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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 sp