Last days in Italy

I’m back almost a week now, enjoying the westbound jet lag that affords me the luxury of going to bed early and waking up early. Mom and I had such a wonderful trip that I would be remiss to leave out our last two days.

Our last day in Scalea was a “free day,” with nothing on our itinerary. The town is a really small town, one where taxis aren’t really an option, nor is any other form of public transportation. We had seen most of the town in our week’s stay, so we took the day as a day to relax. We slept in and then took the rest of Gramma’s ashes to the beach, where mom said her goodbye. I sat on the rocks and reflected for a while as mom combed the beach for driftwood. We then went back to the hotel where I read a book on our balcony in the sun and mom made her slideshows.

We had dinner that night with our new friends Cristiano and Carmine. They took us up some mountain to another hillside town where we had a nice steak dinner. When we ordered, they suggested we get a pizza as an appetizer and then we’d get two steaks. I thought, finally, they get it, that mom and I don’t eat like Italians, and we’re just splitting the entrees. That was until we saw the steaks. They were huge porterhouse steaks meant for two people. So of course the men were left with the task of doing most of the eating, but we still had a lovely night. We said our goodbyes and hope we can play host to them when they come to NY. The next morning Giovanni, our original driver and the owner of the restaurant, drove us back to the airport, using much more restraint than our original airport trip and left us feeling a lot more comfortable. After more big hugs, we flew back to Rome for our last night in Italy.

We arrived mid-afternoon and knew we had to get to the Vatican before it closed. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it. At this point, almost 4 p.m., we hadn’t eaten since 7 a.m., we were starving. Mom made a suggestion to do the most sacrilegious thing you could ever do, and I obliged. She’d seen a sign for Burger King, and once she’d said it, I couldn’t get my mind off it. So off we went. To eat at Burger King. On a Friday in Lent. A few hundred feet from the Vatican. It actually pained me to type that and admit to it, but ya know what? Damn, it tasted good! We’d had our fill of good Italian food all week, so we got some American fuel and then headed to St. Peter’s Basillica, which was open. Mom admired the beautiful paintings and took some pictures, then we went back to our convent hotel for a much-needed nap.

Later that evening we visited my cousin Jennifer, who married an Italian and lives in Rome with him and their two sons. She took us to a great pizza place where I proceeded to eat myself into a food coma. I got gnocchi with a truffle cream sauce and split a pizza with mom. Then when I saw that they had my favorite dessert, strawberries and cream, I couldn’t resist. After the meal Jennifer gave mom a night-time ride around many of the monuments, including the Colosseum. Then we went to some spot where you could look through a keyhole and get a perfectly framed view of the dome of St. Peter’s. We then went back to their apartment where mom kept her kids up way past their bedtime and I was still feeling lethargic from the meal. We had our last night of sleep in Italy, our last morning meal of cappuccino and croissant, and flew back to NY a few pounds heavier than before.

Adventures in Eating

Being pregnant and travelling through Italy has advantages and disadvantages. The main disadvantage is missing out on a lot of great wine drinking and some raw cured meats, like prosciutto and salami. The advantage is I can eat as much as I want and not really be concerned about the calories. I also got out of eating some terrible strong licorice yesterday after finding out, per our guide, that it's not good for pregnancy (who knew?).

Tuesday we cooked our last but best meal yet. Our starter was a stuffed eggplant. The stuffing was made of ham, egg, breadcrumbs and cheese. We then finished it with a tomato sauce. We made homemade fusilli as our first course. The fusilli was a little more challenging. The pasta was rolled and cut into about two-inch slices, which you then smushed a thin rod into and rolled until it was thin. Our sauce was a tomato-based sauce with sausages and ribs and pig fat in it. The second course was a thinly pounded steak, which we rolled the leftover eggplant stuffing into (with the addition of ground beef) and cooked in a broth of onion, celery and white wine. The meal was fantastic from start to finish. Mom has commented how much the cooking reminds her of how her father used to cook.

We then took a little road trip to a town called Aieta on the top of a mountain on a very winding road. There was an old palace on top overlooking the hills. There were sheep and pig farms everywhere. We had a nice little tour guide from South Africa who had married an Italian. We then travelled to Praia, a little beach town, for the sunset.


Yesterday we were up at the crack of dawn to cross through the middle of the country to the east coast town of Ciro. We stopped along the way to visit a licorice factory and museum. The town smelled fantastic, but the fresh licorice was bitter and horrible. We stopped for lunch at an old convent and had a feast so big that we never made it to the second course. Every appetizer you can imagine was brought out to us - from meatballs to breaded mashed potatoes to spicy olives stuffed with tuna. Our first course was tortelloni filled with fresh truffles and another with mushrooms. We were too stuffed to get to the steak second course, so we decided to get back in the van. We moved on to the town of Ciro and hit a winery which covered over 250 acres. Mom even tasted a few different whites (without mixing them with Coke.) We then made our way to a castle on the beach about a half-hour from Catanzaro, where my great-grandmother was from, and I left a little bit of my gramma's ashes in the ocean. On the way back we passed through the actual town and I marvelled at the fact that it had tunnels through mountains and visually resembled parts of Pittsburgh, where, coincidentally, Gramma chose to settle. Today is our last free day in Calabria, so we will have dinner with our new friends Cristiano and Carmine before heading to Rome tomorrow. I fear for the buttons on my work pants when I get back.

Adventures in Cooking, Part II

After a day of sightseeing yesterday, today we returned to the kitchen, where things went a little smoother, though the second course was a little less appetizing. Our starter was something called sformatta (sp?), which was essentially a quiche with ham, mozzarella and parmesan. This took maybe 10 minutes at most to prepare and then cooked for 40 minutes – it was delicious and something I’m sure I can make when I get home. The first course was a cavatelli pasta with broccoli and n’duja, which is a spicy local sausage consisting of all the parts of the pig you would never want to eat or think about eating. Cavatelli is a little like gnocchi but made of just flour and water (no potato). It was a little harder to roll, and there was a trick to making a little slit in it with two fingers. I never quite got the hang of it, but mom did, so I stuck to rolling and cutting it and she stuck with forming it.

Our second course was pigs' hearts and livers sauteed in olive oil and garlic with red pepper and a sundried sweet pepper. I think if it was a different kind of meat I would have enjoyed it more, but for now I’ll just say the baby wasn’t into it and it made me slightly nauseous. Cutting it was particularly gross and unfortunately I can still smell it on my fingers. Our side dish was chicory (spinach) with breadcrumbs and garlic, and that was delicious. The nice thing about having so many courses was I was able to say I was full by the second course and just tasted it without offending. Afterwards we went for gelato with Christiano, our interpreter.

Yesterday was a local sightseeing day. We first went to a farmhouse where many of the local fruits and vegetables are grown. One in particular, the cedro (a citrus fruit), is only grown in two places in the world, this region and in Lebanon. It is a fruit that Jewish people use for religious purposes as an offering. We went and saw where that is grown. Also grown in this region are olives, figs, sweet peppers and oranges. We also went to a little hillside town called Orsomarso and stopped for a cappuccino. We came back and took a little nap and then did a walking tour of Scalea, the town we’re staying in. Many of the villages in this region are very old and built purposefully of stone to defend the land from invaders from places like Turkey and Algeria. Many are actually walled-in cities with one entrance, usually very narrow, and everything is attached. Apparently most of these villages didn't even have running water until the 1970s. We walked over 200 stairs, enough to build up an appetite for dinner.

We've been eating every night at the restaurant and bouncing around the menu, getting a little more adventurous each night. I unknowingly ate rabbit last night. Our waiter doesn't speak English, so when I asked him what was in the sauce he put his fingers up by his ears, which I took for some reason to mean goat or a horned animal, but it was rabbit. And it was very good. They've been making the portions smaller for us now, though whether it's from the food or the pregnancy, the zipper on my jacket busted last night from my growing belly. At least the baby is eating good!

Tomorrow is our last class and Wednesday is a wine-tasting day, which unfortunately won't be much fun for me. A funny tidbit I'd forgotten: Anyone who knows my mom knows she doesn't drink. At all. Something the Italians don't comprehend. I tried to encourage her to at least have a glass of wine, and Christiano suggested that she mix it with coke and a lemon. She did, and she loved it. And when people mock her at home, she can honestly tell them (hopefully in a snobby voice), "Well, THIS is how they drink it in Italy."

Adventures in Cooking - Part I

This morning I faced my fear of inadequacy and went to the dark place where I am most inept in life: The Kitchen. The cooking class is held at a restaurant called Antica Osteria just a short while from the hotel in the town of Scalea. When we arrived, we were met by our chef, Genaro, and a translator named Christiano and a photographer named Carmine. While they were setting up, I had a cappuccino and a mom had a “caffe.” I had explained to her yesterday that a coffee here means a shot of espresso, but she’d forgotten and thought the tiny cup was hysterical (musing that my dad would need about 20 of these) and made several faces after tasting it.

Now to the kitchen. We started with our appetizer. I was given the task of peeling potatoes, and mom, cutting the peppers. Mom was a pro and was tossing peppers around and hamming it up for the camera in the time it took me to peel two potatoes. Soon she started to help me, thankfully, so we could move on to the first course. I found that while peeling potatoes was a weakness of mine, stirring them in a frying pan was a strength. Unfortunately I couldn’t do that for long, but the more time-consuming task of making gnocchi kept me busy for a good while. I especially enjoyed the little contraption that looked like a Play-doh fun factory. Once we made the dough, rolling it and slicing it kept me busy while mom cut the meat for our second course. The sauce for the gnocchi was an olive oil based mushroom, sausage, tomato and garlic sauce. The second course was a simple meat, carrots and celery with white wine sauce. We then did an after-meal course of tomato with a gratin of anchovies, capers, bread crumbs, garlic and parsley. The bread crumb maker was another cool contraption.

Now it was time to eat our masterpiece and neither mom nor I had the appetite to eat the whole thing, so by the time the second course came, we were really just tasting it as the chef lovingly yelled at us in Italian, reminding me that I’m eating for two, and making hand gestures of a microscope. Stuffed, we were able to relax for about an hour before our excursion to the town of Diamante.



Diamante is a town known for its murals. Apparently in 1981 an artist came to the town, once just a small fishing village, and talked the mayor into letting 180 artists come and paint murals all over the buildings. Much of the countryside we passed between the airport and here was made up of abandoned towns because there is no agriculture or any need for people to inhabit some of this land. But apparently the artwork revitalized the town and brought with it a tourism industry. Carmine walked us through the town explaining the murals while Christiano translated. They then took us for some gelatto before returning to the hotel. Now we are just trying to work up enough appetite to go back to the restaurant for dinner (which apparently they didn’t think we ate enough last night.) This has been an amazing trip so far and it’s only our first real day of the course. Tomorrow is a non-cook day and we are going to a museum of regional foods.

When in Rome... Bring Bryan

So I’ve been so consumed with making it through my first trimester that I didn’t spend a whole lot of time planning this trip. I figured this is my fourth trip to Rome, and the Calabria portion is all planned out. I bought a TimeOut book for all of Italy and left my TimeOut Rome at home because it was 10 years old. I never looked in the book to realize that it didn’t contain any maps or practical information. Mom and I got to our lovely little convent hotel in Trastevere, checked in with a nice English-speaking front desk person and showered and napped.

Once ready to hit the town, the front desk person now didn’t speak a word of English and didn’t have a map. Our neighborhood isn’t near a subway station so we would have had to take a bus to a train station. Without my TimeOut Rome I couldn’t even remember how and where to buy bus tickets (Bryan will tell you a story about that…), and alas we took a cab, feeling like a defeated American tourist. I realized, while I consider myself a fairly experienced traveller, just how much I’ve relied on Bryan for his willingness to try and speak the language of whatever country we’re in. I had at least bought an Italian phrase dictionary, but the minute someone started talking back to me I’d blurt out “Parlo inglese?”

A very random coincidence took place the day before I left, in that an Italian court reporter that I’ve met at various international conventions named Fausto found me on Facebook. So at least now mom and I had an Italian-speaking friend to do the talking and take us somewhere off the beaten path. He suggested we meet him at the Pantheon and we’d go from there. This was a great area that gave mom plenty of great photo ops, as we were also close to the Spanish Steps and Trevi Fountain. He took us out of the tourist trap area and took us to this awesome little wine bar that had a smorgasbord of Italian goodies for free as part of a happy hour. We said our goodbyes and headed back to the convent where I entered Time Warp Hell.

I did what I never do and broke the cardinal jetlag rule: I took a nap when I got in. I tried to justify it by saying, well, I’m pregnant and I nap now and it doesn’t keep me from falling asleep at night. WRONG! While I fell asleep by 10, I was up by 1 for the rest of the night. To make things worse, our room had no clock and we had no watches. Mom bought an international cell phone, which we didn’t realize that the time zone was defaulted to Chicago time. So we had thought the time difference was seven hours all day long. In the middle of the night I realized my iPod had clocks of the world, and didn’t realize that my iPod’s EST was on daylight savings, so that would make the time difference five hours. Long story short, I called Bryan to see if he could look at a computer and tell me what time it was, and he wasn’t home and couldn’t. We were supposed to have a wakeup call at 5, but I got up at 4 (which I thought was 5), and that was how our day started.

We flew to Calabria this morning and had a driver drive us to the seaside town of Scalea where we will be staying for the week. I feared for both our lives as it was the scariest display of driving I’ve ever experienced – a 2.5-hour drive took less than 2 hours and we played chicken as he passed several vehicles on the two-way road. Now we are settling in and have our first cooking lesson at 10 tomorrow. Hoping now that we have the time zones figured out, the jetlag will wear off by tomorrow.