EATING DANTE

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.