EATING DANTE

Eating Dante:
Hungry in Italy

INTRODUCTION

Italy was exactly what I expected and Italy was a total surprise.

Italy was an elegantly dressed businessman cycling to work on a bicycle that looked like an old Schwinn paperboy’s bike. Briefcase perched on a rusted basket he pedaled along, talking on his cell phone.

Italy was groups of teenage girls, walking arm-in-arm or holding hands. And it was elderly couples, strolling in the evening, holding hands and kissing.

Italy was long-distance truckers who obeyed traffic laws scrupulously and motor scooters ridden by kamikaze-style drivers who recognized no traffic laws. It was tiny street vendors of gelato and stores devoted to the most elaborate pastries.

Italy was vibrant street markets, selling everything from local produce to the local vintage. These were portable stores that kept the locals fed. At the end of the day’s business, the market was swept scrupulously, leaving it almost immaculate.

I have only to close my eyes to be back to be back there. A sound, a smell, a dish that I ate and I am back again, strolling through the narrow streets of a hilltop town in the Abruzzo or looking down on the Forum in Rome.

In the fall of 2004, I flew into Milan’s Malpensa (bad thought) Airport, took a bus to Lake Como and spent the next four weeks exploring the country by road and rail.

So much of what I had read or been told about the country seemed wrong. Italians would instantly tag me as an American, I was told. “They’ll recognize you by the way you dress, even the way you stand,” one experienced traveler told me.

How then to explain the elderly woman who approached me at the train station in Bellagio and began to chat about the weather? When I admitted “Non parlo Italiano bene,” I don’t speak Italian well, she apologized and repeated herself, pronouncing each word slowly and carefully – in German.

Italians never eat pizza for dinner; It is strictly a snack. I mean, everybody knew that, right?

That would certainly have come as a surprise to a couple of men eating dinner across from me in a restaurant in Udine one night. As I watched, they tucked into their pizzas with knives and forks. The pizzas were about the size of large dinner plates, with very thin crusts and simple toppings such as tomatoes, cheese and vegetables. Accompanied by a couple of salads and glasses of wines, they were mouth watering.

“Don’t ask for a spoon to twirl your spaghetti on,” another old Italy hand told me. “Only Americans do that.” Why then, as I sat waiting for my lunch in the small village of Calalzo in the Italian Alps, did I see a man across from me use a serving spoon to roll his spaghetti into a tight ball before forking the compact mass into his mouth?

In a month of riding and driving around Italy, I found that my preconceived notions of the country took a thorough shellacking. That applied to nothing so much as it did to the food.

Long before my trip was done, I realized that there is no such thing as Italian food. The food of Florence differs from the food of Naples every bit as much as the cuisine of New York is distinct from that of Alabama.

The much-vaunted “Mediterranean” diet is a myth, at least as it applies to Italy. Certainly parts of the country eat the largely olive oil, vegetables and seafood combination that is supposedly so healthful. But it hardly apeared typical of how Italians eat.

Another myth that died hard was that Italians don’t eat much meat. Menus across the entire country didn’t bear that out. Nor did my explorations of supermarkets in the country. There, meat counters were always well stocked if smaller than those found at the typical American mega mart.

Italians eat game animals far more than do Americans. Wild boar, deer, chamois, and multitudes of game birds grace Italian menus. Most of these are wild animals as the country has no laws against the their sale.

The meat of a special strain of beef cattle raised along the Chianina River in Tuscany is prized all over Italy. "Bistecca alla fiorentina," beefsteak Florentine, is a specialty of restaurants in and around that city. It is a T-bone steak brushed with olive oil, grilled over charcoal and served “al sangue,” blood rare.

I collected a rebuke from a waiter in an eatery in Tuscany one evening. Having seen the blood bath on the plates of nearby diners, I ordered my steak “bien cotto,” well done. He gave me a sneering look and stomped away muttering under his breath.

If there was anything that characterized the attitudes of Italians toward food it was freshness. This came home to me in force on the last days of my trip, in Rome. I was idling time waiting for a train in the Rome station when I came across a restaurant called Ciao. The place is a sort of cafeteria-style eatery. Service was divided into stations that corresponded to the Italian menu.

Station one offered “primi piatti,” or first courses. Cooks worked behind a glass partition, preparing food to order. Skillets on three cook tops bubbled away and baskets of fresh peas, tomatoes and basil were arrayed on counters around them.

On one cook top, a skillet held simmering risotto with peas, a dish beloved of Venice and called in that region’s dialect, “risi e bisi.” Directly to the cook’s was a large tub, resembling a deep-fat fryer but holding boiling water instead of oil. As I watched, the cook scooped a few dozen potato and flour dumplings, called “gnocchi,” into a basket and lowered them into the water.

Turning to her left, she ladled olive oil into a skillet atop yet another cook top. When it was sizzling, she added some tomato sauce, chopped tomatoes, and fresh basil. After a few minutes, when the sauce was bubbling, she removed the gnocchi from the boiling water, shook off the excess and dumped them into the skillet. Expertly, she flipped the gnocchi in the skilled to coat them with the sauce and returned it to the heat to simmer.

Then she turned to the risotto and, deciding it was done, emptied it into a serving bowl. Turning back to the gnocchi, she emptied them onto a plate, sprinkled them generously with Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and served them to the customer, myself.

The whole thing took about 13 or 14 minutes and cost about five Euros, a little over $6 at the time. And it was delicious, hot and fresh with bright flavor and a filling heartiness that made me think of meals I had eaten in Italy’s north.

Every place I went in Italy I checked out both the local street markets and what passed for supermarkets to see what people were eating. Overwhelmingly, local shops and stores were stocked with fresh winter vegetables, cabbage and cauliflower, carrots, potatoes and other root vegetables, as well as the last tomatoes of the season. Wherever fresh seafood was available, it was there in quantity.

Supermarkets told their own tale of Italian eating habits and preferences. Every place I found one I visited the local PAM, Italy’s largest supermarket chain. The stores usually had impressive selections of dried, salted and cured meats, especially cured ham or “prosciutto," as well as sausages and other types of cured meats. I never passed up an opportunity to sample the local wares and they never disappointed.

Frozen and canned food sections in markets were usually smaller and less varied than those in the typical U.S. store, although as the stores themselves were usually smaller than their American counterparts, this might account for some of the differences. Italian women have entered the work force in large numbers and this has led to changes in family eating patterns. For example, I saw frozen prepared entrees in many supermarkets, including everything from pizzas to risotto.

What follows is a journal of where I went, what I saw and most important, what I ate and how “Italian” food varied from one end of the country to the other.

Setting Out

I was so paranoid the day of my departure for Italy that I was afraid to leave the house. For the preceding week a conviction had grown in me that something would happen, some catastrophe, illness, accident or death, would sabotage my trip of a lifetime.

For the previous year I had cut my expenses to the bone to save money for the trip. I had moved out of my apartment and rented a room instead to save money. Some burst of idiocy had induced me to move out of the room I had been renting for the previous year at the same time I was preparing to leave for Italy, so departure day began with repeated trips to my storage locker. It was a little depressing to realize that everything I owned fit into a four-by four-by-10-foot storage closet.

Having finally cleaned out my room, I headed to my mother’s house to say goodbye, stopping on the way to pick up extras of my prescription medications, a wise precaution given that I had lost prescriptions on previous trips. I didn’t know how hard it would be to replace prescription drugs in Italy and I didn’t want to find out.

When I got to my mother’s house, she was cleaning the floor in her kitchen. It was already clean enough to eat off but somehow my mother’s 92-year-old eyes had spotted dirt. She politely informed me that since it was Thursday, I’d have to take her to church.

My mother had aides who come in four days a week to take her to church, shopping and to help with other small chores. Normally, I didn’t mind Thursday church duty but I was already worried about the time I’d need to get to John F. Kennedy International Airport. In my mind’s eye, an Alitalia 767 lifted off a runway at Kennedy Airport, turned east and headed for Italy, without me. But church is my mother’s lifeline and if she can’t go six days out of seven let the weak flee.

I got her to church and settled her in her customary pew. Someone else was taking her home, so I headed off to find a secure place to park my car for the duration of the trip. I hauled my bags out of the trunk, flagged a taxi and rode to the Long Island Railroad Station in Port Jefferson. There, I caught the noon train to Jamaica, Queens. Once there, I transferred to the AirTrain to Kennedy, checked my bags and settled down to await my flight.

The Alitalia and Lufthansa ticket counters at Kennedy faced each other, and the lines of passengers were long that afternoon with people waiting to pick up tickets. And that was the end of the similarities. At the Lufthansa counter, six ticketing agents kept a steady flow of passengers moving though the line. On the Alitalia side, two agents were at work, and one of them was talking on a telephone while passengers shuffled their feet and glared.

In this spirit my Alitalia flight began loading passengers at 5:15 p.m., 15 minutes late. Alitalia flight 605 was packed, literally every seat taken, and I was crammed into a row of three middle aisle seats with two other people. The three of us spent the flight looking at our knees since the seats were so close together that we couldn’t even stretch our legs. I had brought my laptop to take notes for his work, but there was so little space between my seat and the back of the one in front that I couldn’t open it.

Long distance airline flights are things best forgotten even in good circumstances, so I’m just going to skip over most of this one except to say that the dinner meal was surprisingly good, given that we’re talking about airline food.

My dinner was chicken with mushrooms in brown gravy (not especially Italian), an antipasto of spiced ham and pickled vegetables, and a pasta dish of “farfale” (bow ties, although the word also means butterfly in Italian) in a creamy tomato basil sauce. Not half-bad.

The aircraft cabin featured a giant screen TV at the front that displayed time elapsed, distance covered, and time and distance remaining in the flight, these figures expressed in miles and kilometers, canceling any chance of false optimism. Alternating with the figures, the screen flashed an image of a vast North Atlantic separating a narrow strip of North America on one side and Europe on the other. A cartoon airliner appeared nearly motionless in the space between the two. It was during the flight that I became convinced that nothing is so much like eternity as a long trip in an airliner.

One of my seat mates was a late middle-age man who had emigrated from Italy to the U.S. in the early 1960s. After 30 years working for the city of New York, he had retired and now split his time between his home in the U.S. and visiting family in Italy. I envied his having relatives in Italy that he could visit and stay with, which he did two or three times a year. On the other hand, I didn’t like to think of making this flight several times per year.

He was a nice enough gentleman but seemed determined single handedly to prove the stereotype that only death can stop Italians from talking. I learned in brain curdling detail about his job, his family, New York City, and his Italian relatives.

After nearly eight hours of flight time, the cartoon airliner was over Italy and approaching the city of Milan. The cabin crew hustled through the passenger compartment collecting trash and getting the passengers ready for landing. The seat belts on and tray tables in their full upright position announcement followed in three languages. The lethargy I’d been feeling during the flight disappeared as I realized that when the aircraft door opened and I stepped out, I’d be in Italy.