What To Do Tonight? How About the Wild Boar Festival?
So on Saturday, May 12 I took the 10:10 bus from Siena bound for Florence. The bus was FULL - literally not one seat to be had. I had been sitting at a window seat and a woman got on the bus at an outer Florence stop and sat next to me. Within 5 minutes, she asked me if I would be more comfortable sitting in the aisle seat. I said “si”, and we switched places. Very nice I thought, and a rare gesture here in the U.S. (or at least here in the “elbow in the ribs” northeast).
As I rolled into Galluzzo - the last town before one crosses into Florence proper coming from the south - a waterfall of feelings cascaded over me: excitement, melancholy, relief, wonder…After having been on the week-long tour that I was on, and as much fun as it was, it was totally programmed, and in the end it was WORK (relief). The excitement was born out of seeing this beautiful city once again, and that in turn made me feel glad about not being jaded. And as you may or may not remember, I lived in Florence in 1989 and 1990, so a touch of melancholy beset me thinking back to those freewheeling times, and all the water that’s passed under my bridge since then…and the wonder of where my friends lives had taken them since we last met also made a few laps in my brain…
I arrived at noon at Santa Maria Novella Station. My friend Piero was to meet me, but there was no sign of him at the bus terminal, and after walking and scanning for a few minutes, I still didn’t see him. I had his home and cell numbers, so I thought I’d give him a ring to find out just where he was. The umpteen phones that surround the station, now that I’ve had a few encouters with them, I now known not be phones, but phone-LIKE incarnations of slot machines. I read the directions in two languages five separate times, and still managed to lose almost four Euros without ever connecting to the numbers desired. If anyone can explain how these phones actually work (or if they actually do work at all), please post the directions here.
As these things tend to be, I ran into Piero just be accident. Big embrace, double cheek kiss, and we were off, I dragging my wheeled suitcase behind. We probably could have taken the bus, but I was keen to see a bit of the city - the old well-worn paths - on the way back to his place. It was quite warm, and the hazy sunshine clogged my head a bit…
I dumped my suitcase on his terrazzo floor, met his girlfriend Elena, and hit the showers. Italian showers…a question for all of you…Is the Italian shower curtain sector that much less developed than our own? The actual plumbing is usually equal or even superior to those here in the U.S., but for whatever reason, the idea of spraying the entire bathroom with splashes and suds seems not to phase Italians one bit - this is just something that I’ve never quite understood - what’s the aversion to shower curtains? Mentioning the shower afforded me the opportunity to ask this mysterious little question, but to be fair, Piero’s shower does have a shower curtain, but rather two sliding doors that meet at the corner. No, the spalshing is not the problem here…here the problem is SIZE. This shower stall is LITERALLY one meter square…there’s barely enough room to turn around, and if one were a body builder or especially tubby, one literally could not get into this shower…but I digress…
I was hungry (I’m often hungry). I told Piero that as much as LOVE Italian food, after a week solid of lavish Italian meals, I wanted something other-than-Italian. So we went out for Gyros at a new little Greek joint that opened up just around the corner. And as is the way with so many Italian lunch conversations, as we ate, we discussed where we would go for dinner that evening. After some back and forth, we decided on the Sagra del Cinghiale (The Wild Boar Festival).
Dinner hour arrived and we piled into Piero’s brand new FIAT, and pointed the car south. For those of you unfamiliar with Italian navigational habits, ALL Italians think that they know where EVERYTHING is, whether they’ve been there a thousand times or never before. No major departure in this case. We drove the dark, narrow streets outside of Florence, already quite rural in character, and continued further in to the country. We drove by where Piero thought the place should be, but nothing…We asked an older gentleman. He pointed us that way…We drove THAT way, and didn’t feel confident in the guidance, so we spotted a cluster of teenage boys on scooters, and they guided us further on…We forged ahead, and just over a certain little hillock, we found it - The Sagra del Cinghiale!
For those of you from the “old east” in the U.S., this was what we would call a “feast” - the events that so many Italian, Portuguese, etc. parishes and/or social clubs hold to raise money (minus the 50/50 chances, the clattering betting wheels, and the bean bag tosses), though Piero speculated that the most likely beneficiary of this event was the local “Casa del Popolo” (House of the People) considering that this area of Italy is better than 90% Communist - or should I write “Communist”?
The place where we ate was an enclosed tent set with folding tables. The place was packed: long tables of families and friends all around us, and just to my left there was a table of clearly Italian guys, and clearly American girls. The Italian boys were trying to work some flirtatious magic through via some pretty poor English, a sack-full of animated gestures, and some singing as well. It’s good to see that some things about Italy NEVER change…
Our waiter was a 10 year old boy that was closely followed by a cute four year old boy who imitated his every move, and between little jumps and spins, wanted to serve the diners. He was denied, and after a bit of this, a late-teen girl picked him up, gave him a big kiss, and pushed him throught the hole from which the orders arrived, presumably in to arms of his dad…We ordered and were served an antipasto di cinghiale (mixed salami, coppe, etc. made from wild boar), two orders of tortellini al sugo di cinghiale (with wild boar sauce), an order of penne al sugo di cinghiale, two orders of grilled wild boar ribs, wild boar sausages, a side of fagioli all’uccelletto (white beans cooked in the style that one cooks small game birds - look it up…), half a liter of red wine, and a liter of water. Beleive it or not, we ate EVERYTHING, but before we did, we somewhat vicariously enjoyed the warm community that these folks had. They laughed while they worked together and seemingly with great pride too: men, women, and children of all ages enjoying each other’s company while working hard toward a common good. For so many of us, a colder, compartmentalized life is much more the norm, and it restored in me a certain faith that people really living TOGETHER in a real COMMUNITY is neither dead nor contrived…
We somehow managed to lift ourselves from the table, and stepped back outside into what had become a chilly, breezy night. We made our way home a bit more efficiently than we had arrived, found an ACES parking spot, and strolled a bit through Piazza Santa Croce, ultimately rejecting a gelato for a little shut-eye…
TOM CIOCCO
L’ultima giornata - CHIANTI
At last night’s dinner, we took a vote about today’s schedule, and but for one dissenter, the vote was for a “lighter” day, so the two wineries we had scheduled was whittled down to one…and I think that even the dissenter was happy once we entered the magical place that is the Chianti region.
Chianti, more than Montalcino, Montepulciano, the Maremma, Bolgheri, for me, is a COZY place. With all of Italy’s nearly incalculable beauty, the KIND of beauty that one encounters can rarely be considered “cozy”, but Chianti is that exception: the warm, sheltering hills, the sweet rust-colored stone farm houses hung with green shutters, the vegetable gardens, the flower boxes full of geraniums, the fragrant, swirling breezes and that LIGHT! Those of us who had been to the Chianti region before revelled in it once again, recounting our respective “first times”. And those who had never been to Chianti before did lots of gasping and sighing and pointing as they became seduced by this magical place.
The cypress-lined roads pitched and twisted through densely forested hillsides and the Renaissance villas perched above their vineyards. Large black-and-white winged taccole hunted grasshoppers in the dappled grasses and hawks spun and rose in the skies above. The scrubby brush at the gravelly roadside pitched and rustled in the flower-scented winds.
Today, we were headed to a small, organic winery called Podere Terreno to not only tour and taste, but to take a short cooking class with Gioia Milani, an expert in Tuscan cuisine. So we all donned aprons and Gioia with her mix of wry humor, Italian tough love, and a warm smile, walked us through the preparation of penne with a sauce of tomatoes, zucchini, sheep’s milk ricotta, and basil; straccetti (thinly sliced and shredded beef top round cooked with garlic, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and arugula; and a mascarpone, raisin, pine nut, and almond cookie dessert. Many folks got their first look at, and use of a mezzaluna - a NECESSITY in an Italian kitchen, but still a bit of a white elephant to most non-Italians. We crowded into the kitchen - some toasted bread for the bruschetta, others peeled cloves of garlic, but because of space constraints, most folks just opened their noses and enjoyed the smells coming off the antique stove…
And as the saying goes, many hands makes light work, so it was already time to eat. Clearly the menu was no surprise, but having had a hand in preparing our own meal for once made up forsuch a small disappointment. We dined al fresco on a BEAUTIFUL bright and cool afternoon - very leisurely - while we sipped on the very clean and “correct” wines from Podere Terreno. We lingered long over our coffees and watched “Napoleone”, the estate’s newest canine addition, take control of the whole gathering, literally barking orders thither and yon…
…on our way back to Siena. The rest of the afternoon and early evening was free time, so before dinner I went for a LONG walk up and down the steep city streets, admiring that peculiar Italian blend of great strength and great delicacy - the palaces, the food, the language, and the faces of the people. Italian cities strike the visitor with the exaltation of humanity’s finer powers with the simultaneous supression of the baser ones…even the mesticherie - the shops that sell mops and buckets and dustrags - still manage to cut an elegant figure on a streetscape for which high aesthetics are fundamentally de rigueur.. I passed shops selling silks tended by young, hazel-eyed beauties, working-class caffes with the Totocalcio results scribbled on blackboards, a lighting store whose window was hung with scores of different models of lightswitches, and travel agencies promoting Aegean cruises. One thing that takes a bit of time to realize, especially in a place as closely associated with beauty and refinement as Italy, that this is HOME for these people, and that they have all the same concerns, pressures, loves, that we have (though in my mind, it IS a bit easier to deal with these mundane difficulties living as an Italian!). Foreigners tend to romanticize Italy, and it’s not all beer and skittles (like waiting for 4 hours at the post office to retrieve a package), but it’s a lot easier to romanticize a first kiss than baby’s first nosebleed, if you know what I mean…there’s got to be something there to begin with, and I think Italy qualifies as having something there to begin with, no?…
The “Last Supper” was held at a famous Sienese restaurant called Osteria Le Logge. Needless to say, we ate VERY well, but since this was the last night of the trip, we all banged our heads together, and came up with an idea to do some “blind” tasting at the table - for example we ordered three 1999 100% Sangiovese wines all from different regions (Brunello, “Super Tuscan”, and one from Romagna) and had a little roundtable “educated guessing” session as to what, where, when, etc…We left the restaurant a little more tipsy than usual, and ambled back to the hotel a little more slowly, perhaps from carrying the weight of the knowledge that our wonderful little jag had come to an end. We all said our goodbyes and see you soons complete with double-cheek kisses standing in the hotel’s opulent lobby. Everyone seemed genuinely satisfied with the trip, and I was happy to have helped in whatever small way in having brought this trip to fruition…But my voyage was to continue the next day…I was taking some extra days to visit old friends in Florence, and was very excited about REALLY slipping into everyday Italian life. I would be staying with my old friend Piero Bongiorno at his 1000 year old apartment near piazza Santa Croce, so rather than guided tours and lavish meals it would be more about grabbing quick coffees with Piero at his local caffe`, and picking over a pile of green beans at the mercato San Lorenzo, and spinnig some reggae discs…I should have a few yarns about this “leg” in the coming days…
I JUST WANTED TO USE A FEW LINES HERE TO THANK YOU, THE READERS, FOR FOLLOWING THESE RAMBLINGS. GRAZIE MILLE!
TOM CIOCCO
Montalcino and Siena
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It was very nice to rise with the “luxury” to choose what clothes I was going to wear, so that cute little sun dress and that adorable pair of canary-colored strappy sandals I had packed…ahh…joke…Today was a day that I was really looking forward to since the move to Montalcino, and therefore to more traditionally styled wines, was a move right into my wheelhouse.
We drove north, and after about 45 minutes of travel, we noticed the topography begin to change. While the Maremma and Bolgheri are a bit rugged, and arid with more grays and russets, as one drives north to Montalcino, the elevations rise, the mountains sweeten and become more verdant, and the temperatures begin to change. Maremma and Bolgheri’s relative proximity to the sea moderates their climates. Montalcino (and Chianti as well) have more “continental” climates which means greater extremes, i.e. hotter days, and cooler nights.
Before gettin’ all winey wit it, we stopped at the ancient and important Abbey of Sant’ Antimo, just ouside of Montalcino. Sant’ Antimo is one of the oldest abbeys in Italy. It is a handsome, early Romanesque structure whose construction was actually commissioned by Charlemagne himself. As we ambled around the building’s cool stone perimeter, shafts of light plunged through the high windows lighting the sweet, blue, curling frankincense smoke that burned in a gilded censer on the altar. While a few people kneeled in prayer, a monk sat at the back of the church adjusting and playing (beautifully I might add) an oboe. I’m not sure why…
We left the abbey and rumbled further up into the mountains to visit one of the truly great producers in all of Montalcino: Piero Palmucci and the Poggio di Sotto estate. Signor Palmucci is what anyone would term a “character”, with a dry, acerbic wit sheltering shy little boy. He and our Italian guide Filippo know each other well, and traded barbs throughout the tour (Palmucci continually called Filippo “bandito” [which does not translate as "bandit", but rather as "banished one" or "disgraced one"]. Sig. Palmucci worked for years in the international wine trade before founding Poggio di Sotto, and speaks 6 languages fluently, English being one of them. Poggio di Sotto is unquestionably what we Anglophones would call a “boutique winery”, though with a decidedly traditional approach. Not a barrique to be found anywhere…Despite Sig. Palmucci’s slow and deliberate manner, it only took a half an hour to tour Poggio di Sotto’s entire facility: crushpad, vinification room, barrel room, bottling line, shipping station, and his personal cellar.
Sig. Palmucci then led us into a darkish narrow room dominated by a long heavy wooden table - it was time to taste! Palmucci makes only 2 wines: Rosso di Montalcino and Brunello di Montalcino. He made an emphatic point of saying that the grapes that go into his rosso are IDENTICAL with the ones that make up his Brunello. In may cases, Brunello producers’ rossos are made with either the “second cut” of fruit, or with fruit sourced from younger vines. Further, his rosso is aged for two years in the same traditional 30 hectoliter Slavonian oak casks in which he raises his Brunello. Rosso di Montalcino requires only one year of age, but he gives his rosso two. His Brunello gets over four years. So what were they like? In a word, sublime. They were sublime: deep, clean, elegant, complex, “sweet”, balanced, and very long. Almost everyone purchased a few bottles (if not a few cases) to have shipped home. For reasons I cannot get into, I cannot get these wines for our shop, so this ain’t no kind of sales pitch, but if you see Poggio di Sotto for sale, and you can part with about $140 for the Brunello (the rosso goes for about $50), treat yourself. You could not possibly be anything but enchanted…
By now it was time for a late lunch. We filled the pullman and headed up to a winery that I shall leave nameless. I sold their wines wholesale years ago, and never much cared for them even then, and the ones we drank at lunch confirmed the fact that, at least for me, little had changed. This winery-that-shall-remain-nameless produces exclusively organic wines, and their “greeness” extends to the macrobiotic food they serve at their on-site trattoria. We dined on dirt cakes, raw millet eaten directly from personalized feedbags, wheatgrass shakes, salame with large chunks of bone in it, and honey-coated insects in a pig’s milk yogurt infused with cow farts. Despite the claims made for the health of this food, everyone who served us looked sickly. Hey, I’m not knocking organic/vegetarian food, but this lunch was that in the extreme prepared by people who have no idea how to cook. Yuk. But, after one stellar meal after another, I guess we were due…
So it was back onto the bus for our ride to the first “city”, Siena (if you can call Siena that - it’s got 60,000 souls soaking wet). Busses larger than “X” are forbidden to enter center city Siena, so we tranferred to a minibus and made our way into the town. Undoubtedly, many of you have indeed visited Siena, but if you haven’t, and you find yourself in Tuscany, make it a point to go. Siena, Florence’s long-time enemy from the early middle ages through the early Renaissance, was essentially stopped dead and dropped into amber by the first wave of Black Plague in 1348. Little has changed there since then, and that includes the sheets on my hotel bed (ba-dum pissssh!). Siena’s cathedral is not to be missed, and the city’s main square the Piazza del Campo is undoubtedly one of Italy’s most beautiful.
A guided tour of the city had been arranged for us, but the slender German woman (who I hypothesize was a failed actress) was so phony and generally abrasive, Iwas able to slip the group by clevely pointing upwards while shouting out “look out for that squirting buboe” and when everyone turned to look, I kicked my red felt pointy-toed shoes back towards the hotel…That night we scaled a steep, cobbled street to reach the evening’s dining spot. The proprietor and chef had ridden in and won (in 1967) Siena’s truly obsessive/compulsive barebacked horserace called the Palio. The walls of the subterranean brick restaurant were hung with photos of his equestrian exploits. The dinner’s highlight for me was the local pasta called pici, which are a sort of fresh, handrolled, ultra-thick spaghetti, usually dressed with a wild boar ragu`. Oh yeah.
The previous days of travel and prandial excesses were really beginning to catch up with us, so we rolled ourselves back down the bumpy street to the hotel, and hit the hay. What some of us didn’t realize was that Siena is a BIG college town, and it was their equivalent of “senior week” in which all of the grads. don medieval students’ dress, blow trumpets, drink, and harrass passersby into the wee hours of the morning. I sleep like the dead, but at breakfast the next morning, some of the more delicate souls in the group said they were at it ’til 6 AM…
TOM CIOCCO
Mercoledi, 9 maggio - una giornata magica!
Today turned out to be a great day for a few reasons…We left the hotel around 9:30 and headed straight for Frantoio Giovani. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, “frantoio” means “olive press” in Italian. We pulled up to the place and entered though what was essentially an oversized garage door. Inside was a SPOTLESS line of the most modern de-pitting, pressing, and bottling line equipment. Giovani is run and managed exclusively by women. And though they do have their own groves, Giovani’s role is to be the “community press” for smaller commercial farmers or even private, family growers who don’t have the means or the need to press and bottle their own production. We tasted some of Giovani’s oil (which was EXCELLENT) and we were off…
Our next stop was the Petra winery. By now we had entered Bolgheri region of coastal Tuscany, home to such world famous wineries as Sassicaia and Guado al Tasso. Petra, to some degree, is Bolgheri’s present and future. Until only about 20 years ago, Bolgheri’s wine production was small and localized. There were very few large or even commercially-oriented producers in this region. In fact, as one drives Bolgheri’s highways and byways, there are scads of vineyards to be seen, but most are populated by very young vines, many too young to even produce fruit suitable for good wine. But the Bolgheri is still Tuscany, and this region’s climate is warmer and more consistent than either Chianti or Montalcino, and the land costs (or DID cost) a fraction of what similar sites would have cost in other Tuscan regions. So this confluence of factors brought the attention of older producers (Tuscan and non-Tuscan alike), as well as start-up, commercially-minded producers and investors who descended on the region like locusts, building vast, hyper-modern wineries. This is Petra. The place IS impressive. Much of it is carved out of the living rock, utilizing modular contruction, shiny steel conveyors, computerized control stations for tank temperatures, soaring cielings, inox tubes runnning through floors and walls, etc.
But as impressive and advanced as all of this is, for my money, it’s that cold as well. The wines are blends of Sangiovese (which our guide all but explicitly stated was planted because the zone in which Petra is located REQUIRES it, not because the winemakers, etc. have any real love for the quintessentially Tuscan variety) and Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, and other “international” varieties. For me this was a wine FACTORY. A very well researched and sophisticated one, but a factory nonetheless. We eventually made our way to their tasting room, and while I was hoping for a pleasant surprise, I got exactly what I expected: solid, technically correct wines, but wines that ultimately lacked any sense of “place” or “soul”. They will sell boatloads of wine for sure, but not to me.
Our next stop was the town of Suvereto, and the consensus was one of the highlights of the trip. Suvereto is the hometown of one of our Italian guides, Filippo Magnani. And being a tourism professional, but one that tries to show off the “real Italy” as much as possible though his work, arranged for a meal for the 15 of us or so in the group at his grandmother’s house, with grandma, mom, and auntie doing the cooking. Grandma’s kitchen overlooked the most beautiful LITTLE piazza in Suvereto. They set up their family holiday tables with all the leafs employed. In addition to a few bottles of “professionally” made wine, the table was repelete with jugs of “vino sfuso” (bulk wine) made by local farmers, purchased and stored in large demijohns. Over dinner Filippo told us that he is the 7th generation of his family to have lived in this house.
And we ate well. Plates came and went, and I once again won’t bore you with the entire menu, but I’d venture to say that the dry-fried string beans with tomato sauce and onions and the penne with a pureed yellow pepper sauce were the crowd favorites. Clearly, everyone felt the authentic extension of hospitality and warmth for which Italy is so well known. We deeply thanked Filippo’s family, shuffled off to the town’s main piazza for a caffe` and a little dolce far niente in the warm Tuscan sun. Really lovely stuff.
The next leg of this busy day was a real adventure. We had a date to visit the Grattmacco winery and taste a few of their products. Grattamacco is one of the oldest and most well-repsected “boutique” wineries in coastal Tuscany. It’s production is now, and always has been 100% organic. Now to say that Grattamacco’s location is remote is to grossly understate. Once we left the last paved road, it took neary an hour to reach the tiny winery. We had a look at the fermentation room, full of open topped wooden fermentation vats (called “tini” in Italy), which was little more than a barn. And when we got around to tasting the wines, what a departure from Petra - these are wines with “terroir” out the wazoo - the kind of wines that if you listen, speak to you about their origins and experiences. Their VERY tiny production Vermentino (an Italian white grape variety) was a KNOCKOUT…I don’t think that they even export it…
By this time we were starving, and we had quite a dinner awaiting us. We slowly decended from our perch at Grattamacco and made our way north and west to the sea. We had a date with the great Italian fish chef Luciano Zazzeri and his restaurant La Pineta in the tiny beach town of Marina di Bibbona. Even if you’re in the area, you’d almost surely have to ask a local how to reach it. It sits DIRECTLY on the beach and is backed by a preserved maritime pine forest, so this is not the sort of place one would ever just stumble upon. The waves crashed just a few meters from the front of restaurant that had it’s entire front open to the surf. The room was a quintessetially seafood eatery: simple but oh so elegant. On a Wednesday night, the room was PACKED with tables of male friends sharing laughs and a great meal, couples at candlelit corner tables, and families with smartly dressed children, with equally well-appointed moms and dads fussing and feeding them… The food? WOW. Every course was a fish dish: an amuse bouche of creamed baccala` and potatoes, fritto misto di mare , lobster and asparagus ravioli, etc. Just fantastic. If you’re ever in the neighborhood, DO NOT miss it!
We didn’t finish dinner and get back to the pullman untill after 11 o’clock. A few of us who were still conscious chatted on the long ride back, but most just slept. We returned to Il Tesoro at close to 1 AM. It had been a really great day, and seeing my suitcase in my room when I open the door made it a PERFECT day. I hit the showers, and then hit the sack. I was out in five minute’s time…
TOM CIOCCO
Able was I ere I saw Elba
Today there was another sort of conveyance in the cards - a ferry! But being that we were still quite a few miles inland, we had to make the ride from the Maremma to the port city of Livorno. Livorno is not one of the more picturesque Italian cities, it being famous more for chemical plants and the Italian equivalent of the Naval Academy at Annapolis than anything else…
So we hit portside, scampered off the bus which was promptly swallowed up by the mammoth ferry and we boarded just behind. It was another GORGEOUS day - low 70s, dry, and clear sunshine. We had the option of taking the ride from Livorno to Porto Ferraio (Elba’s main town) in the dingy deck that reminded me of my high school classrooms or topside al fresco. I chose to get a little Mediterranean sun and air.
As we apprached the island (after about an hour) we could see the lay of the land. Elba is an almost entirely mountainous island that’s bigger than you think it is (though I admit I really have no idea how big you think it is). In any event, it’s not a fazzoletto (handkerchief) as they say in Italian. In ancient times, Elba was an important source of metal ores such as lead, copper, and iron (Portoferraio literally means “ferrous port”), and there are still a few small mining concerns in operation even today. Elba’s other, bigger claim to fame is the site for Napoleon Bonaparte’s first exile. It didn’t take long for someone to spring him, but before he did, he made full use of one of the island’s greatest assests, the Aleatico grape.
Aleatico is an aromatic red grape variety that is one of the members of the Muscat family of vines. It is almost always vinified sweet, but it’s never made in any kind of syrupy, “sticky” style, but rather in a gently soft style with the alcohol levels of a dry wine (usually about 13%). It is redolent of red flowers and a slightly peppery quality underlying. The first place we tasted Aleatico was at Tenuta La Chiusa. Their Ansonica passito (Ansonica is another rare white-berried variety found in Elba and along the southern Tuscan coast) was also notable.
Elba is, to perhaps use a cliche, a Mediterranean paradise. The landscape is rocky, but still silver-green with olive groves and spattered with the intense yellow flowers of broom. The roads twist, climb, and decend through quiant but never cheap or honky-tonk little towns. One knows clearly that one is in a “vacation spot” but due to the fair expense of the accomodations as well as the relative remoteness of the island, Elba has been largely spared the curses of mass tourism. Elba is very popular with Germans and Scandinavians which pleases the local boys no end let me tell you (wink,wink)…
At about 1 in the afternoon, we arrived at Costa de Gabbiani (if you pop over to their site, check out the photo gallery - there is not a trace of lily-gilding in any of those pictures - that is Elba!). We were escorted to the rear of a beautiful old villa that overlooked the sea, and enjoyed a little Prosecco under an arbor before lunch. And what a lunch it was! (it was one of the best meals of the trip)! I won’t bore you with evey course or worse, lord our great pleasure over you, but we were served a home-made fresh black pasta (made with squid ink) that was dressed with a sauce made from FRESH anchovies (don’t knock ‘em till you try ‘em), pinoli nuts, sultanas (white raisins), and red pepper flakes. For dessert I chose a artisanally produced tequila/mandarin sherbet…all this with clear rays of Mediterranean sun dappling the table through a canopy of umbrella pines (the very ones that supplied the pine nuts that garnished our pastas).
No one wanted to leave (duh!), but we managed to pry the silverware from our hands, get back to the pulmino (”little bus” - in Italy they call tour buses “pullman” [like the rail car]), tapped our ways across the gangways, and enjoyed the late afternoon sun glinting off the azure waves.
We made it back to hotel just before dinner (more great food - what a drag). I made my way to my room with two pairs of fingers and two pairs of toes crossed, but alas, nothing - still no suitcase…uffah! Despite the “suck factor” of this situation, with all these other pleasures, I decided that I was still pretty lucky. I spent an hour after dinner looking at the ten thousand stars in the Marremano sky…
TOM CIOCCO
