EATING DANTE

It was at the Milan airport that I first became aware of and amused by the Italian penchant for naming things. The Milan airport is called "Malpensa," literally, bad thought. Given my loathing of airports, I could see how someone might be inspired to name an airport that, but the Malpensa goes with the place where the airport was built, not the facility itself.

It became easier to identify with the choice of name when I went to the baggage claim area. A large screen over the baggage conveyor belt announced which flights were unloading and how long passengers from other flights had to wait before their bags came through the conveyor door. The screen kept flashing the time of first delivery of bags and the time of the last delivery. To support the illusion, the baggage conveyor kept up a steady clatter as it went round and round, empty. The time of first delivery kept changing as no bags emerged from the bowels of the airport.

Before long, people began to get restive and the Italians among the passengers started complaining openly to each other. Finally, after nearly an hour of waiting, I collected my bags, loaded them onto a trolley and headed for customs. Surprisingly, the gaudily uniformed customs officer just waved me on toward the entrance and I found myself standing in the main airport terminal at 9 a.m., local time.

In some ways, the Milan airport was just like every other airport I’d ever seen. Utilitarian at best, butt ugly at worst. But there were some interesting touches aimed at easing the traveler’s way. On the arrivals floor, for example, I found a coin-operated laundry, with an attached dry cleaner. It even featured a self-service pants pressing station. I wondered if wrinkled travelers stood in their shorts while pressing their trousers. Also on the arrivals level was a baggage claim where travelers could store their bags for up to three days for a fee. Two clerks were doing a brisk business, running bags through an x-ray machine.

A quick glance at a map reveals that Milan is truly northern Italy. Just a few miles further north, and you’re into the “Dolomiti,” the Dolomites, otherwise known as the Italian Alps. As proof of this northern longitude, the airport was crawling with tall, leggy blonds who looked nothing like the stereotype of mesomorphic, swarthy Italians. Even the female cops were tall and blond. I could easily have concluded that I had landed in Munich instead of Milan.

The airport was swarming with police. Sitting outside a café, I observed one particular specimen, an anti-terror policeman. Dressed in utility pants, he wore a large web belt, strapped onto which was spare ammunition clips, handcuffs, radios, tear gas canister and some other things I didn’t recognize. On his right side was a nine-millimeter pistol. Ties from the pistol holster also went around the bottom of his pant legs, above where they tucked into his combat boots.

The man was a sergeant, his uniform studded with badges and insignias, including a patch on his left shoulder that read “Italia,” just in case terrorists might mistake him for a Bulgarian cop.

I suppose it’s easy to be snide about this, but Europe in general and Italy in particular have been dealing with terrorism in one form or another for decades. It’s only we Americans who are relative newcomers to it; hence all the cops at the Milan airport.

Beside the anti-terrorism police, the airport also boasted regular airport security police, a detachment from Italy’s federal police the "Carabinieri," plus regular Milan city cops. Trudging into the airport from the plane I had even spotted a gaggle of squad cars marked “Guardia Finanza,” Italy’s tax cops (think the Internal Revenue Service with its own unformed police).

I was stuck at Malpensa until the bus to Como left at 1 p.m., and at around 11:30, being hungry, I decided to put my theory that airport eats are a window into a nation's culinary soul to the test. I didn’t want a big meal just something I could eat standing up, like the Italians I saw all around me. What better for that than pizza?

I wandered into a restaurant on the second floor, bellied up to the bar and ordered “uno tancio,” a slice. There were a number of different types of pizza on display, but I decided that simplest was best and opted for a slice of pizza Margherita.

Pizza – dough dressed with oil, cheese or other toppings – dates back in one form or another to the time of the Romans. supposedly there is even a 2,000 year-old recipe for something like a personal size pizza. But the dish as Italians eat it today goes back only to late-1800s era Naples. A Neopolitan pizza chef served a pie to an Austrian princess named Margherita. Legend has it that she found the pie so delicious that the chef named it in her honor.

Pizza is a dish I can take or leave; usually I prefer to leave it. The way it is served in the U.S. is just too much, too much topping, too much cheese, and too much cheap, greasy meat. So I approached this meal prepared not to like it.

The waitress took a slice from a pie hot from the oven, slapped it on a paper plate and handed it to me with a cheery “buon appetitio.” It was marvelous, hot and cheesy, with a paper-thin, chewy crust and toppings consisting solely of crushed tomatoes and a sprinkling of Parmesan and mozzarella cheeses. The best adjective to describe it was “delicate” not a word often applied to pizza in America.

I ordered another slice immediately. Mimicking the Italians around me, I folded the pizza into a little package, wrapped it in the slice of wax paper it came with and nibbled on it, daintily keeping my fingers clean.

Over the next month, I was to eat pizza in every part of the country I visited. Sometimes I had it topped with vegetables such as artichoke or bell pepper. Once, I even had it topped with slices of hard-boiled egg. Always it was hot and delicious in that delicate way that always surprised me.

With time to kill before the bus to my next destination, I wandered the airport checking out the sights. On the second floor, I came upon a Burger King, just opening in advance of lunch. My first impulse was to avert my eyes and walk away rapidly. I wouldn’t be caught dead in a Burger King in the States, so I certainly had no intention of eating in one in Italy, but I couldn’t resist the chance to check out the offerings. What did they serve in an Italian Burger King? Mostly, it turned out, the usual – burgers, chicken sandwiches and fries. Then I noticed the condiments. How many Burger Kings in the States featured bottles of extra virgin live oil and balsamic vinegar? In addition to the usual salad selections, this Burger King also offered “caprese salad,” a mix of salad greens, cherry tomatoes and mozzarella cheese balls. Curious, I ordered one, sprinkled it with the olive oil and balsamic vinegar and dug in. It was delicious.

One o’clock found me standing in front of the airport, waiting for the bus to Como. The driver, a Filipino expatriate named Marty, gave me a rundown of his personal history on the 50-minute drive. Before landing in Italy, Marty had worked in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, with a brief stint on the U.S. West Coast.

He liked Italy best of all the places he had been, and many of his fellow Filipinos agreed, he told me. “Italy has the second largest group of Filipino’s in the world, after the U.S.,” with about 400,000 living and working in the country. “The Italians treat us very well,” he said.

And the worst place he had ever lived and worked? Saudi Arabia, he answered without hesitation. “They don’t treat my people well,” he said. Saudi Arabia has a huge population of foreign workers, everything from maids to doctors and truck drivers, according to Marty.

Marty said he was in Iraq in the 1980s, during part of that country’s war with Iran. “I was a construction crane operator,” he said. While there, he talked with some captured Iranian prisoners of war. “They were gassed, with mustard gas,” Marty said.

Marty’s analysis of the current Iraq war was stark. America needed to put in power someone even more brutal than Saddam. “You need somebody ten times as bad,” he said.

As we headed toward Como the land rose, the hills gradually becoming higher. On some hills, the tree line ended about three-quarters of the way to the top, leaving crowns of bare rock.

Como lies east and north of Milan in a sort of bowl formed in surrounding hills. The city has been inhabited at least since Roman times, when it was called Comum, and was probably home to people long before the Romans. It is in Lombardy, one of the most prosperous regions in Italy. The area is named after the Longobards, so-called supposedly because they sported long beards. Exactly where they came from is something of a mystery, although some historians claim they were Normans from what is today the Normandy region of France. The Normans were seafarers (these are the same people who conquered Britain in 1066), and other, more southerly areas of Italy also were under Longobard rule in the period between the end of the Roman Empire and the coming of the Saracens from North Africa.

Lombardians are “polentare” – polenta eaters. Some food writers, notably the late Waverley Root, credit the Longobards with having introduced polenta to Italy. Polenta is corn mush, as dear to the hearts and palates of northern Italians as potatoes are to the Irish, as a means for filling the belly and transporting the flavors of sauces, gravies and roasted meats from cook pot to taste buds.

According to Root, the Longobards made their polenta from millet, a grain introduced first to the Romans and later to the Longobards by people from Gaul, what is today Alpine Italy.

Other food historians attribute polenta to a group that preceded the Longobards and the Roman, the Etruscans. According to them, polenta traces its roots to a sort of grain mush called “puls,” that Etruscan peasants ate. The Romans apparently developed such a taste for the stuff that their legionnaires carried it in their haversacks on campaigns all over the known world.Corn didn't arrive in Italy until the 16th Century, brought from the New World by Italian explorers.

Polenta is so identified with the north of Italy that polentare has become a taunt, along with "Tedeschi" – Germans – in the mouths of disapproving southern Italians. The northerners respond by calling their southern counterparts “Africans.” Yes, that means exactly what you are thinking it means. A nasty expression of this regional prejudice states that Garibaldi didn’t unite Italy in 1861, he divided Africa.

The extent of the Italian north south divide became clear to me one day as I strolled the streets surrounding my hotel in Como. An election poster pasted on a telephone box promoted a candidate for a local office. It read:

Guido Martinelli per Como.
Si alla polenta, no al cous cous.
Orogliosi delle notre tradizioni
In English, the sign calls on voters to cast their ballots for Mr. Martinelli. Say yes to polenta. Say no to cous cous, a pasta dish popular in North African countries, it advises. The last line translates as “guardians of our traditions.”

I was to encounter similar sentiments all over the north of this country. Immigration, especially illegal immigration, is a big issue in Italy. Many of the illegal immigrants are from North Africa, and are Muslims. A lot of Italians feel they are forming an indigestible lump in the Italian body politic and resent their growing numbers. Lombardy is a stronghold of the Lega Nord, the Northern League, a political party that advocates among other things hmalting immigration. Formed in the early 1980s, the Northern League also used to advocate separating the north of Italy into its own country. It is either an amusing or idiotic comment on Italian politics that one of the founders of the Northern League, billionaire Sylvio Berlusconi, was the country’s prime minister at the time of my visit.

Milan is the main cultural and culinary powerhouse in Lombardy, and has given the region its signature dish, risotto Milanese. More on this later. Many of the smaller towns such as Como have specialized dishes of their own based on local produce and game. In the case of Como, the signature dish is "risotto" or rice served with perch from the lake after which the town is named.

Form a V with the index and ring fingers of one hand. That is more or less the shape of Lake Como. The town itself sits in a bowl formed among a range of high hills on either side of the lake.

Wandering the town’s narrow, twisting streets, I was reminded of lake towns in upstate New York. The day I arrived was cloudy, with intermittent bouts of fog and rain. The town’s half-deserted air gave it a sort of “closed for the winter,” feel, though there were still plenty of people around.

The area was cool and damp, with lots of pine trees, not something I associated with Italy. It looked and felt a lot like good apple country and later in the day I found that apples are indeed grown in the region and sold in local markets. I tried one bought at a market down the hill from my hotel. It was crisp and crunchy, slightly larger than the ones I’d eaten from upstate New York, though not quite as sweet. It was really very good.

Como is quite the tourist spot during summer, but in mid-October it had the half-empty, lonely feel that I used to get from going to Lake George in upstate New York, after the summer season had ended.

The architecture of the buildings was quite distinctive. Mostly, they were rectangular, five or six stories tall with stuccoed walls on the outside, painted in a sort of dirty pink. Most of the buildings sported green wooden shutters.

The city’s streets, especially in the old walled section are steep, winding and narrow. A promenade winds along the curving lakefront. Tour boats nestled against their moorings. The fog and clouds came so low that they were nearly halfway down the sides of some of the surrounding hills.

Across from the lake was a narrow-gauge railway called a funicular that led almost straight up a steep hill above Como. From the top, I could have see the entire town laid out, as well as most of the lake had the weather been better. As it was, the fog totally obscured the town, and not for the last time in Italy I had the bizarre experience of looking down on clouds.

Como and its environs are really quite well off economically. On both sides of the lake I could see large villas that looked well kept and occupied, although some were clearly summer residences. Lake Como became quite trendy with the Hollywood set in the 1960s and some of the grandest villas to be seem from the lake still belonged to Hollywood stars (the Baldwins purportedly keep a home here, for example).

Lombardy borders Austria, Lichtenstein and Switzerland. The food of this region is heavily influenced by Italy’s neighbors and some-time occupiers. People in Lombardy prefer wide flat noodles called “tagliatelli.” When they eat pasta and they prefer it served with cooked tomatoes, rather than the “marinara” (sailor style) sauce preferred by Italians further down the boot or the “ragu” – meat sauce —made famous by the chefs of Bologna.

Lombard food features dishes that are traditionally cooked in butter rather than olive oil. Lombardy is above Italy’s “olive oil line,” an imaginary but nonetheless real boundary that separates the country based on the cooking fat of choice.

Draw a line drawn across Italy from east to west and have it run north of Rome: It would neatly divide olive oil country from butter country. Further north, Italians cook with lard.

That night I ate the signature dish of Como, lake perch with risotto. For a first course, I had caprese salad, a mix of cured ham, tomatoes and mozzarella cheese dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Caprese means in the style of Capri.

The ham was prosciutto di San Daniele, one of the three main styles of prosciutto in Italy, sliced paper-thin. Thick-sliced tomatoes nestled on a bed of the prosciutto along with slices of “mozzarella di bufala,” a type of the cheese made with the milk that comes from a breed of water buffalo first introduced into Italy by the Romans.

The cheese was light and creamy, with a slight green-vegetable sort of taste that supposedly comes from the grasses that the buffalo eat. I was a little skeptical of that, but I had no better explanation for the taste, so maybe it is true.

The tomatoes were bright red and slightly tart and acidic, which flavors balanced nicely with the balsamic vinegar. The olive oil was very good quality extra virgin, with a light green color and a peppery taste. When I cut into the mozzarella, milk spurted out and mixed with the vinegar. I sopped it up with some local bread, which was a bit darker and thicker than most other Italian breads I had eaten. It was so delicious that only with great difficulty did I restrain myself from licking the plate.

To prepare the risotto for the second dish, the chef put butter in a skillet and introduced a special kind of rice called Arborio. This rice has short, stubby grains that have plenty of starch. To cook the rice, the chef gradually added boiling chicken stock to the rice, stirring continuously. As the rice absorbed the stock, the chef added more, until the rice was cooked perfectly “al dente,” or slightly chewy. To finish the rice, the chef added more butter, some cream and grated Parmesan cheese.

The lake perch was cooked in butter in which the chef had first browned sage leaves, which were served on the side as a garnish. The fish fillets were breaded in flour that the Italians call “doppio zero,” -- double zero -- meaning very fine, and then fried. Was it just me, or was there a definite butter theme to this dish?

It was so delicious I made a complete fool of myself carrying on about it to the waiter. I also amused my fellow diners by taking pictures of my dinner. The waiter watched me with a bemused look on his face, as if wondering if Americans didn’t have food at home.

Later, in the town’s old restored commercial center I found a huge McDonalds that was packed with Italians, mostly youngsters, lining up to buy quarter-pounders. Like the Burger King in the Milan airport, it featured caprese salad. The restaurant also sold beer. There’s an innovation the company should consider exporting back to the States.

The next day, I took a ferry and explored the lake. Lake Como bulges outward at its middle, then narrows again toward its far end opposite Como. Small villages cluster along the shore, each with its tourist hotels and apartments facing the water. The hills back from the lake are very steep, and building typically stopped about a third of the way up most of the hills. Above that, the hills were populated only with power pylons and cell phone towers.

Although the day was sunny, the tops of the hills were still shrouded in fog and low-lying clouds. In the far distance the clouds and fog had lifted enough to reveal two mountain peaks already topped with snow.

The hills surrounding the lake were wooded thickly, with trees whose foliage seemed, surprisingly, to have only begun to change colors. Most were still a faded yellow and green. The hills at the north end of the lake seemed higher than those closer to the town, and the tree lines ended lower down their slopes, leaving stretches of bare granite leading to their tops.

Lake Como is not especially large as lakes go. It covers a total of 145,091 square kilometers, and is 650 meters across at its narrowest point and 4.2 kilometers across at its widest.

I left the ferry at a town called Bellagio, near the northern end of the lake. Like so many of the lake towns, it existed mostly at the lake’s edge, with a few streets and flights of steps leading steeply upward. In a small piazza near the lake’s edge, a local car dealer was holding an exhibition of new vehicles. One, a Fiat four-wheel-drive model called a “Panda,” had an English logo on its side panel that read “Don’t stop me, baby.”

Bellagio was home to many touristy places with irritating names like “art house.” But there were also plenty of restaurants offering typical Lake Como fare. After climbing several steep flights of stairs, I stopped along a narrow back street and checked out the menu of a tiny restaurant. Everything sounded good and I was hungry so I walked through to the back. The patio was tiny, with only five tables, and looked out onto a narrow alley and a range of hills in the distance.

As a first course, I ordered the caprese salad, which came with provolone cheese instead of mozzarella. My second course was gnocchi, dressed with a tomato basil sauce and Parmesan cheese. It was really delicious. Sated I strolled back down to the dock and took a ferry back to Como.

Later that night I stopped for supper in a bar. “Bar” in Italy has a somewhat different meaning than it does in the U.S. A bar in Italy serves alcohol, typically wine and beer and less often distilled alcohol such as scotch. They almost always offer espresso and cappuccino, as well as an assortment of snacks such as “panini,” which are small sandwiches, and other finger foods. Typically, freestanding bars do not serve mixed drinks such as martinis. For that, you need a restaurant or hotel bar.

I ordered a panino and a pint of Guinness Stout. As I finished, I spotted a man standing at the bar smoking a cigar. I like a cigar once in a while, so I approached the bar tender and asked for a cigar. When the bar tender asked me what sort of cigar I wanted, I pointed to the one the man was smoking. The man answered me himself, pointing out that he hadn’t bought the cigar at the bar but somewhere else. He then launched into a long explanation about the cigar, telling me that it was called MiCubano but was really from Nicaragua, not Cuba.

He didn’t seem to understand the concept of personal space, standing close as he could to me and speaking directly into my face, breathing beer fumes on me. I interrupted the flow long enough to ask if the cigar was good, what with its being from Nicaragua and not Cuba. Oh, yes, he assured me, he only smoked the finest cigars. After this tiresome bore started on his third explanation of how the cigar was Nicaraguan and not Cuban, I made my apologies and beat a hasty retreat back to my hotel.

The strange part of all this was how much of what he was saying I actually understood. I guess if you know the context, you can understand the conversation. Another strange aspect of the conversation was the fact that the man almost certainly took me for an Italian. Many people had warned me that I would stand out in Italy and would be tagged almost immediately as an American, but not on that night.

The next day, my last in Como, I took a stroll along the lake front in the early afternoon. Most of the town seemed to be out doing the same thing. People were walking their dogs, pushing kids in strollers, riding ancient bicycles. Lovers old and young strolled hand in hand. There was a fundraiser in town organized by the Italian Multiple Sclerosis Society and fleets of motorized wheelchairs buzzed around.

From a perch on a wall near the lakefront, I observed a couple, an older man and a younger woman. He was sweet talking her and I could tell from the look on her face that he was getting nowhere. I had to turn away to keep from laughing out loud.

Como is really a well off area, a fact that came home to me that afternoon, when I passed a real estate office in the old walled part of the city. Posters for home sales and rentals covered the agency’s windows, and the prices were a real eye opener. I saw one 2,500 square foot home advertised for $800,000 Euros, at the exchange rate close enough to a million dollars. On another poster I saw a 30 square meter apartment (a bit over 900 square feet) renting for 1,200 Euros.

Walking back to my hotel I passed a pharmacy with a condom machine on its outside wall. There were nearly a dozen brands in the machine, which had a sign on it that read COONTROL. The first O had the male symbol superimposed on it. The second O had the female symbol. I supposed this was some marketing guy’s idea of clever. Each brand featured a picture of a woman supposedly in the throws of ecstasy, except that all were fully clothed. I guessed all you had to do was show women the condoms.

Right across from the train station in Como was a restaurant called O’Shaugnessy’s Irish Pub. I’d seen this place every day that I had been in Como and fascinated to see what was on the menu, I ventured inside. The special of the day was “linguini alla vuongale en rossa,” linguini with clams in red sauce. The menu contained other Irish favorites such spaghetti Bolougnese, risotto with lake perch and a large selection of pizzas.

Apparently it had never occurred to the owners of this restaurant that matching Irish food with an Irish-named restaurant might actually be appealing to Italians who could get risotto any time they wanted it, but might find Mulligan Stew intriguing. At any rate, I headed up the street looking for a place to have dinner. Being in a tourist area, restaurants posted their menus outside their doors, many of which I photographed. I got more than a few perplexed looks from headwaiters wondering what was so fascinating about their menus that this idiot tourist would photograph them.

I followed a simple rule in Italy; I avoided any restaurant that advertised a “menu touristica.” The same went for places that advertised “international cuisine.” I am not entirely certain what international cuisine is but had I wanted eat it, I could have taken an hour and a half train ride into Manhattan. To get to Italy, I had spent more than eight hours crammed in a seat so close to the one in front of me that most of the time I was sniffing my kneecaps. After that I wanted to eat Italian food.

Fortunately, Como was well supplied with restaurants serving real Lombardy fare, so my wandering ended with me seated in one, perusing the menu. That night, my last in Como, I decided to try polenta, and ordered the “osso buco,” which came with a side of the corn mush dear to northern Italian palates.

Lombardians prefer their meats braised or stewed, cooked for long periods that render them fall-off-the-bone tender. One favorite, called osso buco or hole in the bone, starts with veal shanks, a not-so-tender cut that is browned, then braised in stock and wine for a couple of hours to leave the poorer cut tender and moist. A favorite part of this dish is the marrow that lies in the “buco,” or hole, after which some poetically inclined Italian named the dish. Lombardians spoon the marrow out of the bone and eat it, or they spread it on “crostini” – toasted bread – as an appetizer. Osso buco is often prepared with onions, carrots and celery, and in Lombardy is comes with polenta.

As it was only 7:30 at night, I was virtually alone in the restaurant, except for a party of German tourists in the next room. Tourists from Germany and Austria must make up a large percentage of visitors to the Como area, and I noticed that most of the menus outside restaurants were written in English, German and Italian. Further evidence of this prevalence of German-speakers among Como visitors came from the headwaiter at the restaurant, who addressed me first in German and on seeing the perplexed look on my face, switched smoothly to English. This being tagged as Teutonic happened repeatedly to me in Italy. I never did figure out what about me appeared German to Italian eyes.

The osso buco was delicious, the veal tender and succulent. The dish was served in brown gravy made from the meat’s juices, and the carrots, onions and celery were soft, almost overcooked to my American palate. The dish came with three balls of golden yellow polenta.

I was unimpressed with polenta, at least on that night in that restaurant. By itself, the polenta didn’t taste like much of anything. Even the corn flavor seemed muted. At best, it was a vehicle for carrying gravy. At that, it was certainly as good as mashed potatoes.

The following morning, I boarded a commuter train for Milan, picked up a long distance train, and headed across the country to a town called Udine.