dirty, filled not only with litter but also with actual garbage. The streets of the other places I had been in the country were nearly immaculate by comparison. Garbage bins on the streets were filled to overflowing and then garbage was simply piled around them. Dogs roamed the streets freely and for the first time I saw piles of dog excrement on sidewalks.

 I found a relatively nice hotel for a good price and checked in. It was right around the corner from the train station. The people who worked there didn't seem to have any sense of service. There was no place in front of the hotel to park and I didn't want to horse my luggage from the garage, about 300 meters away. Oh, no, they told me, you can't park outside. Just long enough to unload my luggage? I asked. They shrugged. Their attitude seemed to be “on your head be it.” No one offered to help me carry my bags. All four of them just stayed behind the desk arguing about something on the computer.
 
After unloading my bags, I drove around and around trying to find the garage where the hotel had reserved spaces. I went back to the hotel twice to get directions again but to no avail. Finally, one clerk said drive around the back of the building and it is right there. And so it was. What the little jerk didn't tell me was that it was back off the street down an alley and it wasn't marked by a sign. I parked the car, paid the fee and walked back to the hotel in a real pissy mood.
 
The hotel itself was really nice, the nicest expect for the one I had stayed at in Udine. After dropping off my luggage, I set out to the train station and took a local train to another town up the line called Benevento. To my disappointment, it was every bit as dirty and chaotic as Naples. I wandered around the old section of the city. I passed an archaeological dig beside a medieval church. The area was fenced off but it was still covered in garbage. At another dig site, this one fenced and roofed, all kinds of garbage had been thrown onto the roof surface, including I saw an entire chicken. I was totally at a loss to explain this level of slovenliness.

The odd thing is that this mess extended only to public spaces as far as I could see. Strolling past restaurants, bars, cafes and shops, I could see that their interiors were immaculate. So why were public areas so neglected?
 
The Benevento drivers were every bit as crazy as their counterparts were in Naples. Crossing the street was akin to forcing the landings at Normandy and the motorcycle drivers were kamikaze-like in their weaving in and out of traffic. I was really surprised at this because in the rest of Italy, pedestrians rule. I recall almost having to get of the car and bribe pedestrians to get out of my way. Here, it was totally different. Disgusted, I caught the train back to Naples and stopped at a restaurant for dinner. This at least was up to expectations.
 
My first course was mozzarella bufala, a variety of the cheese made with milk from water buffalo, the Campagna's gift to the rest of Italy. It came, two perfect round balls of cheese, on a bed of lettuce of some kind I didn't recognize. The cheese has a sort of gummy outer shell, with soft cheese underneath. When I cut into it, fresh milk oozed out. Supposedly, connoisseurs can detect the scent and taste of the special grasses on which the water buffalo feed. Okay. Bufala, as the Italians call it, is not exported from Italy. Supposedly it is best eaten with eight hours or so of production, so it doesn't travel well.
 
My second course was a fettuccine made with a sauce of olive oil, crabmeat and whole tomatoes. The pasta was cooked just right and the sauce was delicious, with just a hint of pepperoncini, the red-hot chilis that Italians in the south love to put in their food. I don’t especially like food spiced that much but this was delicious nonetheless.

On my way back to the hotel, wading through the litter, I passed a bunch of people selling clothing, watches, shoes and everything else. Trashcans around the area were filled to overflowing. On the sidewalk, beside a trash can, sat a Burger King sandwich, half-eaten. I could understand the impulse but why the hell couldn’t the person have put it into the garbage can? I spotted a large flashing sign that said Benvenuto a Napoli. I thought it should be changed to "Welcome to Third World Italy."
 
Satisfied with the culinary part of the tour of Naples, I went back to the hotel, watched some BBC blather about the American elections and then went to bed. The next morning, I caught a train to Florence. The city lies on the Arno river, which bisects the city almost perfectly in half. There are multiple bridges over the river including one, The Ponte Vecchio, the old bridge, that is really quite stunning. Emerging from the train station, I was relieved to see that Florence was clean and orderly. People observed traffic lights and yielded to pedestrians, just like normal humans.
 
I walked around the entire walled part of the city, going in and out through the streets to get to things I wanted to see. I went to the Duomo and then to the Ufficio, really a huge museum dedicated to the greats of Florence's past. I tried to get into the main church here, the church of Santa Maria de Novella but they charge nine Euros per hour and a sign forbade picture taking. So I contented myself with walking around the city.

After about three hours of this my knee was aching so I stopped in a bar and had a coffee and read a little, and wrote notes on the photos I had taken. A local man came in, obviously a few sheets to the wind already, ordered a glass of wine and began lecturing the proprietors about the American elections. Even without much Italian, it was clear this guy didn't admire President Bush. Apparently he spotted me reading a book with an English title, so he came over, sat down, and started lecturing me. I did understand some of what he was saying, about Bush and war and bombing but I didn't want to let on because I figured I never get rid of this clown. He asked me, where you from. America, I said, my heart sinking. So he started in on me about Bush. There was nothing hostile or threatening about him, just annoying. I have a hard enough time communicating with sober Italians, how am I supposed to talk to one who's drunk? Finally, I told the guy, I'm just a tourist; I don't know the president. This started people in the bar laughing. Then he told me, Bush, Kerry, no difference, right? Clinton, now, he was a good guy. Then he made a pumping motion with his arms and "trombone, trombone," this apparently b being an Italian slang for sex. Everyone in the bar was really laughing now and one guy behind the counter made a crack about Italian Prime Minister Sylvio Berlusconi, who is apparently no slouch in the tromboning department. At that point, I decided to leave them laughing and headed out to find dinner. I had read so much about steak Florentine that I had to try it, even though the cost of the meal broke the 25-Euro rule I had made at the start of my trip that no single meal should cost more than that amount.

Steak Florentine starts out as what we would call a T-bone steak, dressed in olive oil, salt and pepper, and then grilled over a charcoal fire. It is really a large piece of meat, probably a pound or even a little more, far larger than anything I would buy and prepare for myself. It came with flakes of Parmesan cheese sprinkled over it. Traditionally, it is served blood rare but I asked for it ben cotte. Supposedly that means well done, although the Italians idea of well done and mine don’t jibe. The steak actually came medium rare, which is how I would have cooked it for myself, so there was no harm done, although the waiter rolled his eyes at my American stupidity for not wanting it rare. As seemed to be traditional with Italian restaurant meals, the steak came to the table lukewarm. Despite that, it was utterly delicious, so tender that I literally cut it with my fork. The steaks come from a breed of cattle called Chianina, which are raised along a Tuscan river of the same name.

I arrived at Assisi at around 10 am. This town is tourist central, and it was mobbed already. I couldn’t find a place to park closer than a mile away, and it cost me five Euros. Then I had to take a bus to the base of he hill atop of which lies the town.

I had done a tremendous amount of walking on this trip and my knees, particularly my left one, had been aching, so much so that at times I found it difficult to sleep. So, when I got to the base of the hill, I knew I was not going to walk up to the top. As no cars were allowed up there, it was walk, or take a cab. There was no shortage of those, so I flagged one and rode to the top of Assisi.

The city is of course the spiritual and temporal home of the Franciscan order, both sisters and priests. St. Francis of Assisi was one of the more peculiar Roman Catholic saints. He lived around the 12th Century, the privileged son of a wealthy father. At some point in his early 20s, he decided to chuck all that and become a mendicant priest, one who wandered the countryside, preaching and living off handouts. He preached the virtues of poverty, trying to convince other priests and the church hierarchy that the Church was too wealthy and worldly, and should renounce earthly possessions and power.

Needless to say, that was something of a hard sell, and while Francis won the hearts of the poor, his church superiors were less than receptive to his message of hair shirts and short meals. He nevertheless founded an order of priests, brothers and sisters who were sent into the world for centuries following. The popular image of St. Francis, promoted by countless Mass cards and other religious images, is a saintly sort of person who wandered off into the woods and talked to the birds. I recall clearly from childhood an image of St. Francis in a forest glade, holding forth to animals that surrounded him and appeared to be listening with rapt attention. Even to my child’s mind, that sounded odd, since I thought only crazy people talked to animals.

The taxi dropped me off at the top of the hill and I stated exploring. Franciscan sister and priests were everywhere. I stopped into the Basilica of St. Francis hoping to get pictures of the magnificent art above its multiple altars. At the moment, though, a priest was celebrating mass and I feared that taking pictures right then might have gotten me arrested. Further into the town, the Church of St. Francis – yes, everything in the town is named after the saint – was open and empty. On the outside, the church appeared huge,
people. The church’s altar art was nevertheless magnificent, and the three altars looked magnificent. The main altar had an incredible stained glass window behind it, showing religious themes in mosaic. The colors were brilliant.

Assisi is headquarters for the Franciscan order, and there were priests, brothers and sisters everywhere on the streets. The majority wore the traditional Franciscan habit, the brown hooded overrode belted around the middle with a white, knotted cord. In a few cases, I spotted less traditional garb such as the cuffs of blue jeans peaking out from the bottom of the habit and cross trainers on feet.

At the bottom of the hill were lines of tourists buying religious trinkets from sellers’ portable shops. It was kind of jarring, seeing that commercialism exploiting the religious faith of people but it was everywhere in Italy, even at St. Peter’s in Rome.

At the far end of the line of trinket sellers was a snack stand. I wandered over there thinking to get a bottle of water. There was no one behind the counter, so I sat down and looked over the menu, which included hot dogs. I was intrigued. What would an Italian hot dog taste like? When the counter guy came back, I ordered one. It was quite a bit larger than the typical American dog, fatter and longer. The hot dog tasted a lot like bologna, the cold cut named after the city of the same name. I asked the counter man about it. He spoke pretty fluent English and explained that hot dogs in Italy weren’t made from scraps such as pork snouts, lips and cheeks like they are in the States, “that’s why they tasted so much better than American hotdogs.” And they’re better for you, he added.

I couldn‘t dispute that last part, but I didn’t agree that it tasted better. As I said, it tasted a lot like bologna, not a particularly good taste when served hot.

I caught a bus back to my car and drove back to Trevi. I got to bed early. The next day I was set to head to the Adriatic, to a small seacoast city called Pesaro.

After my meal, I went back to the hotel and went to bed early. The next day, I was set to retrace my steps back toward the Adriatic coast, to a small town called Ravenna in the region called Emilia-Romagna, another Italian region that extends right across the width of the peninsula. It extends from the Adriatic Coast to Turin on the French border. Included in its swath are some of the most prosperous parts of Italy. From East to West, Emilia-Romagna includes the provinces of Bologna, ground zero for Italian cuisine, Modena, home of balsamic vinegar and Parma, source of Parmesan cheese and Prosciutto di Parma.

These are perhaps the wealthiest parts of Italy. That wealth in times past was measured sometimes in casks of balsamic vinegar or in wheels of Parmesan cheese. Even today there are occasional articles in Italian newspapers about thefts of casks of vinegar from Modena or wheels of cheese from Parma, with values always estimated in the millions of Euros.

The name Emilia-Romagna is some backassed compilation from the Julian family of Caesar Augustus fame and from Rome because of the importance of the Republic not the city in the area’s history.

I arrived at the Adriatic end of the region, a small town called Ravenna, early in the afternoon. Ravenna is about an hour’s drive west of Bologna, the region’s main city. Ravenna got its start thanks to Caesar Augustus, when he decided to colonize the area with Roman citizens around the First Century A.D. This is Italy’s most prosperous region, judging at least by average per capita income, and most of the country’s economic powerhouses both industrial and agricultural have branches in Emilia-Romagna.

Ravenna gets the best of both worlds, fresh seafood from the ocean, only a few miles away, and the abundant produce of rich farmlands that extend in a broad swath from there all the way past Parma to the west. So the area gets to eat the best that Italy produces. Prosciutto di Parma originates about 100 kilometers from here. Balsamic vinegar comes from Modena, around 70 kilometers away.

Early this morning I headed out of Belluno, got on the autostrada heading toward Venice. The weather has been the one continuing disappointment of this trip. It has been damp, cool and overcast. As I passed over a giant highway bridge over a river, the mist lifted enough for me to see the mountains in front of me. It was really startling, and the desire to look was overcome only by my fear of driving off the bridge. There was no place to pull over, so I just kept driving.

Once past the foothills of the Dolomites, the land flattened out rapidly. South of Venice, it becomes one long plain, with rivers on one side and tidal flats on the other. I passed rice fields – this is one of Italy’s premiere rice growing areas – producing the trademark Arborio rice that is the preferred ingredient in risotto. Everything was fallow, except for winter vegetables. The Autostrada was closed south of Venice because of repairs, so I was forced off the highway onto a secondary road to get to Ravenna. It was a long, slow haul behind lines of long-distance trucks. Italian truckers are far more law abiding than their American cousins and they held rigidly to the posted speed limit on the road. But the detour did give me the opportunity to see the countryside up close. Seemingly every house I passed had its garden with winter vegetables growing in neat, geometric rows. Cabbages alternated with chard and a few straggling tomato plants still bearing fruit. Lines of lettuce of a type that is called I think rucola (rocket in English) alternated with chives and lots and lots of radicchio. These are the veggies that end up on Emilia-Romagna dinner tables after the abundance of summer has died out.

Ravenna’s one enduring claim to fame is the fact that the English poet Lord Byron lived there for a while, before drowning in a local river, I forget which one. There was a plaque dedicated to his memory on a public building close to the hotel where I stayed.

The hotel was located in the restored central area of the city, and it was only a few steps outside the hotel to the Piazza St. Francis, which was the political center of the town and the surrounding area during the Middle Ages. For a pretty small and out of the way place, Ravenna boasts some very famous sons, so to speak. In addition to Lord Byron, Dante Alligheri lived there while he wrote “The Inferno.” He also died there and his tomb is in the city. I visited his tomb. He must have been a physical if not a literary shrimp because his sarcophagus is really small. I took a picture of it, much to the annoyance of a couple of other tourists. They were talking in whispers like it was some sort of church. Their solemnity gave me a bad case of the giggles and I had to get out of there.

Dante was born in Florence but had to leave there after his political party – either the Guelphs or the Ghibbelines, I can’t remember which – lost out in political intrigues and he had to flee in the dead of night. He came to Ravenna and produced his literary masterpiece. Whether by design or accident, the modern version of the Florentine dialect spoken by Dante and his contemporaries became the official Italian that is taught in schools and used in official documents.

Many Italians still speak the various dialects of their native regions but everyone learns the “official” language in school. But the dialect pronunciations still bleed into everyday speech. In Ravenna, for example, I heard people saying “yes,” “si,” in Italian, but pronouncing it with a kind of shh sound, like “shi.” I asked an English speaker at my hotel about this and she explained that it was the local dialect.

Emilia-Romagna is also host to a group of people thought to be descendants of the earliest settlers, people who migrated to the region some 2,500 to 3,000 years ago. These people speak a dialect or perhaps it should be a language called “Ladin,” which is entirely unlike modern Italian. There are only two other places in Italy where Ladin is still spoken, around the city of Udine in Lombardy and in a few places in the far north of Italy, in a section called Alto Adige.

After walking around the city, I settled on a local restaurant whose name was in the Ladin dialect. Unfortunately, no one at the restaurant could translate it for me. I had sliced steak, grilled rare, then doused with olive oil and covered with shaved grana padana cheese. The “grana” is a reference to the grainy consistency of the cheese, which along with its sharp taste is reminiscent of Parmesan. It set off the meat perfectly and complimented the slightly peppery flavor of the rucola. The dish came with roasted potatoes and a small grill-roasted tomato stuffed with toasted breadcrumbs.

The meal was another example of the “simplicity” of Italian cooking. Few of the dishes I had during my month in the country contained more than four or five ingredients. Simple does not mean easy, it means balanced, with no ingredient overwhelming or drowning out any other ingredient. Garlic in dishes was always just a hint, to compliment the other flavors. Sauces – "condimenti," in Italian – were always added in just the right amounts. They coated the pasta perfectly. When the dish was done, one sweep of the bottom of the plate with a piece of bread was enough to finish off the sauce. Pasta was always al dente, literally “to the tooth,” or chewy,

For dessert, I had a small collection of cheeses. Two were so-called blue cheeses; one I was sure was Gorgonzola, since it smelled like an unwashed foot. The others were some creamy French concoctions, a local cheese made with hops left over from beer brewing, and grana padana, which came with a fruit marmalade; really delicious.

The next day, I caught the train for Parma and Modena. The day after that I was going to Bologna.

In Parma, I finally found a restaurant that served cavallo, horse. Butchers in Italy are often called "Norcieras," because it was in the Umbrian town of Norcia, that butchery developed in Italy. But butcher shops were also identified by the kind of meats they served up. A standard butcher shop, called a "macelleria," sells things like chicken, beef and pork as well as “specialty meats,” such as organs like pancreas, kidneys and brains. Butcher shops that carried horsemeat were called "carneteria," and it was one of these that I had been looking for ever since I had gotten to Italy. In Parma, I stumbled across a tiny carneteria on a narrow side street in the old section of the city. I walked in and asked if either of the butchers spoke English. No such luck. I tried to explain that I wanted to find a restaurant in the area that served horsemeat. Miraculously, I got my message across. The older of the two butchers came out from behind the counter and led me outside the shop. Placing both hands on my shoulders he turned me to the right and told me how to get to a restaurant that he thought served the stuff. As he spoke he gestured to make sure I got the point. “Uno, due, tre, quarto,” he counted, touching a finger for each of the streets I had to pass before making a left and walking to the end of that street to find the restaurant. Then he repeated the whole thing again just to make sure the idiot American with the strange fixation on horsemeat found a place to eat it.

When I got to the restaurant, however, it turned out that horsemeat wasn’t actually on the menu. The proprietor seemed mystified at the idea that it should be. In English, she told me the restaurant had never served horsemeat and she didn’t know of anyplace that did. Disappointed and still hungry, I headed back out to the main drag, and wandered around central Parma for the next couple of hours. The city’s restored old section sported lots of high-end shops, and the general prosperity of Parma was evident in everything from the prices in the restaurants to the well-heeled look of the people I passed on the streets.

Parma is one of the wealthiest areas of Italy. Parmesan cheese, perhaps the most famous product of this area, is so valuable, that the newspapers occasionally report thefts of the great wheels of Parmesan. In the past, according to one book, banks would hold tons of the cheese in their vaults, as collateral for loans to cheese makers. According to the same book, Parma and its environs was also one of the strongholds of the Italian Communist Party. During World War II, the area around Parma was a stronghold of resistance by Italian partisans. More than 60 years later, there is of course no sign of this. The land around Parma is flat, fertile and intensively cultivated.

I finally found my horsemeat entirely by accident. Wandering along a street in the shopping district, I stopped to examine the menu of a small bistro and there it was – cavallo. I sat at a table and a waitress came and asked for my order. I pointed to the horsemeat item on the menu – pesto di cavallo. Hey, I thought, I know from pesto! She nodded and asked if I wanted the vegetable side dish "cotto o crudo," cooked or raw?

Cooked, I said. I sat at a table outside and waited for my lunch. A few minutes later, the owner came by and plopped a basket of bread in front of me. I asked for butter but he shook his head and said gruffly “no, olio de olivo,” olive oil, slammed down a bottle of extra virgin olive oil and walked away. Gee, sorry, I didn’t mean to offend anyone, I just wanted to put butter on my bread. That was the first time I had encountered that kind of rudeness over a simple request in a restaurant. I chalked it up to the guy having had a bad day and waited for my lunch, passing the time by people watching.

It was pretty clear that Parma was prosperous, simply by looking at the dress of the people strolling by my table. The women, even those dressed “casually” were elegant looking. Jeans were anything but casual looking, no torn or pre-faded slacks for these folks. There were lots of youngish women pushing baby carriages, often accompanied by their husbands, even though it was early afternoon.

Along both sides of the street were high-end shops selling jewelry, art, clothes with labels like Gucci and Versace – Italy, after all, is the homeport for those labels. The most fascinating places for me, though, were the food shops, especially the delicatessens. These were replete with hams, salamis and other cured and dried meats handing from the ceilings. In one shop right across the street from the restaurant, a huge wheel of Parmesan cheese sat in the window.

My lunch came after about 20 minutes. Imagine my surprise when the vegetables turned out indeed to be cotto and the horsemeat was not. It turned out that the pesto portion of the dish’s name referred to the finely minced state of the horsemeat, not to a condiment consisting of olive oil, garlic, basil leaves and Parmesan cheese ground into a paste. Silly me.

Having ordered the horsemeat, I really felt I had no choice but to eat it. I smothered the meat with salt and pepper and took a tentative forkful. It had a firm consistency, at least as firm as a meat paste could be. It tasted somewhat like beef only a little sweeter. It really wasn’t bad after I got past the fact that it was raw. The mixed vegetables were still crisp and had been dressed with a splash of vinegar. It was certainly the most unusual lunch I had while in Italy.

I spent the rest of the day wandering the town, taking in the sights and sounds of prosperity and looking for an Internet café where I could send an email home.

Early the next morning, I packed up, checked out of my hotel and headed south and east toward Bologna. Bologna is historically the epicenter of Italian cuisine. The most famous chefs and chef schools come from its environs.

I got to Bologna in mid-afternoon, parked the car and decided to walk around the old walled part of the city. An extensive series of ring roads surrounds the city, with 11 porti or gates. I walked down the Viale Giovanni Vicini, down the Viale Carlo Pepoli, and along the Viale Antonio Aldini. By this time, my left knee was complaining bitterly, so I sat on a bench and waited for a bus. In around 20 minutes, one came by and I hopped on. The bus curved along the Viale Enrico Panzacchi and turned up the Viale Giosuo Carducci. I got off the bus at the Piazza Di Porte San Vitale. The gate of San Vitale was a remnant of the city’s Medieval past, with a narrow opening through which traffic still passed.

The center of the Bologna’s walled city is the Pizza Maggiore. I strolled down the street heading toward it. The sidewalk was covered with porticoes projecting from the second stories of buildings, a good thing since a light rain had started falling. By this time, it was around 6:30 p.m. and despite the rain, people were out in force, strolling and socializing, the Bologna version of the passegiata, that wonderful Italian practice of strolling in the evening. All along the road, I passed bars that were crowded with people, smoking and talking and sipping wine. The bars had laid out plates of appetizers, slices of pizza cut up into small pieces, slices of sausage on toasted bread, bowls of cured olives and pickled vegetables. People were helping themselves, sticking toothpicks in these goodies and gobbling them up between sips of wine or beer.

I got to the Piazza Maggiore just as it began to rain harder. The Palazzo del Podesta and the Basilica di San Petronio dominate this center of the city. There was also one of those tall columns with a winged statue at the top.

Aside from its fame as a culinary center, Bologna’s reputation also rests on it past as a center of Italian learning. Europe’s oldest university was founded there, at first as a law school.

On the food side, the city is famous for its cooking style, dubbed alla Bolognese. The distinctive pasta of the region is made with eggs and typically served fresh rather than dried and dressed with a sauce called a ragu. Tortellini, the egg pasta that legend has it is in the shape of the navel of the goddess Venus. The “ini” ending indicates the size of the pasta; small. Tortelli is the same pasta, only slightly larger. Tortelloni is the largest version.

The region, Emilia-Romagna, is also famed for its cured pork products, known collectively as salume. Perhaps the most famous of Bologna’s contributions to this type of food is a sausage called Bologna. Yes, it’s the same stuff that your mother made your school lunches out of. This is the city it hails from. Delis in the city are stocked with long, round tubes filled with bologna, which the Italians carve pieces out of an eat from a plate.

Many of the dishes I ate in Italy had names that struck me as very funny, but one of the funniest I encountered during my trip was a pasta-and-beans dish called malmaritati, which translates to “badly married.” The dish I sampled was made with white beans and an egg pasta cut into all sorts of odd, random shapes. It tasted somewhat like the pasta e fagioli that I had in the north of Italy, except that it was made with a clear broth and without the browned pancetta.

Later, at dinner, I had tagilatelle Bolognese, a dish made with fresh pasta, dressed with a sauce made with veal and pork and finished with a little heavy cream. God, it was heavenly. To start off the meal, I had an appetizer of bruschetta di tartufo nero, slices of grilled bread brushed with olive oil and covered with shavings of black truffles. I couldn’t believe how delicious it was. After all, the dish consisted of nothing but bread, olive oil and fungus. What the hell kind of magic converted that combination of ingredients into something so delicious?

Later, after dinner, I strolled again through the Piazza Maggiore, past a store from Italy’s largest chain of bookstores. It was mobbed with people. I was surprised, given that I had been reading a book a British author had written about his four years living in the country. Author Tobias Jones maintained in his book “The Dark Heart of Italy,” that Italians rarely ever read books.

I strolled around the Piazza, looking for a gelato stand to get some dessert. A German tourist approached me and asked for directions to someplace. What the hell was this thing with my being mistaken for a German all over Italy? I told the woman in Italian that I was a tourist. “So am I,” she said in English. I got out my tourist map and we found the spot she was looking for. I found my gelato stand, got my treat and headed back to my hotel. The next morning I was heading out of Emilia-Romagna and into Umbria and a tiny medieval hill town called Trevi.

Umbria is the Italy of the postcards, at least the ones that don’t feature topless beaches and antiquities. Umbria is mountainous – the Appenines to be specific, and towns and cities tend to be clustered on hilltops, occasionally, depending on size, spilling down the sides of the hills. Trevi was one such place but so where Perugia, Norcia and Spoleto. Between towns, the steep hillsides are terraced and every inch of them is cultivated.

I left Bologna in – what else – rain and fog. The weather on this trip to “sunny Italy,” has been the only disappointing aspect of the trip. Heading south on the Autostrade I could barely see any of the surrounding hills that brooded over the road. Every once in a while the clouds would lift enough for me to see what was ahead. As I headed into Umbria from Emilia-Romagna, the land became steadily hillier and then frankly mountainous. Occasionally the clouds lifted enough to reveal lightly forested hilltops. Sometimes, the tops of the hills were bare. Umbria is one of the places in Italy where marble is mined. I was halfway across a highway bridge when the fog lifted enough for me to see the mountain ahead of me. The height of the mountain, it must have been 2,000 feet or 3,000 feet above me, and the height of the bridge, probably 800 feet over a river, combined to give me a bad case of vertigo. I had to pull the car over on the breakdown lane until my heart rate returned to normal.

Around noon, I pulled off the highway into some no-name town just above Perugia to find some lunch. I pulled into the parking lot of a small hotel, it being the only place I could find that sold more than just sandwiches and espresso. The hotel restaurant was small and even at barely noon it was packed. At a table across from me, a party of what were clearly workmen was just tucking into their pasta course, sopping up sauce with bread and washing everything down with red wine.

I checked out the menu and settled on tagilatelle, a wide, flat egg noodle, served with a sauce made with porcini mushrooms. It was earthy and delicious and just the right amount of food for lunch. I got back on the road and headed south toward Trevi. I arrived there around 2 p.m. and immediately began driving in circles, completely unable to find the hotel. The streets were steep, and narrow and winding. After my fourth turn around passing the police station, I decided I should go in and ask for directions, which I got from a very nice officer, after he told me about all the cousins he had in the U.S.

Following his directions, I found the hotel, perched at the highest point of the hill, literally at the end of an alley. After much backing and forwarding I finally got the car parked and checked in. I dumped my bags in my room, and headed out to explore the town.

Trevi is perched high above a valley. It’s so small that it isn’t one of those towns that spill down the slope of the hill it is on. In fact, it doesn’t even cover the top of the hill. I strolled down a steep alley from the hotel, and walked out into a small square. Restaurants, bars and small shops lined the square, making it clear that if a Trevi dweller didn’t want to leave their tiny town, they’d never need to. At one end of the square was a small theater. From it wafted the sounds of a choir practicing. I walked around a corner and through a small park to a little bar, where I had a glass of beer and smoked a small cigar called a Garibaldi. The idea that smoking indoors is a threat to the health of everyone involved hasn’t caught on much in Italy. Sometimes it seemed that all Italians smoked cigarettes and nearly every place allowed them to. It was the rare restaurant indeed that did not allow smoking.

At dusk I walked down a steep street that ran parallel to one of the city’s walls. Stopping there in the fading light, I looked down the valley. In my imagination I removed the power lines and utility poles, the highways and the train lines, blacked out the lights and tried to see the area surrounding Trevi as it might have appeared to a person 500 years ago.

The steep hillsides surrounding the town and stretching far into the distance were covered with olive trees, mostly heavy with olives. Trevi is famous for its olive oil and there was a factory for producing the stuff right down the road from the town. That factory ships olive oil around the country.

The hotel was a very interesting place. Despite its antiquity, parts of the building dated from the 15th Century, it was the only place in Italy that I stayed in that had a bathtub. After a day of wandering up and down the hills of this very steep town, it was a really welcome sight. My room was small but had a surprisingly spacious feel because the ceiling was probably 15 feet high. There was no phone and the television brought in only Italian TV, which featured some startlingly frank sexual material. The only English language channel was the BBC.

Around 9 p.m. I headed out for dinner. At the foot of the alley there was a restaurant and I popped in for dinner. To start off, I had a soup made with only three ingredients, water, olive oil and a toasted grain called farro, a very ancient grain that goes back as far as the Romans, who called it far and used it to make food to keep their legions on the march. It was unbelievably delicious, given the tiny number of ingredients.

As an appetizer I had a slice of pecorino cheese made right there in Trevi from ewe’s milk. The slice of cheese came with a small pot of honey. The sharp, salty taste of the cheese was offset perfectly by the sweetness of the honey. My main course that night was tagilatelle again, this time sauced with a ragu made from cinghiale, wild boar. God it was delicious.

The next morning I maneuvered the car out of its parking spot and headed southeast toward the city of Norcia. This mountaintop city is the home of butchery in Italy. Norcia is so identified with butchery, especially of pork, that Italian butchers used to be called “norcieros.” In a few places in Italy I came across butcher shops still named after that city.

As befit the motif that seemed to have cursed this trip, the weather was terrible. It was intermittently rainy and overcast, with fog that drifted down toward the valley from the tops of nearby mountains. At the top of one of those mountains perched Norcia. The road leading to it was narrow and twisting, and as I drove up it I had yet again the disorienting experience of looking own on clouds.

It might actually have been a pleasant ride up to Norcia, even a beautiful one up that particular section of the Appenines had I been able to see anything. But I couldn’t. As the car climbed, the fog became denser, until I could only see about 50 feet in front of me. Vehicles emerging from the fog on the descending side of the highway, including one huge tour bus, never failed to scare the hell out of me. The fog made it difficult enough to keep the edge of the highway in view. Each time a car passed me heading down, I instinctively shifted toward the opposite side of the highway. As I drove up, the distance to the bottom increased, making me more and more nervous. If I could have found a spot to turn around I would have abandoned this quest to taste cured meats at the source and turned around. But the twisting highway – and I use that word with a certain irony – offered no place to do that.

After two hours of nerve wracking creeping through fog I got to the top and parked in a lot outside the main gate of Norcia. By this time the fog had lifted but it was raining heavily. For a place so famous in Italian gastronomy, Norcia was surprisingly tiny. The “downtown” consisted of two strips of shops and restaurants along the both sides of the main drag. A few side streets ran off this strip but most of the action was either side of it.

Unfortunately for my meat-tasting plan, it was four in the afternoon when I finally for to Norcia, and every restaurant was closed. They wouldn’t open again until seven or seven-thirty and I had no intention of hanging around this hilltop for the next three hours. A butcher shop at the head end of the street caught my eye. What the hell, meats were what I had come here to sample at risk to life and limb. Even if I couldn’t taste the stuff I could at least look at it.

The shop was about half the size of the typical Seven-11 here in the States. Every inch of it was crammed with stuff hanging from the ceiling, stacked on shelves, filling every corner. The smell was unbelievable and by the time I was done taking pictures I was salivating freely. The owners of the place were obviously used to tourists taking pictures of hanging hams, so they didn’t even notice me, although I was acutely embarrassed at all the other tourists staring at me.

Having finally sniffed and snapped my fill, I walked out into the rain and tried to figure out what to do next. I hated to leave without tasting any of this bounty but every place I could see was closed. Then I spotted a tiny café that looked open. Sodden and dripping I walked over to the place and walked in.

Small does not begin to describe this café. It held a short bar, one refrigerated glass-fronted case and three three tables, one of which was occupied by an elderly drunk sipping wine and talking away in Italian to the owner. I sat at a table and looked over the menu, which consisted of one side of one piece of paper, typewritten. When the owner approached the table and asked what I wanted, I tried to tell her that I wanted to sample some of the cured meats typical of Norcia. Even as I was struggling through this in my pathetically limited Italian vocabulary, I was thinking, “Yeah, fat chance she’s going to get this.”

But she did get it. In a few minutes, a plate materialized at tableside, covered with cured meats and some local cheeses, accompanied by a half-loaf of crusty bread and a bottle of what could only have been extra virgin olive oil; a typical Italian late afternoon snack.

There were two kinds of salami, including one made from cured wild boar meat. There was a traditional prosciutto, and one cured meat that had a hard crust and was soft in the middle. Communication between the owner and myself never reached a level to allow her to explain what this was, but spread on a piece of bread with a drizzle of olive oil, it was heavenly.

I took my time eating; what, after all was the hurry? It was pouring outside. After a heavenly hour spent inhaling the wonderful smells and savoring the tastes of a skill that was hundreds of years old I finally dragged myself into the street and headed back toward my car.

The trip down the mountain was every bit as uncomfortable as the one going up, except that the traffic was lighter and didn’t run in to any of those huge tour busses. I drove back to Trevi and went to my room for a bath and a change of clothes and headed off to find dinner.

This time I chose a small restaurant lower down the hill. For a first course I had “gnocchi al sugo con anantra.” Gnocchi are dumplings made from grated potato, flour and an egg. They are cooked in either broth or salted water. “Anantra” is duck. Italians serve gnocchi dressed with tomato sauce, as I did that night, or with butter and sage sauce. I have had both and while I prefer the sage and butter treatment, the tomato sauce was delicious. The main problem with gnocchi is that they can be tough and chewy, what people sometimes call “belly bombers.” There was no such problem with them this night. The gnocchi were tender with just a touch of that chewiness that Italians call al dente. The tomato sauce was light and creamy, with just a hint of sweetness cut by the right touch garlic, which the chef had removed from the sauce before serving the dish. The duck was finely ground and sautéed before being added to the sauce. The dish was everything a main course should have been and I went back to my room replete and sleepy. In the morning I got up early and headed off to Assisi.

I drove straight south from Udine to the A 13, then struck west toward Venice. As I headed west, the land changed in character, becoming steadily flatter and more intensively farmed as I headed for Italy’s most famous city. Around noon, I pulled off the Autostrada at a small village and looked for a restaurant to have lunch. I settled on a restaurant attached to a tourist restaurant. When I walked in, I was immediately heartened to see a group of local workman tucking into lunch. They kidded the waitress and each other and were obviously regulars in the place. I was about halfway to Venice when I decided to get lunch and the closeness of the city on the water was evidenced by the seafood selections that the other guests were eating. One man was eating crabs, and I watched the waitress deliver a plate of pasta topped with muscles and clams to another of the group.

I decided there was time enough to sample seafood when I actually got to Venice, so I ordered a local pasta dish called pappardelle con funghi or noodles with mushrooms. Pappardelle or “gulp down,” pasta is a flat, wide egg noodle beloved of northern Italians. The funghi were portabella mushrooms, sliced thick and dressed with olive oil. The pasta was served al dente, literally, “the tooth,” or slightly chewy, then dressed with olive oil and a little butter and some chopped parsley. The only thing I added was a tablespoon of Parmesan cheese. This was typical of dished I ate in Italy. They came to the table almost perfectly seasoned during cooking. I did not once add salt to a dish and only a few times added pepper.

Typically, I took my cue on adding spices or condiments to dishes from what was on the table. If extra virgin olive oil or balsamic vinegar were on the table, I added them, always just a splash. The Italians love to add at the last minute a tiny bit of what they have dressed the dish with during cooking. So a dish cooked with olive oil might get a final splash of the oil just before serving. It was frequently amazing how this drizzle of raw olive oil added to the overall flavor of the dish. If a recipe calls for parsley or basil during cooking, Italian chefs and waiters loved to add some at the last minute just as the dish was being placed before the diner. The end result was always marvelous.

After lunch, I pulled onto the Autostrada A-4, sort of the Italian equivalent of the German Autobahn but not as wide. I had heard so many hair raising things about Italian drivers that I was really nervous about my first time on this high speed road, but the drivers were all very well behaved. Even the Italian long distance drivers seemed amazingly law abiding, even to the extent of observing the speed limit. The only exception was at the scene of a minor fender bender type accident about halfway from Udine to Venice. I was stopped in a long line of traffic edging its way around the accident when two truckers got out of their rigs and began exchanging what were clearly angry comments. Soon they were exchanging something more substantial that words, like fists. A group of police ran over and broke them up, ushering them both to their trucks.

I recall my mother traveling to Italy in the early 1970s and complaining about how dirty public spaces were. Even a book I read before going to Italy, written in the 1970s, also complained of the same thing, so I was prepared for the highways to be littered even more than they are in the U.S. They weren’t. The A-4 was immaculate, and all the public spaces I’d seen to that point were also scrupulously clean. Even the parking lots at rest areas were free of litter. I guessed that someone must have decided to take responsibility for public spaces after all.

Around three in the afternoon I pulled into a suburb of Venice called Marghera and asked for directions to my hotel. I got my first inkling that the choice of locations wasn’t my most brilliant move in Italy. The hotel was located in a tiny town called – are you ready for this? – Malcontenta, or unhappy. On the way out there, I got my first of why. I was never able to find out the derivation of this name but before I left Venice four days later I was convinced it reflected the inhabitant’s opinion of the town’s location.

The tiny town wasn’t far from the main part of Venice itself, only in fact about a 25 minute drive but it was way the hell and gone on the other side of the city’s industrial section. To get to Malcontenta involved driving over a bridge, past the industrial section and over a set of railroad tracks. The town was tiny, consisting mostly of homes, a few apartment buildings and a few small businesses. To top it all off, the when I got to the hotel there was a sign on the door advising people that it was closed for renovation, and advising people to go to its sister hotel down the street. I drove down the street, pulled into the parking lot at the other hotel and went inside to check it out. To my disappointment, the hotel had no Internet connection, which the other hotel had advertised. I had been willing to pay a little extra for the privilege of not having to travel everyday to send messages.

The room available was also a disappointment. It had no mini-fridge and had only a tiny, very narrow bed. It was like sleeping on someone’s couch. The whole thing really pissed me off but I should have realized that something was wrong when I saw the room rate, 55 Euros per night. In a city as expensive as Venice, I should have realized that the room rate would come with a step down in quality or at least in comfort. Still, the hotel did have what turned out to be a first-rate restaurant with a vast assortment of seafood on the menu including such things as baby octopus, fresh squid and various shell fish I had never even heard of. The Veneto, a vast section of Italy that extends from Venice clear across the peninsula to the mountains, is famous for its appetite for anything that swims, crawls or slithers or otherwise makes its way through the sea. I was determined to try as many of them as possible and nausea could be damned.

I arrived at my hotel late in the afternoon, too tired to go directly into Santa Lucia, so after checking into the hotel, I went through my towel snapping, mosquito killing routine and took a short nap. Later, I had dinner at the hotel restaurant. I wanted something typically Venetian, so I settled on linguine con vongole, or linguine with clams in a white sauce. The tiny clams resembled the ones we call cherrystones and were cooked in white wine with minced garlic and parsley. The linguine was cooked al dente and then dumped into a skillet in which the clams had been cooked. The chef or perhaps the waiter sprinkled a bit of parsley on the dish just before serving it, a nice touch that added a bit of salinity.

The next day I awoke early. The first thing I noticed was that it was, yet again, overcast and rainy. The next thing I noticed was a persistent itching on both legs. Examining them, I saw numerous, red, slightly raised bumps that bore a marked resemblance to mosquito bites. At first, I wondered if my bed could have been infested with bedbugs or some other bloodsucking parasites. It really seemed impossible. After all, this was a three star hotel in the outskirts – okay, the far outskirts of a city – in a major western European nation. Italy wasn’t some knew that mosquitoes have sophisticated sensory organs that enable them to detect warm-blooded creatures with blood to suck. But my legs had been under sheets and a blanket all night. How had the little bastards found them? Regardless, I shut the window, took my shower and spread a dab cortisone cream on each bite.

An hour later, I took my first ride into Venezia Santa Lucia, and the degree to which Malconenta is off the beaten path came home to me. There were two ways to get to the main part of the city from the small town on the far side of Venice. One was to take a ferry across a bay. The other involved taking a bus to a suburb, Venezia Mestre, then taking a train one stop to Santa Lucia. I don’t know the Italian phrase for “east jockstrap nowhere,” but someone must have known it because that is where the town was. I caught the number 11 bus into Mestre – sort of “west jockstrap – and from there, I caught a train to Santa Lucia.

Venice is an island, at least the main and most important part of it, Venezia Santa Lucia, is surrounded by water. Think Manhattan with canals instead of streets and boats instead of taxis and autos. Venezia Santa Lucia has no roads and no cars, trucks, buses or even the motorcycles that are ever present in the rest of Italy. Not even bicycles are to be seen on its pedestrian walkways. Instead, the city relies on a network of canals. The canal grande winds through the city in a sort of backwards S, and other, smaller canals spread out from it. Public boats, that is to say boats that are privately owned, are allowed only on the canal grande. The other, smaller canals are reserved for boats that handle city services, hundreds of them. I saw police boats, boats hauling food and other consumer goods, boats loaded down with laundry, even paramedic boats, complete with flashing blue lights and sirens.

Santa Lucia is connected to the other parts of Venice by a long railroad bridge. Riding into the place on a local train, I passed dozens of fish farms. The lagoons of Venice are some of the most intensively fish farmed places on earth, and their product is worth its weight in gold, for Venetians have a passion for anything that swims, crawls or slithers through the sea.

Local markets I passed in town overflowed with fresh seafood and restaurants often displayed the day’s catch in refrigerated cases placed appetizingly in storefront windows. I saw heaps of prawns, lobsters, sea bass and fish I didn’t recognize, spider crabs and bigger ones that looked a bit like Alaskan king crab packed on ice. Venetians will eat anything from the water bit it had better be fresh.

I wanted to take a water taxi to Venice’s most famous landmark, the Piazza San Marco, so I left the stagione ferrovia (the railroad station) and walked to the ticket outlet for the taxis. It turned out, however, that the boat drivers on San Marco route were on strike. The odd thing about this is that the only boat drivers on strike were the ones whose route went from the train station to San Marco directly. Everybody else was working. Since most of the other routes also stopped at or near San Marco, the purpose of the strike seemed a bit obscure. A helpful ticket seller told me to take another boat and get off at the Rialto Bridge stop and walk a few blocks to Piazza San Marco. It was raining, so I stopped off at a local shop and bought a waterproof hat. Hat in place, I climbed aboard the next Rialto taxi and watched Venice go by.

Water has always been both friend and enemy to the Venetians, going back to 5th and 6th centuries, when people first came there in large numbers to escape raids by barbarians such as Attila, which the failing Roman empire could no longer block. Those first inhabitants of Venice built homes on stilts and learned to fish farm intensively in the lagoons of the shallow waters surrounding the town. Those waters provided food and later entry to goods from all over the known world. It was from Venice that explorer Marco Polo set out for the east and China.

But the waters of the Bay of Venice also brought ea raiders, pirates who plundered the city whenever they could. The people of Venice were forced to make common cause with the remainder of the old Roman Empire in Constantinople and a city to the south of Venice, Ravenna, became the sight of the first Venetian leader anointed by the Roman Emperor in the East. Ultimately, Venice’s sway was to extend across a vast swath of peninsular Italy, all the way to the Swiss and Austrian borders.

One of the downsides of visiting a country like Italy during the off season is that this is when the locals decide to do restoration work on the churches, monuments etc. that make coming to the city worthwhile. Half the buildings in Piazza San Marco were had half their walls covered with a sort of metallic mesh. From behind it came to sounds of hammers and chisels tapping and chipping. The day was dank and dreary, with a low fog and mist that obscured buildings across the piazza, and the shortage of sunlight make photos iffy.

There was, regrettably, no shortage of pigeons or of assholes feeding them. There were literally hundreds of these birds, perching on every surface, preening themselves, feeding, fighting and otherwise making immense pains in the ass of themselves. One old fool sprinkled breadcrumbs over himself stood with arms outstretched while literally dozens of pigeons landed on him and walked up his arms, pecking their little asses off. Others lined up snapping pictures of this idiot. Is it any wonder that everything in the piazza was covered with a fine patina of pigeon shit?

The Piazza San Marco was in the heyday of Venice the seat of government and the cultural and political heart of what was from the 13th to the 15th centuries an independent city-state. For about 400 years, Venice was an economic and trading powerhouse, bringing in all manner of luxuries from virtually every part of the known world. Not bad for a city that began as a refuge for people fleeing barbarian raids after the fall the Roman Empire.

All around the piazza tour groups clustered around their guides, each describing in a different language the glories that had been Venice. As I walked around the piazza, I heard this spiel repeated over and over, in French, Dutch, German, Italian even Chinese and of course English. One young English woman was regaling her tourists with an account of leading Sir Elton John around the piazza while he regaled her with tales of how many bags he needs to carry when he travels.

I picked up tantalizing little bits of information about Venice while eavesdropping on these tourist guides. For example, the city of Venezia Santa Lucia may not by law get any bigger, largely because, being surrounded by water, it has no place to spread to. It made me wonder what was the point of such a law, what with this being an island and all. One particularly fascinating tidbit came from a German guide who was nevertheless lecturing in English. The workmen restoring the area over the main altar of the of St. Mark’s Basilica had to remove inlaid gold leaf put there more than 500 years earlier. In all, they removed 80 pounds of gold. The original builders, he pointed out, applied gold leaf that was six times thinner than ordinary paper is today. Cool, no?

By the time I was done touring Piazza San Marco it was time for lunch. Searching for an out-of-the-way place to eat, I came across a restaurant on a small dead end canal. It was crowded with people speaking Italian, so I figured if they were tourists, they were at least tourists from other parts of Italy. I asked the waiter for something that was typically Venetian. She winked and touched the side of her nose, as if to say “leave this to me,” and disappeared into the kitchen. A few minutes later he reappeared with a basket of bread and a glass of red wine I hadn’t even asked for. About twenty minutes later, he brought a dish to my table, set it down and with a wave of his hand over the dish said, “echo qua;” there it is. The “it” in question was fegato veneziana, calf’s liver Venetian style.

I hate liver. When I was a kid my mother, convinced that eating this organ meat conveyed all sorts of health benefits, decreed that Thursdays were liver night. In fairness, she tried everything she could think of to make it palatable. She breaded and fried it like chicken, braised it like pot roast, she even tried grilling it. But there was nothing that could disguise that distinctive and disgusting odor of liver. I swear I could smell it cooking when I stepped off the school bus almost a half-mile away.

This Venetian style liver had been cut into small pieces and cooked in a mix of butter, olive oil and onions, with a splash of white wine, and came with brown gravy. It was served with two slices of white polenta. It was truly magnificent and the polenta was delicious, bathed in olive oil and covered with the gravy from the liver.

Later that night, at the hotel, I had my first entirely seafood meal. It started off with an appetizer of baby octopus dressed in olive oil, lemon juice and parsley. I was a bit apprehensive about eating raw octopus and sure enough after eating it I disgraced myself by throwing up all over the table. Just kidding. In fact, it was delicate and delicious, with a saline taste that bespoke ocean but was not salty. The octopus was not at all slimy or chewy, as I had anticipated.

My main course was cuttlefish cooked in a sauce of its own ink and balsamic vinegar, accompanied by two squares of white polenta. The cuttlefish was similar in texture to the octopus; in fact, octopus and cuttlefish are members of the same underwater family of creepy crawlies, and the cuttlefish flesh had a soft texture not unlike al dente pasta. As for the polenta it was, alas, still corn mush. When I was sure my waiter wasn’t watching I slathered some butter on it to give it some flavor. All this accomplished was to make butter-flavored corn mush.

As a special treat at the end of the meal the waiter brought me two sardine fillets. These were not the sardines that come packed in oil in tiny cans. These were full-size sardines that had been filleted, marinated in vinegar and lemon juice then dressed with the most gorgeous extra virgin olive oil. The oil had a greenish tinge and a peppery bite that offset the slightly saline flavor or the fish. Pointing to the sardine fillets, the bread and butter and the olive oil, the waiter told me that this combination was unique to Venice. “Solo in Venezia,” he said.

The next morning I returned to Venice to see some of the other tourist sights, such as the Ponte Vecchio. Around noon, I made a beeline for Venice’s old Jewish quarter, called the ghetto vecchio. Today it is only a shadow of its former self but I went there to taste some food prepared in the style the Italians call “alla guidecca,” Jewish style. Disappointingly, I found only one kosher restaurant and it served nothing alla guidecca. I had to settle for tagilatelle Bolognese, not bad for a disappointment, but not what I was hoping for. My experience of Italian food Jewish style would have to wait until I got to Rome.

The streets of Venice in the Santa Lucia quarter were really more like alleyways and were so narrow that sometimes I had to turn sideways to allow others to pass. At one spot I paced off the width of one and it came up just about 10 feet wide. As I walked around, I encountered small dead ends, frequently occupied by tiny shrines to one saint or another with small offerings of flowers or candles placed in front.

As befit a tourist area, Venice had more than its share of high-end shops and stores and its shopping areas featured stores with some of the most famous commercial names in Italy. But unlike a similar area in a U.S. city, these stores were small and resembled more boutiques than behemoths one might find at an outlet mall back here.

Overall, I had to admit that I didn’t entirely enjoy Venice. It was too touristy and even out of tourist season it was pretty crowded. Finding a restaurant that wasn’t dedicated to feeding tourists “traditional” Italian dishes was difficult, and prices were outrageous. A slice of pizza in Venice cost nearly four Euros; the same slice cost barely half that in Como. And it was in Venice that I first encountered beggars in Italy. One guy I passed on the way from Rialto to Pizza San Marco was kneeling on a pillow, perfectly still arms outstretched like a penitent. The small plastic cup in his hand spoiled the impression.

I returned very late to the hotel that night. The next morning I was up early, checked out of the hotel and headed off to explore more of the Veneto.

The Veneto is the largest political and cultural entity in Italy. Broken into three sub-regions, Venezia Giulia, Venezia Euganea and Venezia Tridentina, it extends west from Venice, which serves as its political and cultural head, all the way to the borders with the region of Lombardy, and the countries of Switzerland and Austria. Early Saturday, October 23, I loaded the car and headed east and north for Vicenza, a medium size city about 100 kilometers from Venice.

The trip was somewhat complicated by the fact that that the A4 was closed so construction crews could replace a bridge and the highway was closed from Venice to around Padua, halfway to Vicenza. I had to take the SS11, a smaller two-lane road that was heavily trafficked, especially with long distance trucks whose drivers, unlike those in the States, seemed almost religiously dedicated to observing the speed limit. It took me nearly three hours to get back on the A4 and get, finally, to Vicenza. Once I found the hotel, checked in and found a place to park the car, I set off to explore the town.

While Vicenza cannot help being influenced in nearly everything by its vastly more powerful and cosmopolitan neighbor to the east, its cuisine is somewhat distinctive, given that it is too far from the sea for fresh seafood to play the same major role it does in Venice. Vicenza lacks even a decent sized lake to provide fish. There is a river that runs through the town but it doesn’t seem to provide much in the way of fish except for local anglers. So Vicenza’s recipes count on dried fish, the most famous of which, baccala all vicentina, I was determined to try.

Fish here is served al forno, baked in an oven, instead of grilled, as is most common in Venice. Dishes in Vicenza are cooked slower and longer, and the cooks here prefer meat to fish, including all sorts of roasted birds. A local favorite is wild birds cooked in clay pots. I saw pigeons for sale in local markets, as were turkeys and other birds. At one macelleria, I saw dozens of birds trussed and ready for sale, as well as a plastic tray with sheep’s brains.

Vicenza was also fresh pasta country, and I saw in the equivalent of an Italian deli mounds of fresh pasta, ready for sale to customers who stopped in on their way home from work. The pasta had a distinctive, yellow color because it is made with egg. The favored “condimento,” for pasta here is a ragu, made with bits of meat rather than a marinara – literally “sailor style,” that is preferred in the south of the country.

I spent the rest of the day walking around Vicenza’s restored old center section. I strolled in the local PAM, Italy’s largest supermarket chain, and into small ma and pa stores in the town to see what people were eating. In Vicenza, there were fresh fish in all the stores, but the selection was pretty small. I also noticed that the frozen food section was pretty small, far smaller than the ones in typical U.S. supermarkets. Italians seem not to have taken in a big way to frozen foods.

After a couple of hours of walking around, I wanted some lunch, so I popped into a local restaurant and ordered a local pasta called bigoli dressed with a ragu made with veal. It was really delicious and was just the right amount of food. It was really amazing how many of the things I was told or that I read about Italy and food culture here that have turned out to be plain wrong.

“Italians eat pizza as a snack, not as a meal,” I read in one book. That would have come as a hell of a surprise to the two guys sitting across from me in a restaurant in Udine, busily eating whole pizzas, using knives and forks, yet another Italian pizza-eating rule. Picking up pizza with your hands is only proper if it is one slice and you are standing up. Otherwise, eating pizza with your hands is – non che fa – just not done.

Italian restaurant meals are typically sold al la carte although some restaurants that cater to tourists sometimes offer price-fixed meals, that include two or three courses and a dessert. In a typical restaurant menu, courses are divided into primi piatti or first courses, and secondi piatti, second courses. Then there are contourni, or side dishes – typically vegetables or potatoes, and dulci, sweets. The great thing about this was that I could order exactly as much food as I wanted and nothing more. I learned to imitate the Italians I saw eating around me and typically ordered primi piatti for lunch and reserved secondi piatti for dinner. It worked out very well, and I never left a restaurant in Italy feeling hungry or that I had eaten too much.

Depending on the area of the country, first courses can include soup (either minestre or zuppa, depending again on location) as well as pasta dishes or risotto. Second courses can include various cuts of meat, chops or steaks. Desserts on the other hand were not a big feature of menus in the restaurants in which I ate. Few had more than three or four or at the most five items on the dessert list.

On the other hand, even the smallest towns I visited had a pasticceria, or pastry shop that offered a very large variety of sweets. Strolling around Vicenza after lunch, I passed one of these shops and saw a mound of bite-sized, crème filled pastries called cannoli in the shop window. They looked so good that I popped into the pasticceria and bought two. The filling was creamy, with a hint of tartness from lemon juice. The cannoli were coated with cocoa powder and the pastry tubes, cannoli means “pipes,” were very crisp. They were the perfect small dessert to end a light lunch.

By evening, my knees were singing Ave Maria from all the walking I had done and I needed to sit down. It was too early for dinner, so I chose a bench in front of a portion of the old medieval wall of Vicenza and settled down to observe Italians performing what is called la passeggiatta. This refers to the very Italian practice of going out for a stroll in the evening. Typically, this starts around 6:30 p.m. and goes to about 8 p.m. In Vicenza, I watched people strolling about, young couples pushing baby carts, older couples walking hand in hand, young girls and boys, roving in packs and eyeing each other. Bars in the area threw open their doors and spread various appetizers along the bar. People stopped in, bought glasses of beer or wine, munched the appetizers, smoked and gossiped.

The bench I was sitting on was in front of a section of old wall, dating back to the early middle ages, according to a plaque. Vicenza was actually founded by Roman settlers a few centuries before Christ, when they called it Vitinium, but it was a backwater then and remained so until Venice became its own city-state. After that, Vicenza became a sort of outpost of Venice as that city became wealthy and powerful thanks to its vast foreign trade. Another independent city-state, Milan, lusted after the riches and the trade of Venice. After it fell under the sway of the kings of Spain, Milan made a few stabs at invading Venice, and Vicenza served as sort of the canary in the coalmine, warning its parent state when things got tense. Vicenza was the place that Milan’s armies would have to go through when that city’s leaders developed the urge to eat seafood themselves, in Venice.

Across from me, an elderly man perched on the steps of a church, playing tunes on an accordion. I nodded to him and he must have tagged me for an American because he immediately switched from an Italian tune to playing “Moon River,” of all tunes. At his feet, a puppy gnawed at stray sheets of paper. The occasional passerby stopped and dropped coins in a box at his feet.

All around me were a sea of Italians, strolling, smoking, eating gelati – ice cream, talking on cell phones or conversing over espressos at tables under umbrellas, set just off the sidewalk. The night was cool and damp with just a hint of fog that gave the street lamps faint yellow haloes.