In Visso, “It’s Written on the Wall”

“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

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

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

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

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…

Assisi Floral Passione, Spanning the Ages

Passione takes hold of one early in Italy: passione for good food, for soccer, for the frescoes in your town church, for music, for one’s village festival – and even for flowers. Flowers of all colors, picked in the fields, on thorny bushes, in your grandmother’s garden, way up in the mountains off a twisty, dusty dirt road. Young children pick after a hot sweaty hike with a grandmother, teens zip along country roads on their motorbikes in search of specific flowers, specific colors and elderly Gina picks them as she scrambles like a goat up a rocky mountain path with walking stick in hand and cloth bag on her back. Everyone brings the flowers back into Assisi and then gather at night in the old medieval cellars to de-petal the blooms, grinding some, shredding others, drying or chilling as needed to enhance color, preserve the perfume.
read more…

In Perugia, an Old Hen for Good Broth

“La gallina vecchia fa buon brodo,” (“an old hen makes a good broth”) says an old Italian adage, lauding the wisdom of a sage elderly woman. But an old hen does make the best broth as the meat of a young chicken will slip off the bones while the chicken pieces simmer with carrot, celery, half an onion and a small ripe tomato or two (added for color as well as flavor). My Sicilian husband, Pino, remembers that years ago, chicken broth was brought to the family of the deceased as the first food to eat after the funeral and burial of a loved one. After death – hopefully, in the family home, so that the women of the family can wash and dress the body – relatives sat all night with the deceased and relatives and friends would fill the house the next day. Burial was generally within forty-eight hours. Little to no food was eaten in the home during the mourning time before burial.
read more…

Cantine Aperte in Umbria

This past May, fifty-one Umbrian wine cellars threw open their cantina doors, invited visitors into their vineyards and uncorked bottles of crisp whites and robust reds for the thousands joining in on Cantine Aperte (“Open Cellars”). The festival – launched twenty years ago by Movimento Turismo Vino – is targeted at the diffusion of the culture of wine and developing familiarity with Italy’s great wine regions. Bringing to life the slogan “Vedi che bevi” (“See what you drink”), over nine hundred Italian wine cellars welcomed more than a million visitors on the last Sunday in May, 2011.
read more…

Feasting in Purgatory

Leaving Gradoli, picturesque Latium hilltown on the western shore of Lake Bolsena, you might miss that old stone ruin on the left, but if you stop – as a friend and I did recently – you can feast in Purgatory. That is, at Il Purgatorio. Once a 15th-century monastery in ruins (old arches still remain), una cooperativa of five men, co-workers and friends, rented the building from the Comune di Gradoli and opened their restaurant about twenty years ago.
read more…