Sicily = Mexico? (Monday 12 October -- Friday October 16th)

Did Sicily break off from Mexico 50 years ago and go full steam across the Atlantic and squeeze through the mouth of the Mediterranean and engage in a blanket memory-embedding marketing campaign to convince us all that it has always been here? Just kidding. Kind of. We stayed in Taormina, saw Mt. Etna, engaged in cooking adventures (we had a kitchen in the apartment we were staying in), were epically lost in Catania (I can still hear a projected Dave Moore in the car: "Goddamnit! Goddamnit! You've got to be fucking kidding me! Can someone please put up a street sign?!!"), had a nice afternoon on the beach, saw some amazing ruins, got a haircut, and wondered if every square inch of architectural wonder in Taormina had been grafted onto a shopping mall (it had). Favorite town: Noto; the entire town had been built out of the same toasted yellow-hued stone (thanks to Google: "Noto’s stone is a variable-light yellow colored Miocenic fossili ferous calcarenite, belonging to Palazzolo formation which is of sedimentary origins from the Iblei series.").  Our last day and a half in Taormina, it rained... poured... like crazy; after the Messina mudslides, we didn't sleep so well.

We spent our last Sicilian evening in Palermo because we were feeling a yen for the insanity and beauty of an Italian city. Palermo was supposed to be more insane than Naples, but we found it to be reminiscent of New York-Brooklyn (with the addition of lots of pretty boys on scooters [one of whom was hauling ass down one of the streets with a baby in one arm (obviously, baby car seats, etc. are an invention to get Americans to spend more money... the Italian version of a car seat is sandwiching a child inbetween mother and father careening down a gothic street at top speed)]). Amy had a good afternoon photographing all of this happening while I played bodyguard. There was a lot of Richard Scary half-the-house revealed scenarios where we got a real appreciation for the layers of history, architecturally, that are layered on top of one another in a living breathing millenia old city like thick paint. For dinner, we went to Osteria di Vesperi where we got the tasting menu (house-made bread including squid ink bread [think Jane's Oceanoff-winning prosquiderol], raw fish platter, ravioli, pasta rings with barbequed octopus, lamb, tuna, cheese plate, dessert [as well as several amuse bouche... everything was covered in bottarga]); it was really good but way too much food. Amy's quote: "I feel like I swallowed a basketball." We got up at 6AM on Saturday and embarked on an eleven-and-a-half hour train ride to Rome with the intention of rewriting NYT's 36 Hours in Rome.

Amalfi (6 October -- 11 October)

 

After the farm, Baghdad would have seemed like a nice way to spend a few days, but I have a feeling Amalfi would have held its own without the flying excrement torture. The way the town (and all of the towns on the Amalfi Coast) was stacked up and perched on the side of serious vertical was unbelievable; every bit of the valley the town inhabited was terraced and had lemon orchards and there were innumerable steps (many of which Amy and I took) that led to nowhere and to everywhere. We had an 8-hour hike around the valley that we thought we would never come back from, the best lunch possible from da Vincenzo in Positano (grilled octopus and deep-fried artichoke, frutta de mare fritta, and a nice regional white wine), and some beach time doing a lot of nothing.

Down on the Farm: Rustic Gone Wrong ( 4 October -- 6 October)

Stop in Naples on the Way to the Farm
§no picture... would have been clubbed immediately after taking camera out and robbed blind§
So, at least near the train station, the water supply is laced with a nice amount of crack cocaine. Amy and I took a stroll in the neighborhood between trains and Naples makes the Loin look like Pac Heights.

 

The Farm

We should have heeded the sign at the "convenience" motel/bed and breakfast at the Contursi train station: once we reached the 4 out of 4 mark for baby shit and piss hitting the floor during a meal, the fact had sunk in that our hosts only used cold water and glycerine soap to clean their dishes (and hands after baby cleanup), and the realization that everything we were eating with or from (and the walls) had a good amount of black mold, we came to a quick decision to end our stint helping this struggling family on their "farm." Day 1 we helped with the grape harvest and crush (which lasted about 2 hours), and Day 2, after we had given notice, we picked the trash up around the house (just the inanimate trash), made some hasty plans for travel and lodging in Amalfi, and found ourselves elated on a bus to Salerno at 6:30PM.

Florence (Friday 2 October -- Sat 3 October)

I can still hear the echo of what Rick is going to tell me when I return: "Moore, you travel halfway across the globe, go to Florence, and you don't go the Ufizzi?! Where are your priorities man?!" All I can say is that we weren't planning on spending 2 days in Florence, the line of cows waiting to get into the Ufizzi was hours long, Boticelli can wait (or he will be better remembered in print; Picasso, at least his cubism, is better as plates in a text book), and they were holding Octoberfest in Dante's piazza (note Lynchian character in middle of the shot below)... what do you want from me?

Figline Valdarno (27 September -- 2 October)

What is it that Jennifer Oakes said about cooking school?... something like: "Cooking school is for people who don't know how to cook and want to spend a lot of money."  I should have consulted with Jen before booking my cooking class with Claudio Piantini, the kingpin of a gypsy scam operation running out of the hills above Filigne Valdarno.  To be fair, I did cook a lot of dishes, picked up a few things, helped butcher a lamb, and made lunch and dinner for me and Amy Wednesday and Thursday of the week, but I ended up seeing Claudio as some tragic figure in the middle of a swirl of family obligation, a bad marriage to an insane woman, and the need to whore himself out to a U.S. cooking vacation (or whatever the hell they call these culinary program places) outfit to keep it all afloat while his restaurant flounders).  Could just be my opinion, but still.  Got the hell out of there a day early and hightailed it for Florence.

Parma (25 September -- 27 September)

Friday and Saturday, Amy and I stayed with her Parma host family from a semester she spent in Italy in college. Claudio and Claudia Ferraroni live in a 4-story building with Claudio's three brothers and each of them have a floor; the top floor is not occupied and Amy and I stayed there. Claudio, Claudia, and their son Lorenzo, were incredible hosts and Claudio immediately saw that the way to connect with me (as we couldn't do it though language) was through cured meat and booze; I believe I ate half a pig's hindquarters while at their home and ran though quite a few bottles of wine and about a bottle of grappa with Claudio. Claudio also liked to bring out his Mussolini paraphenelia (apron, underwear, wine collection...) to rile up the liberals, and it got really interesting when he brought out his shotgun...



Saturday, Claudio took Amy and me to a parmesan cheese production wharehouse and we got an impromptu tour by the Indian guys making the cheese. It's quite an operation with copper vats that are used to make each round. They take big paddles and dislodge what becomes the round from the bottom end of the vat, which looks like an upside down funnel, and then hang the curds in burlap to extract the extra liquid (we each got a fist of warm curds off of one of the rounds... guess that one will be a little light). Once the extra liquid is wicked away from the round, it goes into a plastic mold for a couple of days to form up, then a salt-water bath for a week or so, then to the aging rack for several months. Each round ends up being around 400 Euro and this joint had around 1,000 rounds in the aging racks. We also went to a salumi factory, but they weren't grinding pigs up to shoe them in their own intestines, so we were limited to trying the product. That afternoon, we made carbonara. Saturday night, the entire family (including their daughter Mariana and her boyfriend) went to a restaurant out in the country. Dishes of note: various proscuitti (to be placed in a pillow of fried bread [basically a square fluffy unsweetened donut...] and consumed over and over again), capitelli in brodo, tres ravioli, and wild boar (chingiale).


Sunday for the midday meal, the entire family convened (including Frosty), and Claudia showed Amy and I how to make gnocchi (potatoes and farina, that's it... rice the boiled, peeled, and still steaming warm potatoes into a waiting mound of flour, knead the resultant mixture into a smooth dough, roll pieces into index-finger width lengths, cut into gnocchi-sized pillows, and texture). We had the gnocchi with both a gorganzola sauce and a pomodoro and basil sauce; it was lovely. We spent the afternoon at the house and then Amy and Mariana drove me to the train station so I could make my way to Figline Valdarno for a cooking class.