Pictures of a Floating World

The most magical gift I've ever given to myself was wrapping up almost exactly two years ago, and the lapsed time between then and now has neither diminished the experience nor given me a greater ability to express what made it magical.

Magic, I've found, is hard to explain.

I suppose one simply must believe.

It's fitting in that: I have described it as the nearest thing to a religious epiphany I've ever experienced.

In typical fashion, I remembered mere weeks before its opening & closure that I had wanted to see Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Floating Piers. (The timing is this: the piece existed for a brief three weeks or so.) My initial impulse was to say, "too bad, so sad, you didn't plan this in time." Some nagging little voice in the back of my head pushed me to explore the possibility. "Sure," it urged me, "you probably won't pull this off. But there's no harm in playing it out."

One of the things I find most difficult in life is trip planning. I loathe it. Having flights booked well in advance gives me an anxiety of sorts that seems ridiculous (and isn't all anxiety just that, ridiculous? Then again, it’s a major part of my day job, so...) but it's a struggle all the same. And when I'm grappling with the planning monster, the easiest fix is to call my mother, who lives for this kind of thing.

"Hi, Maman" (yes I call her maman and no she is not French) "I think I want to take this trip but it's kind of crazy."

My mom is that devil-on-your-shoulder in the best way possible when it comes to spontaneous travel possibilities and almost always just that push I need. (She's a little more wary of jaunts to "unsafe" places, but Europe is always firmly on her oh-just-do-it-you're-only-young-once list.) As fate would have it, she’d always wanted to see one of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s works in person and still lamented that she’d passed on The Gates.

Things just started to come together. Reasonable flights? Found. Hotels near Lago d'Iseo? Sold out. Hotels within a train ride away? Absolutely. The perfect dress with orange accents and matching earrings? Certo! I think all the penance I've paid to the travel gods in terms of missed flights and cancellations and delays delays delays was finally enough for them to give me a break.

The next thing we knew it was 5 in the morning on the closing day of the show, getting ready to hop in a taxi we had ordered the night before. In a stroke of brilliance and quick debate, we asked if the driver would go all the way to the lake instead of dropping us at the Brescia train station. As always, certo.

All the energy and excitement and anxiety and whirlwind of the previous weeks fell away into pure serenity and delight the second we stepped on the piers. Neither one of us could stop giggling at the alien sensation of walking on the piers as they danced atop the surface of Lake Iseo.

I'll make one attempt at characterizing the physical experience. The Floating Piers were composed of plastic wrapped in spectacular golden (orange when wet!) fabric, crossing the Lago d'Iseo (a less well known – but equally beautiful – lake found between Lakes Como and Garda) from the town of Sulzano to the village of Pescheria Maraglio on the creatively named Monte Isola (literally "mountain island") and then stretching back out into the lake to encircle the tiny private Isola di San Paolo.

The plastic cubes bobbed up and down with the motion of the lake, some areas soaking and oddly squishy and others quite dry in the hot July sun. It was slow going, perhaps, but not a soul was rushing. Nearly everyone had at some point or another a childlike gaze of wonder or lost themselves in a cloud of giggles. It was a surreal, joyful, magnificent experience, and indeed a final gift from Jeanne-Claude.

When I look across all the adventures I've been fortunate enough to have, this ranks at the top in no small part due to the fact that it seemed meant to be. I may never find the words to explain it, but I carry it with me always.

Tutti a Tavola

First, a word from our lawyers. (No, not really.)

This is not a recipe. I hate all those self-important food blogs that want to tell you a condensed memoir and bury a recipe after an extended diatribe. There is something to be said for food writing. Those posts? Not food writing. If I can't taste what you ate from your words, imagine the scents and mouthfeel, get lost in your prose, then I don't want it.

(I do very much get that search engines make it hard for recipe creators to make money on what they’re doing… I’m just asking for the stories that accompany to be more useful and food-oriented. Because I’m a jerk.)

Besides, when it comes to pasta, I really don't use recipes.

One of the great joys of being in Italy is of course cooking in Italy. It isn't just the fact that there are ingredients in abundance I can't easily get stateside; I have some asinine romantic notion of a connection to my history via food.

And when I say "asinine romantic," I do mean that in all honesty. Here I'm cooking bucatini all'amatriciana, a perfect epitome of cucina laziale. My family is not and has never been from Lazio. It's not my history. Furthermore (if we really want to get into the historical accuracy of the dish) it should be tomato-free.

When I lived in Bologna, my roommates were amazed that I knew how to cook Italian food. None of our friends cooked – at best, they'd boil pasta and dump on some sauce that mamma sent from home. My American friends wanted to learn and, in teaching them, I learned that I can be an absolute tyrant in the kitchen. People wanted to improvise without a baseline understanding of how flavors meld nor the importance of handling things just so lest the texture be ruined.

It was a disaster, and – again – I am a jerk.

I prefer l'amatriciana with long, discernible strips of its ingredients. The soft sharp bite into a perfectly sautéed onion makes the process of chopping them all worth it. I'm one of those people who look a perfect horror chopping onions - sobbing, runny nose, the whole nine. Worth. It. 

The real star of the dish is of course guanciale, a type of cured pork that comes from the cheeks (guance in Italian) and is porky, fatty, wonderful. It's typical of Central Italy, but this came from the deli counter at a supermarket in Tuscany, and I had no complaints.

A quick melancholic digression.

The news of Tony Bourdain's death came the day before, and it hit me harder than I would have expected. I don't know if I realized what a big fan I was, and not for the harsh, sometimes crass, badass rockstar persona, but for the way he traveled. Respectful, curious, warm, enthusiastic, adventurous, and joyful. He was my inspiration for a number of trips – mostly recently, Sénégal – and cooking something with love for people I love seemed like an appropriate way to honor him.

This trip made me question why lard has such a negative connotation – it's hard to imagine anything more magical and comforting than rendering pork fat to begin preparing a meal. The kitchen fills with an earthy smoke, the slices glisten and sparkle as they turn quickly transparent.

Next go the first round of peperoncino (red pepper flakes – not the sweet green pepper from pizza places) and our sliced onions. The way I learned to cook pasta is that certain ingredients are allowed to steep in the cooking oil as it heats, garlic and peperoncino in particular. This imbues the dish with a consistent but mellower bite of the flavor in question. If you like things spicy – as I certainly do – you add more at the end for the sharp kick and additional complexity.

Tomatoes get added as the onions are set on a low burner to soften, and this is where I'm quickly exposed as a heretic of sorts: I use canned tomatoes. Is it crazy? Maybe, but canned San Marzano tomatoes instead of some watery uncertain early-in-the-season pink things from the grocery store are my preference every single time. I use a combination of passata – like a purée but rougher – and pomodori pelati (skinless) that I slice again into long strips.

And now another bit of heresy: this sauce is wonderful on day two and beyond. Italians don't believe in leftovers, but I'm going to lean into my Americanness wholeheartedly to say that day three bucatini all'amatriciana pan fried and lightly burnt with lots of stinky pecorino is probably a top ten dish for me. I like my pasta sauce relatively tight – or as my dad called it as a kid, "pastashoota," properly rendered as pasta asciutta (dry) – so I let the tomato thicken up. While it's cooking, salt to taste and add more peperoncino for good measure.

Now there is one important thing that I should have mentioned at the beginning... get your water boiling. Use the biggest pot you have. Salt it well. Retain a cup of the water before draining just in case your sauce is too tight. Pasta should be cooked al dente or not at all. On this I am 100% purist, and it's frankly non-negotiable.

Now comes the good part. Once the sauce and pasta have been united and the sauce is as tight or loose as you like, portion it out and cover the mountain of pasta with a thick snowfall of grated pecorino romano.

The end result should be some kind of perfection: noodles with body and heft, a rich but not too heavy sauce redolent of earthy pork, soft sweet onions, bright fresh tomato, the lingering heat of the peperoncino, and just-slightly-funky-but-all-the-way-salty cheese. As a tribute dish to the memory of a constant inspiration, one could do worse. Buon appetito.

She Flies Through the Air with the Greatest of Ease

Here's a quick confession: I'm Tuscan. It's where my surname originates. It's where I first came to love Italy. It's in my bones, in my cooking repertoire, and (sadly) in my accent. Yet when I picture the Central Italian countryside, my brain immediately hops to Umbria.

Umbria is a feast for the senses: rolling green hills cresting over a valley of kelly, gold, and forest fields, bejeweled with a sprinkling of vibrant red, buttery yellow, and rich purple wildflowers. The air smells like sun-warmed grass, a faint but often present hint of smoke, and happiness. There’s no place I’d rather be for a country trip.

I’m used to seeing Umbria from the hill towns outside of Perugia, over the meandering rivers and streams feeding the Tiber as it wends its way down to Rome. This last visit, I finally made the journey east to Gubbio, one valley over, after years of trying to find a way out there.

Gubbio is a pristine, formidable, medieval town, built atop Monte Ingino, a hill in an Apennine no man’s land between Perugia and the equally formidable and equally medieval Urbino in Le Marche, the neighboring region.

A quick aside: that region's name is sometimes translated when discussed in English, as opposed to the standard anglicization à la Florence (Firenze), Venice (Venezia)... Leghorn (Livorno, truly the worst of the bunch). I remember a guide book my parents had twenty or so years ago called Umbria and the Marches, and I could not for the life of me figure out what parades had to do with a region of Italy and why they were so important as to merit inclusion in the title.

There are views to be had from the winding streets that work their way slowly up the mountainside, but the best viste are from the top. And what better way to get up there than a two-person cage? Enter the Funivia Colle Eletto.

I had anticipated a standard funicular as you see not uncommonly across the peninsula, but the funivia is something unto itself... somewhere between ski lift and go-go cage, flying over the greenery of Monte Ingino.

The ride alone was thrilling, but of course the real reward came after disembarking and getting a view of the whole valley from on high.

Beyond taking in the panorama, there is a bar and a restaurant, along with the church of the patron of Gubbio, Sant'Ubaldo. Sant'Ubaldo himself rests in his own church, displayed in a glass sarcophagus before the altar, complete with a mitre that makes him look more wizard than bishop.

In Which Our Heroine Goes to Italy and Becomes a Cat Lady

Could I have come up with a ruder title?

(Probably not... I'm not really that creative a writer.)

100 times out of 100, I would classify myself as a dog person, but as I told my best friend years ago, "I would settle for an outgoing cat." And, in Pescia, I finally met one. And then I saw cats everywhere.

This is Schatz, and he was my little buddy for a week. Social, ever so fluffy, but still all cat. We would sit on the patio in the sun; I sipped wine while he had his head scratched. He wrinkled his nose at me when my hands reeked of aromatics from cooking (more on that later) and played aloof and disinterested the evenings after days away. "I'm just standing right next to you pointedly ignoring you. Because I don't care." That little stinker had my heart.

I convinced myself I was a secret cat whisperer. Schatz would come as if I'd conjured him, follow me around the property, roll over to have me scratch his belly while his whole body hummed in contentment.

Other cats I encountered seemed not to have yet received the memo of my skillset. And it seems I am not actually a cat lady so much as a one cat lady. Mein Schatzi.

Infiorate di Spello

One of the most spectacular celebrations of a feast day in Italia is the infiorate of Spello for the holiday of Corpus Domini. Spello is itself a gorgeously romantic Umbrian hill town one train stop south of the infinitely more famous Assisi (thanks, St. Francis!), and the narrow, winding, cobbled streets come alive with wildflowers for not even 24 hours for the holiday.

The notion of an infiorata (translated generally as a "flower carpet" or "flower tapestry," essentially a collage on the ground composed of cut flower petals and greenery) isn't an uncommon way to celebrate this particular feast, but the Spellani craft the most exquisite pieces of art from local wild plants, all carefully tended to produce vivid scenes.

The process begins the night before the holiday with hundreds of locals clustered tightly in narrow porches separating flowers, cutting petals, and laying out their designs on prepared templates. The scenes can be religious tableaus, intricate patterns, or the always charming junior groups done by local children and teens.

After hours of careful presentation, the infiorate are completed, and locals and visitors alike follow a twisting course through the city to admire the works.

Of course, fresh flower petals don't do well in the heat of the Central Italian sun, so the infiorate are kept under tents during construction and periodically watered to keep them from drying out too much.

The holiday ends with a parade led by the priest walking through the murals (which I can never bear to watch!) and awarding of prizes to the muralists. Then the town, exhausted from the late night and hours upon hours of work, retires to a lazy Sunday afternoon and night.

La Rossa

Bologna has three nicknames:

• La Dotta - the learned, as it's home to the "oldest" university in the world (debatable, but let's go with it)
• La Grassa - the fat, due to the Emilian cuisine: rich in butter and absolutely wonderful
• La Rossa - the red, said to be a reference to the color of the city, but there are naturally tongue-in-cheek implications around her politics

I've never really understood the latter from the physical sense - Bologna is red, but it's also tangerine and rose and salmon and cantaloupe. I tried to search for the red this trip with little success, but enjoyed the thrill of the hunt.

Un po' d'Africa in giardino.

“Cerco un po’ d’Africa in giardino
Tra l’oleandro e il baobab”

— Paolo Conte & Vito Pallavicini, "Azzurro"

(I'm looking for a bit of Africa in the garden, between the oleander and the baobab.)

They say you can't go home again, and – maybe – they're right. I'm finishing the last of a three day stint (to be fair, 36 hours or so) in Bologna, an 8 minute walk from where I lived ten years ago. There are waves of nostalgia, a million familiar sights, an unshakeable feeling of the unceasing march of time, and a song in my heart so strong I feel ready to burst. This city made my life so much richer, and I will forever be grateful for the gifts it gave.

There is, however, something to be said for no longer being on a student budget.

The apartment has one of those sun-drenched, terra cotta wonderland terraces that you only hear about, but I seem to have found. Being nestled in the heart of the university district, you can hear opera singers warming up, piano lessons in flight, and the constant warm hum of student conversation. It's a little slice of heaven and respite in the ever churning energy of this gorgeous city, and I am beyond loath to leave it behind.

La Parthenopea

If reincarnation were really, surely at least one of my past lives would have been lived out under the blistering Neapolitan sun. Naples has been one of my happy places since my first visit at 20. It is frenetic and filthy and often dangerous and I love every part of it. I'm not certain what it says about me that I thrive in chaos.

At least, I think I thrive in chaos.

In that spirit, I kicked off my trip not in the reasonable starting cities of Milan or Rome, but instead my beloved Napoli. It meant an extra layover (hence, Madrid!), and a whole layer of complication to meet up with my parents in Umbria. I arrived at 23:00 and was scheduled for the 13:00 train for Roma Termini; in my mind, this was clearly a sufficient amount of time to wander my favorite streets and stop for a meal at the oh-so-touristy but equally delicious Antica Pizzeria da Michele.

So I thought.

I woke up late with a headache to boot and didn't get out the door until 10. Naturally, the street I thought I wanted to take (and found without map nor problem) wasn't the street I actually needed to take, which lead to me furiously power-walking down Spaccannapoli muttering "shcusate" in my best imitation of dialetto and arriving at the restaurant (where a line was already assembled) at five to 11. 

My saving grace? Solo travel! The place is always so crowded that you get a ticket on arrival and wait until your number is called. It can be hours if you time things badly. The man giving out the tickets was asking how many were in each group and I hollered out, "una!" when he came to me. "Are you alone?" he asked. "Si, sono da sola - I am alone!" I responded back in Italian, hoping that would help my case. Lo and behold, I was not only seated, but got the first pizza coming out of the oven. I left twenty minutes later, full as an egg and inordinately pleased with myself.

The other complication of the morning was the fact that while I had brought along the DSR and an extra lens and planned my shooting around the direction of the sun, I had forgotten to replace the memory card. There's nothing like lugging a heavy bag of effectively useless camera gear to pay penance for your stupidity. And so, instead of rim-lit portraits of Napolitani going about their mornings, iPhone shots. So it goes.