Eat, Pray, Love... minus pray and love.

 I'll be honest, I don't really know how to write about my trip to Italy without sounding like a douche. What, am I just going to describe how amazing the food and wine was at every meal, day after day? Who wants to hear someone go on and on about delicious food that they will never get to taste? That's just rude. Oh, wait.... I just described this entire blog.

Ok, so seeing as I have been a complete douche on this blog for over a year now, and you people still keep coming back, there's no reason to stop now. I will just try to keep the food euphoria to a minimum.

 I spent a few lovely days in Florence, visiting museums (shoe shopping), historic churches (boot shopping), and drinking in the local culture (having long, tipsy conversations in broken Italian with overly friendly bartenders).

While in Florence I spent a lot of time trying to assimilate to local habits, which meant starting every day with a caffe corretto (espresso with a shot of grappa) at the bar, where I would ruminate with a grumpy group of old men about soccer, the hotness of Berlusconi's current mistress, and the parking job that guy out there was doing.
Not having an opinion on any of these, I participated by doing this gesture over and over again, which worked surprisingly well. When the conversation came around to me, I'd let out a "eh... Berlusconi!" and switch to this gesture, which inevitably started another round of groaning and effusive gesturing from the group.

 

Having worked up an appetite with all that soccer talk, I would stop by the Mercato Centrale to talk shop with the Butchers, squeeze and sniff all the produce, and have my midmorning pizza. [To be fair, the Mercato and all its characters deserve a whole post of their own. Picture the trading floor of the Chicago stock exchange, but with porcini mushrooms everywhere.]

Then, feeling like I should probably do something, I don't know, cultural, I would go someplace like this:

 

 Or this:

 But back to the good stuff. The early evening in Florence is all about aperitivo hour-- which is convenient, because it fell right around when I usually have elevensies on East Coast time. Aperitivo hour is its own peculiar scene, where the young and beautiful drink spritzes and campari sodas, stare at each other, and try to make a free dinner out of the buffet of snacks at the bar until it is time for actual clubbing. In english, this roughly translates to "pregaming".

Obviously, there were too many incredible meals on this trip to mention, and I wouldn't want to rub them in anyway. But one plate of pasta absolutely needs to be talked about. This plate of pasta has ruined regular food for me for the rest of my life.

On my last night in Florence I took myself on a pretty classy date to the superb Buca dell' Orafo, right under the Ponte Vecchio. This place is understated, but arguably one of the best restaurants in Florence. There are no tourists, and you can be sure the waiters will make fun of you in Italian if you try to speak English. This is a foodie's restaurant, but without the fiddlehead ferm foams and pork bellies you would find at a foodie place in New York. The food at Buca dell' Orafo is unabashedly very traditional, but made with such care and love that you start to wonder why anyone would ever cook anything else.

Now, picture the sky parting, and this plate of maltagliati al sugo (pasta scraps with meat ragu) floating down to me on a cloud:

The room goes silent as the pasta and I give each other the once-over. We like what we see.  

Then I take a bite, and... I'm not sure I have the superlatives to describe it. There are times when it is shocking to be reminded how spectacular simple food can be. Only a handful of ingredients in this dish, and I had to restrain myself from licking the plate. In a week of incredible eating, this dish was far and above the best. If I can ever make anything this wonderful, I will die happy.

Ok, enough about pasta scraps. After Florence I drove to Umbria to the tiny town of Montefalco to meet some of my favorite wine rock stars.

It was pretty much as beautiful as you would expect.

 

 

 I spent a lot of time driving up mountains and down mountains, visiting the tiny towns in between, and learning more about Sagrantino, the local wine. 

I was lucky enough to be there just as the wine harvest was wrapping up and the olive harvest was beginning. All the leaves in the vineyards were changing color, and you could actually smell grapes being crushed and fermented when the wind blew. Seriously.

 

I spent a lot of time walking through olive groves and Sagrantino vineyards.

One of my destinations was the winery of Arnaldo Caprai, who put Montefalco on the map by resurrecting the forgotten Sagrantino grape in the 1970s.

I had a fantastic tour, where I got to taste the 2010 Greccheto white that had been crushed 10 days before, and had gone through fermentation but not aging. It tasted kind of like Fresca, which I took the liberty of telling the winemakers. I think the humor was lost in translation.

The highlight of the whole trip, though was meeting my favorite winemaker, Paolo Bea. Their incredible winery is run out of their family home, and is a tiny, all natural, biodynamic production. Paolo, his son Giampiero, and grandbaby Paolo II took me around the vineyards and talked about their philosophy of doing as little as possible to interfere with natural phenomena in the winemaking process. 

We drank some wine and chatted for a long time, and the whole time I could not believe that I was sitting next to this wine legend, in his home. The best part about it was that the Beas seem totally unaware of the cult following they have among certain American winos; Paolo just seems amused by the whole thing, and would rather be out with his cows.

Paolo was surprisingly flirtatious for a guy pushing 90, and insisted that the good looks in his family all came from him. Certamente, I agreed, wondering if this was really happening.