Scheggino: Eating at “Kilometro Zero”

Food/Wine Lore, Rural Life, Umbrian Hilltowns2 Comments

For a “menu a kilometro zero”, head to Scheggino, Umbrian medieval hilltown gem on the Nera River. Follow the twisting stone-vaulted backstreets, leading up to the 11th-century S. Nicola church, and just past a narrow alleyway, you’ll come to the huge wooden door of Osteria Baciafemmine, named after il Vicolo Baciafemmine (“Narrow Alleyway Kiss-the Girls”). According to an old village legend, young people would head in summer heat to the shady alleyway, so conveniently narrow that getting away without a kiss was improbable.
read more…

Peppe, a Last Link to Treasured Rural Memories

Rural Friends, Rural Life, Unforgettable Italians4 Comments

“Giugno, la falce in pugno” (“June, the scythe in the fist”), says an old Italian proverb, re-echoing the days of scything hay manually. Times have changed: at Peppe and Gentile’s farm two weeks ago, fifteen hundred bales of hay in the hayshed – with fifteen hundred to go, Peppe told me. He’s haying all alone – his tractor, his only companion. With this heat, he’s out in the fields before daylight. Amazingly, he’s back on the tractor after a short post-lunch pennichella (“nap”). It’s now July so the hay is in: time for the wheat, oats, barley.
When we farmed in the late 70’s, haying was a group venture, all of us rotating from farm to farm throughout June, til everyone’s hay was in. There was some mechanization but in our hilly area, the smaller hand scythe, la falce, and the ominous looking grim-reaper type scythe, la falce fienaia (literally, “hay scythe”) were used to cut that hay along ditches, on hillsides, and around trees which escaped the motorized falciatrice.
read more…

Sonny Rollins and Perugia’s Umbria Jazz: Giving Back the Italian Passione

Festivals, Italian 'Passione', Special Events, Umbrian HilltownsLeave a comment

He could only hobble across the stage, head of fuzzy white hair bobbing, sax clutched in a strong gnarled fist. The knees and hips of Sonny Rollins – soon to be eighty-two – might be worn out, but not his lungs. He barely stopped for a breather – I saw him sip some water once – in nearly two hours on stage at Perugia’s open air arena, Santa Giuliana. And the more the Umbria Jazz crowds deliriously shouted “Sony, Sony” (no, not a typo – but the Italian pronunciation of “Sonny”), the wilder, the more intricate, the more powerful those trills on the sax.
read more…

Isola di Giannutri, “Fuori dal Mondo”

Other Italy FavoritesLeave a comment

Fuori dal mondo – “out of this world” – is what you feel as you step off the ferry onto this tiny Mediterranean island. The turquoise/emerald water of the island coves is certainly “out of this world” but you are “out of this world” touching down on this island with 180 houses (hidden away – we only saw about six in our three days here), fewer than twenty permanent residents, only one small piazza with a single restaurant-bar (mostly empty), one meagerly-stocked grocery (never did find it open) and only dirt paths leading to the two or three coves of chrystalline water.
At a fork in the footpaths, the only three signs on the island indicate the swimmable coves and the warning that no one may verge off the footpaths from early May until late October unless accompanied by an authorized naturalist guide.
read more…

Italy’s Back to Campanilismo

Italian 'Passione'2 Comments

Italy’s recent loss to Spain in the European cup was “meritata” as countless Italian newscasters and fans all over the country admitted in interviews. But what a glorious show of Italian passione these weeks have been! And not only: taken up in the surge of excitement, passione, I read assiduously all soccer analyses in the Gazzetta dello Sport and other papers after the games, marveling over the finely-written articles, smiling over descriptions which could ONLY be written – and hungrily read – by Italians. This line, for example, written after Italy defeated England. to describe how Montolivo played: “his moves on the ball were like brushstrokes of Caravaggio.” As Italy headed into the final match, one sports journalists wrote, “Abbiamo ridotto L’Inghliterra e la Germania a nature morte” (“we reduced England and Germany to still lifes”). That artistic bent again…
read more…

In Visso, “It’s Written on the Wall”

Italian 'Passione', Other Italy Favorites3 Comments

“It’s written on the wall” is the most apt expression to describe a wander through Visso, medieval hilltown not far from Norcia, close to the Sibilline mountains. As you walk through this town of genteel pastel-colored palazzi, do keep your eyes on the lintels of the doorways: many are topped with dedicatory inscriptions or the coats-of-arms of Popes, cardinals or bishops, each of those laying claim to a municipal structure erected for the town. As you enter the main piazza through the medieval city gate, you’ll see the oldest inscription on the wall next to the arched city entryway: 1256.
read more…

Passione Duo in Deruta: Maiolica and Farm-cooking Goodness

Food/Wine Lore, Italian 'Passione', Rural Friends, Umbrian Hilltowns2 Comments

Now over eighty, Raffaello started painting his maiolica masterpieces as a young boy. Massimo started young on the potter’s wheel, too, creating the vases, pitchers, urns Raffaello still decorates. At a young age, too, Giuseppa learned to make homemade tagliatelle: another sort of art. She still does at her farm just outside of Deruta.
Each carries on their respective arts with the same motivating force: passione.
read more…

Castelluccio’s Chromatic Majesty

Festivals, Food/Wine Lore, Italian 'Passione', Special Events, Umbrian Hilltowns3 Comments

When you come down the hill from Norcia and round that curve, you’ll understand what a mozzafiato view is. Only mozzafiato (literally, “cutting off, truncating your breath”, and more visceral than the English “breathless”) can describe that first site of il Piano Grande, “the high plain” (1452 m) stretching out below Castelluccio. And now is the time: from late May to early July, the Piano Grande becomes a kaleidoscopic tapestry of wildflowers of every color intermingling with the chromatic variations of the crops cultivated by the few farmers still living in Castelluccio, overlooking the vast plain.
read more…

Near Todi, Vineyard Splendor

Food/Wine Lore, Italian 'Passione'1 Comment

The Peppucci family vineyards blanket the sumptuous curves of the gentle hill landscapes outside Todi. And no vineyard view is more wondrous than a sunset one. One late June evening – while overlooking the spread of vineyards below us – we sipped glasses of the Peppucci fine Grechetto wine (this white-wine grape can be cultivated only in Umbria) on the patio outside the Cantina Peppucci. While filling our wine goblets, young owner Filippo Peppucci told us about leaving behind classical studies and an almost-completed law degree to follow his passione: il vino.
read more…

Lake Trasimeno’s Isola Maggiore, an Island of Peace

Italian 'Passione', Umbrian HilltownsLeave a comment

In the early thirteenth century, San Francesco di Assisi left behind the woes of the world for forty days of isolation and contemplation on a tranquil island in the middle of Lake Trasimeno.
The visitor can still see the rock where St. Francis stepped when getting out of the rowboat upon arrival. There might be doubts about that rock but not about the peace San Francesco must have felt upon arrival: the same peace which still infuses any visitor as the ferry pulls into verdant Isola Maggiore.
read more…