EATING DANTE

Udine

It required three trains to get from Como to Udine, and not one of them left on time. There was the local train from Como to Milan, an sleek futuristic looking high-speed job called Eurostar that I took from Milan to Venice, then another local to Udine. The local from Como to Milan was only about 10 minutes late. In Milan’s central station, I checked the large TVs scattered around the station for the next train to Venice, where I had to go to connect with a train for Udine. I had about two hours to kill before the Eurostar left for Venice.

After off loading my stuff from the local from Como – I really needed to learn to pack less – I piled it on a cart and lugged it off to the ticket office and asked the very nice lady behind the ticket window about the next train to Venice. I showed her my Trenitalia rail pass, figuring that was good enough to get me on the next train. But she was ready to extract a little more money from me. It turned out that the rail pass was good enough to get me on the train but not enough to reserve a seat for me. You can’t take a Eurostar train without a reservation. Okay, then, what with this being the ticket office and all, could I just buy one? The answer was yes but not here, she told me. Even though you need a reservation for a Eurostar train, Trenitalia doesn’t sell reservations. For that, you need to go to a private travel agent, one of whom just happened to be right across from the ticket office. So, off I went to buy my reservation. A large sign on the door to the travel agent warned me that baggage carts were not allowed in the office. I vaguely recalled reading somewhere that leaving your luggage unattended in a train station or an airport is the fastest way to lose it. So it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I parked the cart outside the travel agent’s office and went inside. I needn’t have worried. It took only a minute, literally, for the agent to take my information, tap a few computer keys, generate a card with my reservation and charge me 12 Euros.

Then I lugged my three bags to a train on track nine, heaved them onboard and collapsed in my seat. The Eurostar looked great, low slung and modernistic in design. The seats were roomy and comfortable, and the large windows promised great views as the train raced across the width of northern Italy. Or anyway, that’s what the brochure had promised. The only problem was the train wouldn’t go.

About 40 minutes past the scheduled departure time, there was a long announcement over the station’s public address system. Now announcements in train stations are always incomprehensible but this one, being in Italian, was especially mystifying. But when all my fellow passengers got out of their seats, began collecting their belongings and exiting the car, I got the hint that something was wrong with the train.

So, I hauled my bags off the train, scored another luggage cart and followed the other passengers. A further message on the PA system informed us that our new train was on track 14, so we set off. After we had gotten about halfway there, another long message boomed out of the overhead speakers, causing my fellow passengers to stop in their tracks, turn around and start trudging back toward where we had come from. A woman passenger, seeing the bewildered look on my face, took pity and explained what was going on. “They say the first train will be fixed promptly, so we should go back on board.” She shrugged apologetically. “That’s Italy,” she told me.

So I trudged back to track nine, dragged my luggage up he steps and heaved it onto a luggage rack, and returned to my seat in the second-class compartment. It was like a Three Stooges movie only all the nuck nucks ended in a vowel. Finally, more than an hour late, the train set off for Venice.

If you took a ruler and drew a line connecting Como and Udine, it would be virtually straight. But the land between the two spots changes perceptibly as one travels from west to east. The rail line skirts the foothills of the Dolomites, the Italian Alps, and crosses many rivers. But as we headed across the peninsula, the land dropped and he mountains receded in the distance.

This was wine country and vineyards alternated with fields of corn as the train headed west. This part of Italy is also polenta country. Farmers here use every inch of space to grow things to eat. As the train headed west, I passed fields whose plow lines plowed right up to power pylons or other obstacles, flowed smoothly around them and plowed on. There were grape vines in small clusters in backyards, and I wondered if these were for the table or if the growers there were using them to make their own wines. At one place we passed on the approach to Venice, the train passed a house where there was a small bunch of grape vines, followed by a cornfield that butted up against an electricity sub-station.

Often, vines alternated with rows of corn or other crops such as cabbage, cauliflower or other winter vegetables. At one place, chickens pecked at the ground under a fenced enclosure. At another, a couple of pigs rooted in the dirt in a pen.

Once in Venice, I switched to a local train and headed north to Udine, where I arrived at the central station around 6 p.m. in a light drizzle that seemed to have banished taxis from the face of the city. Taxis in Italy seem not to cruise around for business but to wait in certain locations for people to come to them. Unfortunately for me, the Udine train station didn’t seem to be one of those locations.

Burdened with about 70 pounds of luggage, I set off for the main drag hoping to flag down a cab and get to my hotel. I stood on a corner for around 30 minutes, getting slowly wetter and not seeing a single taxi. The train station parking lot was also a main area for busses and I watched lines of them load passengers and head off to destinations outside the immediate city limits. There did not seem to be any local busses, at least not at the train station. I didn’t even have a tourist map of the city, so I had no idea how far it might have been to the hotel.

When my hat was so soaked with rain that water ran off the brim each time I moved my head, I decided that a new course of action was in order. I returned to the terminal and approached a clerk selling bus tickets at a kiosk, and showed her the address of my hotel but she shook her head and made it clear that no bus from the train station headed that way. Growing increasingly frustrated I asked her about taxis. She handed me a card with a phone number on it and pointed me to a pay phone. I made a call and managed in my mangled Italian to give a dispatcher my location. Then I returned to my spot on the street in front of the station and waited for the taxi, which showed up in around 10 minutes. A little over an hour after arriving, I arrived at my hotel.

It was pretty clear right away that the hotel was formerly a rather large home that had been converted to a hotel. There was really no lobby, just a room inside the front door, and a staircase that led to upper floors. A large bowl filled with fruit at the foot of the stairs was a nice welcoming touch. I checked in and got the key to my room, which was on the second floor. The room key was an old fashioned affair attached to a large metal weight, making it unlikely that guests would forgetfully pocket the key and walk out of the hotel with it.

My room on the second floor was smallish but with a high ceiling and large windows that gave it a larger feeling. It was blessedly warm, even though some considerate hotel staffer had left a window ajar to let in fresh air, something I was to find commonly throughout Italy. Unfortunately, the window had no screen; another common circumstance in Italian hotels, and the fresh air brought with it plenty of mosquitoes.

One would think that the country that gave name to perhaps the world’s worst mosquito-borne plague, mal aria (bad air) would by the 21St Century have figured out that window screens were a good idea. But no building I saw in Italy had screens on its windows, and it was in Udine that I began the routine that I followed each night during my stay in the country. Closing the windows in my hotel room, I would get a towel from the bathroom and search the room for mosquitoes, slapping with the towel at the ones I couldn’t reach. Often enough, I awoke the next morning with bites on my arms or legs from critters I had missed on my mosquito search and destroy missions.

Udine is the capital city of the Italian province of the same name, which is in turn the administrative and political center of a region called Friuli-Venezia Giulia. It is one of the areas of the country that has served for centuries as a point of entry of people, foods and ideas from places outside Italy. The ingredients of Udine’s food culture range from the seafood of the Gulf of Trieste to the south and west to the mountains along the border with Austria to the north and the borders of Slovenia, once part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. Included in Friuli-Venezia Giulia is the city of Trieste, once part of Austria, which Italy received as a sort of consolation prize for fighting on the side of the Allies during World War One.

Perhaps the region’s most distinctive foods are a cheese called Montasio, made from the milk of Alpine cattle along the Tagliamento River, and one of the three signal cured hams of Italy, Prosciutto di San Daniele. It is also one of three areas in Italy where people still speak an ancient dialect called Ladin. According to the late food writer Waverley Root, there were around 800,000 Ladin-speaking people in the region, although others put the number considerably lower.

Much of the land of Friuli-Venezia Giulia is not particularly productive agriculturally, according to Root, and wild game meats play a large role in the cuisine of this region. And as were typical of mountainous areas all over Italy, preserved pig products, salume, play a large role in the food of the area.

Having rendered my hotel room as much of a mosquito-free zone as possible, I showered and put on dry clothes. My hotel was located about a mile and a half from the old center city of Udine. Although it was still dreary and overcast, the rain had stopped. Armed with a tourist map, on which a very kindly hotel manager had highlighted in yellow the streets leading from the city center to the hotel, I set off to see some of Udine and find myself some dinner.

During my Italy trip, I kept in close contact with home via email, and although the bigger cities in Italy had many Internet cafes where for a few Euros I could send messages home, some of the smaller places presented distinct challenges in finding such places. Udine was one of the latter. The hotel manager informed me that the only Internet café she knew of was located in the old center city, about a mile and a half from the hotel. Armed with the map, I set out to find it.

My hotel was set on a side street, down from one of Udine’s main drags. Strolling down a small side street toward the main ring road, I passed a small grocery store that featured a large selection of wines in a display window. Glancing at the display as I strolled past, I froze in my tracks. In the window were numbers of bottles whose labels featured pictures of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Printing on the labels extolled the virtues of Il Duce and Der Fuhrer. I thought this might be another manifestation of the Northern League in this part of Italy until I noticed a bottle whose label sported an image of Che Guevarra. I was more than a little mystified, but as the store was already closed for the night, there was no one I could ask about this, even if I could have summoned from my limited store of Italian the words to form questions about why the hell anyone would put these creatures on bottles of wine. Resolving to ask at the hotel about the store and its peculiar vintages, I turned left at the Piazzale Oberdan and headed up Viale F. Ranati to the traffic light, turned left at the Via A. Caccia and headed downtown.

A light mist had begun falling, encasing the streetlights in yellow halos. As I headed toward Udine’s restored old walled city center, it began raining again. I managed to find a taxi getting gas at a service station on my side of the road and I got the driver to take me the rest of the way downtown.

Udine has a very picturesque restored center city, with quite a few buildings that date back to medieval times and a few Roman era ruins. The cab dropped me off at the Piazza Maggio, and I started walking around, looking in store windows and checking out restaurant menus.

As in most Italian towns of any size, a Duomo or cathedral anchored the city center. In Udine it was the Duomo E Oratorio Della Purita. From there, I walked in widening circles, checking out the Chiesa Di San Francisco, the Loggia Di San Giovanni and the rather ornate Palazzo Della Banca D’Italia. At opposite corners of the Piazza Maggio were the Castello Musei Civici and the beautiful Basilica Delle Grazie. The Basilica was gorgeous, with incredible altar decorations that I came to appreciate as one of the most accessible forms of art throughout the country. I wanted to take pictures in the Basilica but there was a service going on at one of the side altars. Promising myself I would return, I set off to explore as much of the center of Udine as failing light would allow.

Udine’s old walled city is very pretty, with a warren of narrow, cobbled streets and covered walkways that offered me a welcome relief from the rain. Shops lined the walkways and offices and apartments occupied the spaces above them. Even a cursory glance at menus and wine lists displayed in front of restaurants and wine bars revealed that there was a heavy German and Slovenian influence in the region. There was even a Gewerztraminer wine being promoted at one restaurant.

Despite the best efforts of the hotel manager to keep me from getting lost, my unfailing lack of a sense of direction kicked in and I could not find the Internet café. After passing the same police station three times, I resolved to go in and ask for directions to the place. As I approached the police station doorway, I noticed a group of people standing in front of a bar, chatting. Right next to the bar was a neon sign that read, “Internet Service.” Sighing, I headed over there, only to find that it was closed. Muttering curses to myself, I resumed my wandering. In the next couple of hours, I roamed all over old Udine, finally ending up at a restaurant near my hotel. Footsore and wet, I went inside to sample the local cuisine.

The restaurant, a fair-sized place just down from the hotel, was cozy and crowded. Across from me, a couple of local men dug into pizzas, large flat jobs with very thin crusts and simple toppings that consisted of tomatoes, cheese and paper-thin slices of Prosciutto di San Daniele. Large salads of arugula, which the Italians call rucola or rocket, and glasses of red wine, completed their meal.

Not wanting pizza, I selected a carpraccio of prosciutto and mozzarella di bufala for a first course and a pasta dish called strazzopreti or – no joke – “strangle the priest,” as a second course. The name supposedly derives from the fact that the dish was so delicious that in medieval times, when only the wealthy and the clergy could afford to eat it, priests would gorge on it until they choked. This nasty sentiment is expressed in the monikers of pasta dishes all over Italy, although the names and ingredients change a bit depending on the regions and the dialects spoken there. According to The Dictionary of Italian Food and Drink, a wonderful book by food writer John Mariani that I lugged around Italy with me, this dish is also made in the Trentino region using potato dumplings called gnocchi; in Emilia-Romangna, the dish is called strozzapreti and is made with a wide, flat noodle called tagilatelle; in the Neapolitan dialect it is called strangolaprievete.

The carpaccio came with three thick slices of mozzarella di bufala, a cheese made with the milk of water buffalo whose ancestry can be traced back to the Romans, who either brought them back to Italy from Africa or who received them as tribute. In any case, their milk is used to make the cheese, which is prepared daily. Italians believe that the cheese must be eaten within no more than eight hours of its production, or it loses its distinctive flavor. Perhaps that is why it isn’t exported. Whatever the reason, you can’t buy the stuff outside Italy.

The waiter placed a bottle of extra virgin olive oil on the table, some red wine vinegar and a basket of bread. Much to the amusement of my fellow diners, I stood up to get a better vantage point, aimed by digital camera and snapped several pictures in rapid succession. I sat down red faced at the commentary around me. Even though I understood very little of it, it must have been along the lines of “why is this idiot taking pictures of his food? “Don’t the Americans eat dinner? I hated calling attention to myself like that but the whole purpose of this trip was to experience and be able to describe Italian foods, so I swallowed my pride and snapped away all over the country.

When I cut into the mozzarella, it oozed milk, which mixed with the green-tinted olive oil and the vinegar. I sprinkled a little pepper on the dish and began eating, sopping up the mix of oil and milk with a little bread. It was incredibly delicious. The cheese had a slight herbal flavor to it, which I have heard some food experts attribute to the grasses on which the bufala feed. I’ve always been more than a little skeptical of that sort of thing, largely because my adulterated taste buds can hardly ever detect the subtle flavors these characters always claim to detect. But I can’t explain that hint of vegetable in the cheese any other way so perhaps it’s true.

The prosciutto was sliced thin enough to read a page of newsprint through, and was sweet and delicious, without any of the saltiness that I expected of cured ham. It is the pride of Italian prosciutto makers to produce the stuff with a minimum of salt, according to TV chef Mario Batalli. Prosciutto di San Daniele comes from the hind quarter of a pig, which is air dried for up to 18 months in special, climate-controlled facilities, using only a minimum of salt in the process. I dressed the prosciutto simply, with just a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and a splash of vinegar.

The pasta dish, strazzopreti, is so simple that it is incredible that so few ingredients could taste so good. The pasta was a type that I had never seen before. It consisted to two short strands of pasta intertwined like rope. It reminded me of the small Italian cigars called Parodi that my grandfather used to smoke.

The pasta came dressed with only extra virgin olive oil and slices of cheese called ricotta salata. Ricotta cheese (in Italian, ricotta means re-cooked. The cheese comes from whey left over from making other chesses) is wrapped in cheesecloth and left until all the liquid drains off. The resulting product, firmer and drier than regular ricotta, is then smoked over an open fire. This cheese gave the strazzopreti a warm, earthy taste, reminiscent of uncooked mushrooms, that was both delicate and delicious.

I walked back to the hotel, had a small glass of wine in the bar, and went to bed early.

The next day was a sort of administrative day, with time out for laundry, sending emails to family and friends and picking up the car that I had reserved. That, in itself was a bit of an adventure.

The laundry was right up the street from my hotel. It was tiny, and empty when I got there. Italians are gadget mad and this laundry was proof positive of that fact. The six washers and six dryers in the laundry were all hooked up to a central computerized control panel. I had to put money into a machine that issued me a card for a preset amount. I then selected the number on the control panel that corresponded to the number on the machine I had chosen. Then, I selected water level, temperature and cycle on the machine itself, loaded the clothes and closed the door. As the machine filled with water, I added soap and bleach. When the clothes were done washing, I repeated the steps in selecting a dryer. Two hours after I had started, I dropped off clean clothes in my hotel room and took a cab to the car rental agency to pick up my car.

The agency was way on the outskirts of Udine and long before I got there I knew I was going to have a hellluva time finding my way back to the hotel. When I got to the agency, the usual crew, one of whom spoke English, wasn’t on duty. The two people there spoke not a word of English. The head clerk told me he spoke German, but that didn’t help. But it turned out his assistant spoke some Spanish, so he asked her questions in Italian, which she translated into Spanish for me. I answered her in Spanish and she translated the answers into Italian for him. Christ, things got so convoluted – I don’t speak Spanish that much better than I speak Italian – that for a while I feared I’d end up renting the Bat Mobile, a stretch limousine or a bulldozer. But after about an hour, the clerk handed me a completed contract. I made the sign of the cross over myself in hopes that the small print didn’t contain any clauses that would come back to haunt me and signed my name in four places, including the one to show that I wanted all the extra insurance known to man. I didn’t fancy being stopped from leaving the country at the end of my trip due to some damage to the car that I hadn’t even noticed.

When it came time to pay, the clerk ran my debit card through the car reader, and nothing happened. He ran it again and still nothing happened. My heart sank. Three days into my trip and the money had suddenly run out? Before I left the U.S. one of the things I had forgotten to do was to get a duplicate of my debit card. If somehow the magnetic stripe on the thing had gone belly up, how the hell would I get any money? A quick look in my wallet revealed that I had 30 Euros.

The clerk dialed the phone and spoke to someone at the other end of the line who evidently pissed him off, for he slammed the phone down muttering Italian curses. “Hay problemas;” are there problems? I asked the other clerk, who relayed my question to the first one. Just wait, he answered in Italian. He ran the debit car a third time, and it worked.

After a bit more linguistic song and dance, the head clerk took me outside and showed me a car. It was a Fiat diesel-powered hatchback with a standard shift. It had plenty of room and was just high enough off the ground to make it easy to get into and out of the thing.

I drove out of the driveway of the rental agency, turned left and was almost immediately lost. For the next hour, I drove in circles, passing the same places over and over. I kept pulling over the side of the road to consult my map, then getting back on the road again. I made the mistake of driving toward the center city, with its warren of narrow streets that often enough ended up in dead ends. Then, I’d have to back out of the dead end, much to the annoyance of other drivers who to their credit did not honk, swear or make rude gestures.

Eventually, I realized that the map I had been using didn’t include the roads outside a narrow area around my hotel. I stopped off at another hotel and got a larger map. Armed with that, I finally recognized a sign that told me I was on a ring road that would lead me back to the street my hotel was on. Soon enough, I was pulling into the parking lot behind the hotel.

I walked back downtown, looking for a place to have lunch. I ended up eating in a German restaurant just for a change of pace. I had a first course of a really delicious squash soup, followed by rabbit grilled and basted with a very delicate sauce that tasted a bit like barbecue sauce cut with balsamic vinegar. The meat was tender and delicious and in fact tasted a lot like chicken.

Later that evening, I found a small restaurant around the corner from the hotel and went in for dinner. Someone was loading chunks of fruitwood into the burn box and the whole room was suffused with the smell, a bit like apple. The chef would periodically rake hot coals out of the fire and push them under the grill, which was canted at an angle so part of it was very close to the coals and part higher, above them. As he cooked meats, he moved them gradually up the grill, away from the hottest part of the fire, until they were done. It was really fascinating to watch.

For dinner I had pasta e fagioli or pasta and beans. It was very different from the versions of it I had eaten in Italian restaurants back home. The chef started with chicken stock, and then browned pancetta or Italian bacon in a skillet. He added cooked beans to the stock and then must have added pureed beans to thicken it. The pasta was a tiny version of rigatoni called I think ditalini. The dish came in a sort of mini tureen and it was thick and hearty with the smokey flavor of the pancetta running all through it; truly heavenly.

My second course was grilled veal chops, basted with olive oil and dusted with salt and pepper before cooking over an open flame on a grill. I like veal and this was delicious but the chops were a bit underdone for my taste. Most grilled meats I ate in Italy were served rare, and although one could ask for them cooked well done, the request tended to evoke either pitying or scathing looks from waiters.

After I returned to the hotel, I packed in preparation for leaving the next morning, performed my mosquito-killing ritual and fell asleep watching the BBC news on satellite TV. During my time in Italy nothing worked better as a soporific than the pompous, plummy wankers on the BBC. The following morning, I checked out of the hotel and hit the Autostrada heading toward Venice.