Yesterday I promised to devote today’s post to laying out the week’s Cucinapalooza itinerary. I lied.

Got sidetracked is perhaps a bit nicer way of putting it. “Lie” seems so intentional, so harsh. When I wrote that I would describe our upcoming daily cooking activities for the next week, I intended to do so. It’s just that it wouldn’t be right not to write about last night.

We are in the strange position of owning a villa in Umbria but not being able to stay there tonight. Or tomorrow. It’s actually a nice problem to have, as the villa is currently rented by a terrific group who are experiencing the wonders of Umbria. Nice for them and nice for us.

So for the two days in Italy before we move to the villa to begin our Cucinapalooza cooking tour, we have had to find a place to stay, some place close to Rome but also close to Terni, where we have scheduled some meetings to go over some business plans with colleagues of ours. Looking at a map of the area around Terni Suzy and I both independently and at the same moment turned to one another and said, “what about il Re Beve?”

Il Re Beve (the king who drinks) is a marvelous restaurant we have dined at twice, the first time with our good friend Lodovico who had taken us on a tour of his native region, the second time with our friends Pete and Nancy (who are rejoining us for Cucinapalooza) at the end of a visit to the villa and on our way to Rome. The restaurant, we recalled, was excellent and the setting, overlooking the hills south of Todi, spectacular. And, as we recalled, on our previous visit the waiter had showed us a special banquet hall for weddings and told us there were rooms for rent in the castello (castle for those who don’t speak Italian). The proximity to Terni (15 minutes), the setting (magical), the restaurant (fabulous), along with a special rate for a package called “Io & Te in una “Fuga d’amore” which translates roughly into the “You and me in a ‘fuga’ of love” package made it all the more irresistable. I was afraid to look up the translation of “fuga,” deciding instead to see where it took us.

The Fuga package, by the way, included a “romantica cena” (romantic dinner) “a lume di candela” (by candlight) “nel nostro reservato e romantico prive” (in our reserved and romantic “prive” (again no translation dared)). This sounded too good to pass up, especially when considering that the room was both “suggestiva” and “preziosa.” So we took the plunge.

I can honestly say that plunging can sometimes lead to death, but other times, like last night it can result in immersing yourself in something completely special. And the cena romantica was nothing short of special. We started our dinner hour (or four, despite a touch of jetlag) with a glass of local wine on the outdoor terrace, the temperatures here in Umbria being unseasonably high for this time of year, something in the neighborhood of 75 degrees. And over the course of the cocktail we began building a rapport with our waiter and romantic guide for the evening. Finally when we decided to tear ourselves from the terrace he showed us to our “prive.” Down a long, narrow passageway, just barely my height and completely darkened save a few very dim candles we walked until we emerged in an enormous banquet hall, a 15th century room that no doubt served as a stable back in the day but which in this day overwhelmed with its 30 foot arched stone ceilings, uneven stone floor and a sea of candles that illuminated the room in dozens of discrete patches. Set at one end of one of the banquet table were two placesettings. One for me and one for my queen. And filling the room was the haunting sound of Diana Krall, one of our favorite singers who happens to be opening the Umbria Jazz Festival this year.

Over the next three hours we were virtually left alone in this hall, with our waiter making the occasional trek from the main restaurant to bring us food and wine, discretely making heavy footfall as he made his way down the passageway before entering our sanctum. Each time he entered, however, he was well received, as he brought us fabulous dishes, wonderful wine and even more so as he provided us an audience on which to shower praise for the wonderful evening.

Dinner in your own private banquet hall is something that should be on everyone’s bucket list. And although we crossed it off our bucket list we enjoyed it so much we’re going to spend our second and last night at the Castello in another fuga d’amore. We may not exactly know what a fuga is, but it sure is a lot of fun trying to figure it out.

Ci vediamo!
Bill and Suzy

One of the challenges in blogging about our Umbria Food and Wine tours is to fight the temptation to chronicle and recount every single activity that we do each day.  First, the internet is not large enough to store all that we would write.  Second, no one would believe us.

So daily we modestly use a little artistic license to edit out and fit into a more believable human scale that where we go, those with whom we talk and laugh, and, especially that which we eat and drink.  The hardest job I have is making those editorial cuts.

Tuesday’s job was easy.  We visited Norcia, our favorite pork town and took a tour of the Patrizi Prosciuttificio.

Norcia, a town which we have visited a dozen times in the past is a picturesque walled town in the Valnerina, the Nera river valley that is on the other side of the mountains from Spoleto.  Separated from the Umbrian valley by the Apennines it is more than a world away.  The drive to Norcia is characterized by windy roads that follow the Nera river, carved deep below steep, rocky, plunging mountains.  But a few kilometers before reaching Norcia, after a half hour of zigs and zags, the steep mountains begin to open up and a fertile verdant valley begins to unfold.  It is a little Swiss-like, both in color and landscape, and here, since Roman times, farmers tended to their flocks, butchers sharpened their knives and their skills and people went about their business secure in the knowledge that they were about the best fed people in the world.  Best fed if you like pork.

For the word Norcia – as I have written hundreds of times before – as well as the place called Norcia, is synonymous with pork.  For hundreds of years the people of Norcia have practiced the art of butchery, spreading their trade throughout Italy and the rest of Europe, giving meaning to a new word – norcino – which means both a person from Norcia and a pork butcher.  One word with two meanings because the two are one and the same.

So we come often to Norcia, especially during out Food and Wine Tours, to learn about pork and about butchery and to taste and compare.  It is a tough job but as they say, someone’s got to do it.  And so we set out on Tuesday morning for Norcia, this time to learn about the art of making prosciutto.  And our destination was the prosciuttificio – or prosciutto curing warehouse – of the famiglia Patrizi.

We arrived at Patrizi just after noon, having spent the first part of the morning learning about and tasting olio novello, the season’s “new” extravirgin olive oil (pardon the lack of editorial discipline in sticking to a single activity to describe).  The hourlong drive from the Trevi-Foligno area, through the rocky gorges that begin at Scheggino and continue all the way to Norcia, an all natural landscape bathed in bright sunshine, made one feel a communing with nature and helped one forget all the olive oil slurped and bruschettas stuffed down in the service of learning.  It is hard to make this drive without shifting your focus, becoming more attuned with nature and sloughing off the concerns of the modern world.  This is part of the magic of Norcia and the Valnerina.

We passed Norcia itself and instead of winding up and over the mountain to Castelluccio, a lunar-like landscape in the adjoining valley where Italy’s best lentils are grown and another regular visit of ours, we continued straight toward the town of San Pellegrino to a small settlement called Frascaro, tucked away in the National Park of Mount Sibilla.  This valley, green and fertile and surrounded by towering mountains, possesses the perfect climate for curing the hind legs of pigs.  It has been a place for making prosciutto for centuries.  And today our hosts at Patrizi were going to show us the entire process.  And along the way we would get the opportunity to taste.

From the outside one would be hard pressed to guess that the nondescript concrete building that is the Patrizi prosciuttificio housed nearly 70,000 hind pork legs, drying and aging them in the clean, fresh, Norcia environment.  Indeed, right in front of the building Wendy stopped an oncoming car and asked for directions to Patrizi.  Easy, the driver responded.  Turn into through that fence and you’re there.

And so we did and a few moments later Davide, one of the brothers who manages the business that their father founded and which he has grown up working in, slid open the large doors and greeted us with a smile that we were to learn is perpetual and as much a part of the man as the sharp butcher’s knife that is strapped to his side.  Davide greeted everyone in our group warmly and welcomed us inside, into the sanctum sanctorum.  The secret black box where pig legs become prosciutto.

And over the course of the next hour we were let in on the secret of prosciutto.  In those rooms, where thousands upon thousands of legs make the mystical journey from animal flesh to treasure, a very simple process is at work.  Salt and Time, the Patrizi brochure states (yes, they gave us English brochures).  Salt and Time, the two “secret” ingredients in transforming a ham into a prosciutto.  No more, no less.  There is no special sauce, expensive ingredient, complicated process that cures a prosciutto.  It is the simplest, most natural process imaginable.  The long, slow drying of prosciutto in the clean air of the Valnerina, an environment, both meteorologically and culturally pure, where one can wait and let nature take its course over the year and a half that a leg of pork becomes a prosciutto.  What makes a prosciutto from Norcia special?  You really have to visit the area to feel it, to understand in your bones that literally nowhere else can nature do its work as well as it does here, in the shadow of Mount Sibilla.

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And to drive that point home, our lunch that day, after a late morning antipasto of bruschetta with olio novello back in Foligno, was simply prosciutto.  Set up on a makeshift serving table in the middle of one of the aging room floors, Davide and his wife and colleagues proudly displayed a fresh prosciutto for us, anchored in a traditional stand, the topmost layer already sheared off.  Below was a marbled prosciutto, with thick veins of creamy pork fat throughout, the style of prosciutto that Davide says keeps him eating prosciutto despite decades of surrounding himself with pigs legs.  And for the next hour he and I, with an occasional guest appearance from my friend Pete slice paper thin, translucent slices that are placed on a simple plastic plate and as quickly snatched up by our group, draped on a piece of neutral tasting bread and snarfed down.  It is amazing to see how much prosciutto a person can put down in this environment.  Perhaps our group was just being polite, trying to show Davide how good his prosciutto was.  But I suspect they ate nearly a half a leg because they could.

Salt and Time.  Gifts from nature that tend to get lost, to get pushed aside in our rush to move forward, to enrich ourselves so we can have more time.  Here just outside Norcia, unhurried, standing around a table with a single leg of prosciutto, surrounded by hundreds of legs that have been hanging here for months and will continue for many more months to do nothing but sit, biding their time as they “become” prosciuttos, we can perhaps begin to appreciate how important those two simple, elemental ingredients are.

Ci vediamo!
Bill and Suzy

How to spend a Sunday morning? How about sitting outdoors drinking cup after cup of extravirgin olive oil. Continue reading Olive Sunday →

We’re back. Just as we knew we would be. But six, nearly seven weeks removed from Italy, since our last two month visit, is and was a long time away. It is, naturally, good to be back, especially as our month long itinerary will be a mix of the old and familiar and the new and exciting. Sicily, Ponza, Umbria. Beaches, Greek ruins, rental boats and Umbria Jazz, the villa and our Umbrian neighbors. Pete and Nancy (their fourth or fifth visit?), Bill and Corinna (their second), Willia and John (their second, too) and Bruce and Christine, John and Betty (their first). I can’t imagine ever getting tired of this. Continue reading Ristorante Redibis →

The history of coffee in Venice goes back to the 1600’s. Venice was a center of trade and merchants brought coffee beans from Africa, Yemen and Egypt to the city. Venetians immediately fell in love with this rich, exotic new drink (who wouldn’t!) It was a luxury item enjoyed by wealthy Venetians. Coffee shops and roasting facilities sprang up throughout Venice. By the middle of the 1700’s there were over 200 coffee shops in Venice. Just like today, it was the perfect place to meet and catch up on the local news and gossip.

Continue reading Cup of Joe →