Category Archives: Liguria

The final drop…

22 Monday Dec 2008

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photo-water-dropThe Water Problem, so movingly and eloquently described here, has been resolved.  I don’t imagine anyone’s particularly happy; we certainly aren’t.  But at least it’s over.

Our lawyer looked at all the documents and told us that we must pay the c. E 2,500 that Acqua Potabili demanded.  Our only remaining recourse is to go to the neighbors for help.

The Captain called A.P. and arranged to have all documents e-mailed to us here in the States.  There will be no second shoe dropping.  The bill we received here covered up to September, when we discovered and corrected the problem.  It began in excess of E 6,000, to which Mr. A.P. applied a bewildering series of reductions to arrive at the E 2,500 figure.

It all has a bit of good-cop bad-cop feel to it.  Bad Cop – “You owe us E 6,000!”  Good Cop – “But you only have to give us E 2,500!”  This, I guess, is meant to make us feel better, and to make up in some way for the appalling lapse of time between meter reads and bills.  But in fact, the bill is about 75 times larger than what we would reasonably expect, and somehow even though A.P. has made big concessions, it just doesn’t feel all that good.

Except for the fact that it’s over.  That part feels just fine.

Italian Water Torture

08 Monday Dec 2008

Posted by in Italy, Liguria, Rapallo, Uncategorized

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s_glass_of_water1

I’ve been putting off writing this account because every time I think about it I want to s-c-r-e-a-m.  I will try to keep it brief, but I shall fail. And before I start on the Tale of Woe, you should know that Italy is justifiably proud of its delivery of excellent public water. They’ve worked hard to see that safe water is universally available, and they’ve done a great job at that.  But.

In September I casually opened our water bill.  It comes twice a year and is usually in the neighborhood of E 30-40.  I almost fainted when I saw the amount due on the new bill: E 3,276.00.  Now I thought I’d seen everything outrageous that Italian utilities could hurl at us when, after five years, the electric company finally took an actual meter reading and sent us a bill in excess of E 800.  But E 3,000?  Surely this was a typo.

It was not a typo.  We had, unbeknownst to us, a leak, a ‘perdita’, from our supply pipe.

geyser1Well, ya big dummies, I hear you thinking – didn’t you even notice the ground was wet or something?  Well, no.  We didn’t.  The black plastic pipe that brings water to our house originates at a ‘contatore’  (a water meter which is also the site of the junction with the water main) about half a kilometer up the road from our house.  It crosses under the road, and then runs down a very steep torrente, a river bed which is usually dry unless there’s been a lot of rain.  The torrente is very narrow and runs between our neighbor Giovanni’s house and the property of other neighbors, the Trattoria Rosa family. It is, by and large, invisible.  The pipe then runs under the road again and then goes underground to arrive at our house.

Neither the Captain nor I was able to scramble up the torrente to look for a pipe problem – it is that steep.  We called our trusty friend Giovanni, the mighty-river1Human Backhoe, the very strong Romanian who has his own building business now.  He arrived in a couple of hours with a wiry young man who was able to climb up the rocky stream bed.

He found that our neighbor Giovanni’s wall had tumbled down into the torrente, breaking and burying our plastic pipe in the process.  Hence the water loss was never visible, nor was there any noticeable decrease in water pressure at the house.

The Water Company (Acque Potabili) has an office in Rapallo which is open three mornings a week, and there you can speak with an actual person.  Unfortunately she was unable to do anything other than give us the fax number for the main office in Torino where she instructed us to send a letter explaining the problem, along with photographs and the Backhoe’s bill (too many Giovanni’s in this story).

That’s right.  Fax number.  Acque Potabili doesn’t give you a phone number until things have become quite desperate. But they will call you, and a very helpful man did call.  What he said amazed us.  Here is the chronology of what happened, as we’ve pieced it together from this conversation:

n.b. Our normal usage for 6 months is +/- 100 cubic meters

Sept. 2007 – we received a normal bill from a normal  Feb. 2007  reading

August 2007 – the meter was read, usage showed 824 cm

Feb. 2008 – we received an ‘estimated’ bill of about E 35, in spite of the fact there  a reading had been made in August 2007

Feb. 2008 – the meter was read, usage showed 767 cm

Sept. 2008 – we received the gigantic bill

In the course of the conversation from Mr. Acque  in Torino Louis learned that, based on our meter readings, our actual bill should be in the neighborhood of E 6,500.  In that conversation Mr. Acque said they would reduce the bill to E 2,500.

We have also been in touch with neighbor Giovanni’s family (he died earlier this year) and they are willing to discuss sharing responsibility with us.  All our Italian friends have said, “But of course, it is the neighbors’ fault. Their wall fell on your pipe.  They should pay.”

Another friend suggested we should charge the water company with threatening our health because the leak was  there for so long that impurities could have entered our water, and they did nothing to notify us.

We have just received news that a telegram arrived this week threatening to turn off the water if the bill is not paid by Dec. 23.  Merry Christmas! At least this time we’ve been given a telephone number and have found their web site with contact information; the Captain will call first thing tomorrow morning. And at least the exchange rate, which was $1.50 = E 1 when the bill arrived has improved to $1.27 = E 1 today. And thank goodness we have a wonderful friend who checks the mail and alerted us to impending trouble.

falls

But still.  Wouldn’t you think a company has some responsibility to bill in a timely fashion, and especially a responsibility to alert a client to a problem?  We thought so, but evidently we were mistaken. (We must be becoming partially Italian since, in this case, ‘timely’ means six months later.)  Think of the water that was wasted, for starters, then think of the size of the bill.  It makes us both groan.  There does not seem to be any board or commission that oversees the operation of monopoly utilities in Italy – at least not one that a consumer has access to.

Me?  I’m waiting for the other shoe to fall.  This big bill was based on a meter reading from February, 2008.  What might the bill of February 2009, based on an August 2008 reading, have in store for us?

Stay tuned!

A Pressing engagement – Olives, part 2

05 Wednesday Nov 2008

Posted by in Food, Italian habits and customs, Italy, Liguria, Photographs, Uncategorized

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Saturday, the day we took our olives to the press, was a gorgeous day. It turned out we had 99 Kilograms of fruit, not the 111 our funky scale told us (we weigh using the unreliable technique of standing on the scale with the olives, then without, then subtracting the difference; it’s kind of comical, especially the shocking ‘without olives’ part).  Mixing ours with T and J’s 75 K gave us a total of 174 K from which we got a total of 26 K of oil.  My trusty calculator tells me that almost 15% of each olive is oil.

We came home with 16.3 liters of oil, and T & J came home with 12.3, giving a remarkable liter of oil for every 6 K of olives picked, a very good result.  We were all happy except for T & J who had picked only half their trees.  Fortunately they were able to pick the rest the next day during a brief respite from the rain, and got them pressed with a batch of another friend at a different frantoio.

frantoio-and-church

The frantoio is in the teeny little building above, squished between San Pietro church and a building housing a delightful restaurant where we ate an enormous lunch (don’t even ask).  The olives are weighed, dumped in a chute, washed, and then disappear into a vast array of machinery with pipes, hoses, gears and belts.  Eventually one is told to put a container under a nozzle and, as they like to say here, Wah-Lah!  Olive oil, golden green and slightly bitter, arrives.

The bits that don’t come back to you as oil are pumped off into a big truck just outside the building.  All this muck is taken off to another kind of mill where it is heated and somehow even more oil is extracted.  What we received is the Virgin (or, I suppose, Extra Virgin) oil.  What is made from the leftover is ‘olive oil.’

Now the oil will sit in its demijohn for about 4 months.  Impurities will sink to the bottom, and somehow the bitterness will disappear and we’ll be left with the mellow, rich oil for which Liguria is justly famous.  It’s hard to wait!

There is a series of photographs of the process available here. Some of the photos look very hazy.  That is because the interior of a frantoio IS hazy – it must be from tiny particles of olive oil floating in the air.  They get into the back of your throat when you walk in and you wonder if you’ll be able to continue breathing.  It must be very good for the complexion.

So the Olive Adventure of ’08 is over.  Our trees will be pruned rather severely this winter, so it may be a year or two until we pick again – unless we can help our friends pick, which is always fun.  It was a Banner Year.

Olives!

02 Sunday Nov 2008

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‘Tis the season to be harvesting olives.  All around us the hills are festooned with colorful nets, principally orange and yellow.  They are wrapped around the trees and are attached one to the next making the steep terraces look like a brightly colored slopes.  The olives drop into pockets in the low parts of the nets, whence they are easily collected.

Our friends T and J have 51 trees which have been beautifully pruned and cared for.  They do not use nets, but instead hand-pick the olives, which is easy to do with their trees, none of which is much taller than we are.  The pruned and umbrella-shaped trees are much more productive than trees which are ‘let go.’

Our trees are in the latter category, very much in need of a pruning, which they will receive this winter.  They had been untended for at least 20 years when we bought our place.  Just after we moved in a friend sent a friend over who pruned some of the trees, but none of them very dramatically, and we’ve done nothing about it since.  This means the trees are huge.

We use a system that falls somewhere between the Old-Timers’ and T and J’s.  We have one net, which we carry from tree to tree (we have only about 15 trees).  Then we spend a very long time positioning poles to hold the net in place and form a bowl under the tree we’re working on.  There’s usually a fair amount of good-natured discussion about the placement of the poles, but eventually the net is positioned in a more or less stable way.  Then the Captain takes a long, thick bamboo stick and whacks the trees to make the fruit fall.  This is a time-honored way of removing fruit, but it’s fallen out of favor with modern olive-culturists.  The preferred method for removing fruit these days is the olive rake, a plastic rake with tines spaced just less than the average olive.  You attach the rake to the weapon of your choice (bamboo stick for us, this year as in photo) and comb out the branches.  The tines pull the olives off and send them spraying all over the place.  With luck a large percentage of them end up in the net.  The Captain alternates whacking with a stout stick and whacking with the rake on a long pole.  Meanwhile I use a rake on a small pole and wander around looking for low branches to strip.  I’m also crazy about finding olives on the ground and putting them in my basket – treasures!

This year the weather has not co-operated with many Ligurian harvesters.  We’ve had heavy rains and very strong winds, the heaviest since the great storm of 2000. A lot of olives have come down, and the weather for several days was just too nasty for gathering those that are still on trees.  Those who got their nets up in a timely fashion are doing very well (it’s a stand-out olive year).  Those who waited will have lost a lot of the crop unless, like me, they like to creep around on their hands and knees under the trees – not an efficient way to gather.

Once the olives are collected it’s good to get them to the mill, the ‘frantoio’, within three days.  Our favorite frantoio over the mountain in Val Fontanabuona went out of business while we weren’t looking last year (there was no olive harvest for anyone in Liguria last year – no olives). So instead yesterday we went to a different mill here in Rapallo.  Stay tuned for the report.  In past years we’ve gotten a liter of oil for each 7 or 8 kg of olives.  We had 111 kg this year (we also didn’t get all of our fruit picked before the weather turned on us).

If you’re really interested in olives, Mort Rosenblum has written a delightful book called ‘Olives’ and subtitled “The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit,” which is stuffed with history, culture and even some recipes.  If you enjoy Life-in-Italy tales, Extra Virgin by the Englishwoman Annie Hawes is an engaging account of her purchase of a rustico and grove of olive trees above Imperia some twenty years ago; she writes appealingly and amusingly of her neighbors and of the land itself.

Riding in Style

18 Saturday Oct 2008

Posted by in Customs, Driving in Italy, Italian habits and customs, Italian men, Italy, Liguria, Photographs, Rapallo, Uncategorized

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Many of our friends deplore the number of scooters on the streets, and the abandon with which they are driven.  To which we reply, Think how crowded our already crowded streets and parking areas would be if every one of those scooters was a single-occupant car.  It would be day-long gridlock – a nightmare.

Having said that, there are some scooter drivers who give the rest of us a bad name by being reckless and thoughtless.  And there are scooter practices which car-drivers find annoying; for instance, all scooters will move to the front of any line of cars, and will pass any slow-moving column of cars.  Personally I think irritation at this practice is just envy on car-drivers’ part! I was stranded in a long line in down-town Rapallo a while back; here’s a photo of a few of the scooters who made their way past me and up to the front of the line:

We’ve been making a years-long study of the various driving styles of the Italian Scooter Drivers, and herewith we present our findings.

First of all there are the Wild Young Men who ride with their helmets on the back of their heads, sometimes unfastened (though this is illegal so you don’t see it so often), and always, always, their elbows bent out.  What is it about leaning forward and sticking your elbows out that makes you go faster?  I don’t know, but they all do it, so it must work. You know if you see someone coming at you on a scooter with arms akimbo that you’d better watch out, because he won’t be. And yes, it’s always ‘he.’

The counterpoint to the young boys is the Straight Young Girls. They seem always to be reed-slim, and they sit absolutely erect, with their knees and elbows tucked demurely in. They don’t necessarily drive more slowly than the boys, but they make a neater package. I have to say here that I had a hard time getting the photos to illustrate these styles – the scooters go by quickly, so many of my attempts were blurred failures. The example of this riding style is a woman a little older than the teens of whom I’m speaking, but she has not lost her youthful Style.

Then there are the Young Bucks out cruising. They’ve learned to keep their elbows in, but haven’t yet learned to watch the road all the time. There are more important things to look at!

Time passes, young men age, and through some bizarre rule of body physics the elbows go in and the knees go out. I was able to capture a rare elbows AND knees out gent. This is uncommon; usually the Old Guys simply put their knees at right angles to the scooter and hold their arms in.

Smoking levels are down in Italy, but many people of both genders enjoy smoking as they scoot along. The Captain has noted that most smokers like to light up immediately after putting on their helmets but before they’ve started the motor. (Only yesterday I watched a man put on his helmet, then pull out his papers and tobacco and proceed to roll a big fat cigarette before setting out; that was a first for me.) The Captain wants to invent a ‘sigaretta finta’ (fake cigarette) for those trying to quit – something they could keep in the scooter and put a match to when they set off, and then clench between their teeth as they drive. He thinks it’s an idea with real financial potential; I think we should keep our day jobs. I was unable to capture the not unusual sight of someone driving, smoking AND talking on the cell phone all at the same time. It’s a rather terrifying sight.

Another oddity of the older gentlemen riders is the One Foot Dragging style. I’m not sure what this accomplishes – maybe it serves as a sort of outrigger in case balance should suddenly vanish.

I felt very fortunate to be able to capture a photo of the almost-never-seen Two Foot Dragger:

Perhaps this driver had an especially wiggly passenger?

Before showing you the last two photos, which are of everyone’s favorite scooter style, I want to mention three important styles I was not able to document with pictures. The first is highly illegal, but still often seen. It is the Entire Family of Four on One Scooter. Dad drives; Mom sits pillion; between them, smooshed to near invisibility, is the smaller of two children. Standing between Dad’s legs and arms, between him and the steering handles, is the larger of the two children. Phew!

The Chat is an amusing illustration of the Italian national past-time of sharing information. It’s not unusual to see two scooters zooming along side-by-side as the drivers engage in animated conversation involving, of course, lots of hand language.

You go years without seeing something and then, boom, three times in one week: last week I saw the ever-rarer Side Saddle Passenger, not once, but three times. This style gives me the jim-jams because having tried it once or twice myself I know how completely unstable the side-sitting passenger feels. And if you’re wearing a slippery skirt it’s just a short slide from the scooter seat to the pavement. Ick. Give me my jeans and let me straddle that seat, please. This riding style is favored by older couples, the woman in her sweater and matching A-line skirt, which is too tight to allow her to ride modestly in any other way.

Everybody’s favorite motor-scooter sight has to be the Dog on the Floorboard. We frequently see the older men up here on the mountain transporting their hunting dogs to the woods for a good run. These dogs seem all to be liver-spotted spaniels, and they are excellent passengers.

The other day I rode behind a scooter which had an unwilling lab as passenger. It was hilarious; the dog was all over the place and howling at the top of its lungs. It’s owner was driving very cautiously, but it was still all too much for the dog who sounded more like an air-raid siren than a dog. Perhaps they had come from the vet; or perhaps it was a training exercise. In any event, it had Fail written all over it.

Of course, the smaller your dog, the easier it will be to carry it on your scooter:

If you don’t trust your pooch to balance on the floor, and he’s small enough, you can always tuck him into a basket:

This last is a bit of a cheat because the scooter is stationary, but it’s clear they will soon be on the move:

Have I left anything or anyone out? Let me know if I’ve missed any Moto-Riding styles and I’ll update the catalog.

Zoom Zoom

01 Wednesday Oct 2008

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Sunday in Japan Valentino Rossi won his sixth Moto GP Championship.  That’s motorcycles, and a happy result for Italy.  And in Singapore Filipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonon did not win the Formula One race for Ferrari.  That’s cars, and cause for a national day of mourning in Italy.

Should you care?

Well, that depends.  If you live with or are going to talk to one of the 90% of all Italian males or 60% of the males in the rest of the world (and who knows what percentage of females) who follow motor sports closely, the answer is Yes.  You will want to be at least familiar with the main players so as not to appear a complete dunce.

Personally I stopped watching Formula 1 when Michael Schumacher retired.  There was something about his utter focus, determination and single-mindedness that warmed the cold northern cockles of my heart. (If you haven’t heard of Schumacher, he was the Tiger Woods of Formula One.  If you haven’t heard of Tiger Woods you need a subscription to Sports Illustrated.)  The new Ferrari ace, Massa, is a cute kid, but he doesn’t seem to have the killer instinct that Schumacher had.  And I never did watch the motorcycle races; those boys lean over way too far.

If you live in Italy, however, there’s a more pressing reason for you to keep abreast of at least the racing schedule, if not the results.  Within half an hour of the completion of either of these races the ordinarily gutsy driving of the Italian male becomes downright lunatic.  Sunday morning as I coasted sedately down the hill to Rapallo, shortly after the completion of the MotoGP, a young kid on his all terrain bike came screaming around a car in the opposite direction on a blind curve; he was in the middle of my lane, and very fortunate I wasn’t driving my gravel truck today.

We were on our way to the beautiful city of Chiavari just down the coast from Rapallo.  There is a Mercatino dei Sapori (a food market!) on the last weekend of each month; vendors come from all around the country with absolutely delicious things to eat. Over on the right you can find a link to an album of photos of this delightful event.  This week, however, my interest strayed from the comestibles to the sky, because there was a Canadair flying from the sea to an inland fire and back again, over and over.

The Canadairs are small 2-engine airplanes with big stomachs.  The pilots, who must have to pass an insanity test for the job, skim over the sea and pick up a belly-full of water which they then carry back to the site of the fire, on which they dump their load of water, back and forth, back and forth.  Again on the right you’ll find a link to photos of the Canadairs fighting fire – both from Sunday and from a couple of years ago when they were flying over the hill just behind us.  They engage in amazing feats of flying prowess, aiming right towards a hillside, for instance, and pulling up at the last possible moment, at the same time releasing their water which inertia carries forward to the burning hillside.  It’s incredible to see, much more exciting than either of the races that were on TV that morning.

There’s a great urban myth about the forestieri finding the charred remains of a swimmer, in full scuba outfit, high on a burned out mountain.  He must have been scooped out of the sea by a Canadair and dropped right into the heart of the fire!!  I believed this entertaining tale the first three times I heard it; then the penny dropped.

The pilot this morning flew back and forth low over the city of Chiavari instead of over a less-populated area.  We could hear the low grumble of his engines as he neared the city; the sound growing to a roar as he passed low over the narrow streets, which sent the sound bouncing back and forth till we weren’t sure from which direction it was coming.  The Captain, who should know, says he was between 300-400 feet above us, which sounds like a lot until it’s an airplane flying over your head.  Then it doesn’t seem like nearly enough.

As we were scooting home we watched this hot dog fly parallel to the coast up towards Rapallo.  He then banked sharply and flew directly at a cruise ship in the bay outside Portofino, banked very sharply and flew between the ship and the land, banked again in the other direction around the Portofino lighthouse, and headed back up to the airport at Genova where the Canadairs are based (rather poor pictures of these maneurvers, blue tinted for some reason, on the right).  Anyone on the ship or at the lighthouse will have had a more exciting morning than they had planned. The Captain says that the pilots eat in the cafeteria at the Genova airport at 12:30.  As it was 12:10 I’m sure this fellow was on his way back for lunch.  But he couldn’t resist giving the folks on the land a bit of a thrill.  No doubt he had watched the motor cycle race that morning.

If you see a path, take it

27 Saturday Sep 2008

Posted by in Italy, Liguria, Photographs, Rapallo, Uncategorized

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Not always good advice, but as often as not it works out well here, so if you’re planning a trip to Italy, be sure to pack your walking shoes.

We used to wonder why so many places in Italy were built in ‘inconvenient’ locations, for example San Fruttuoso, which was once a very important abbey.  Nowadays you can reach it only by boat or on foot.  But of course, we finally realized, in the 1200’s when it was built it was as convenient for it to be there as anywhere else, in fact being on the sea made it more convenient.

Italians are inveterate walkers.  You can be out in the middle of nowhere on some trail that you figure no one has been on for a century; you’ll round a corner, and there will be a middle-aged lady in her straight skirt and high heels walking towards you.  The passagiata is one style of walking, and ‘footing’ along the sentieros is another, slightly more energetic approach. After that I guess you graduate to hiking.  One reason Italians seem so much slimmer and healthier than Americans, I’m sure, is because walking is still central to life here (leaving out the Mediterranean diet for the moment).  In the town where we used to live in the U.S., people routinely drove to the Pharmacy to pick up their newspapers, then got in their cars and drove about 100 yards to the Post Office to pick up mail. The pace of life here accommodates the time it takes to walk in a way that the hurried life in America frequently doesn’t.

Almost every community, certainly every region, has  available maps of the public paths, so it is not difficult to find places to walk.  Not all paths are on these maps, however; there’s no substitute for an ancient neighbor who can tell you which unpromising looking set of steps to take to get someplace quickly. Every place in Italy is connected to every other place by these paths.  Some have been turned into roads since the invention of the automobile, but the shortest distance between two locales is frequently still the ‘sentiero’ – the path.  A good example is the connection between Rapallo and San Maurizio, the frazione where we live.  It’s about 8 kilometers by car, but it is surely not more than 4 or 5 by foot through the woods.  Now that autumn has arrived it is a lovely walk, dry scuffling leaves underfoot and cool breezes off the sea just when you think you’re becoming overheated.

I walked into town yesterday, partly for the sheer pleasure, and partly because my moto was receiving its new back tire.  Here are some photos of the journey.

After leaving our street I walked down this long flight of steps, cutting out 2 switchbacks in the road – isn’t it inviting?

Then I crossed the street and walked down a curving road through a small settlement. Now I know where all the barking we hear comes from. I’ve never seen so many watch dogs.
One house had 3, each fiercer than the last!

Continuing down the hill I arrived at the old mills, which have recently been restored. We’re told there used to be five or six mills in this narrow valley; now there is just this one, but it served double purpose, milling both olives and chestnuts. The old mill wheel between the buildings could be used for both milling operations. Now it is a civic museum and quite interesting to visit.


The stone paths here have always interested me – they’re the devil to walk on because so many of the stones are set end-up rather than flat. I don’t know why, but have decided it was to give better traction to the mules as they made their way up and down these trails loaded with goods.


It was unusually quiet walking down this path. I didn’t hear scooters, or buses honking, or dogs barking, just the occasional bit of birdsong.

You know it’s autumn when you start finding chestnuts on the ground. The ones on the ground now are a bit early; the recent big winds brought them down before they were ripe. The wild boar, cinghiale, love these nuts, so it’s a good idea to keep your eyes and ears open when you’re in the chestnut forest, even though the boars are usually nocturnal.

Amazingly there is a ‘last homely house’ well along this path. I met the woman who lives in it several years ago; she works in the hospital and has (of course!) a lot of dogs. It’s impossible to drive to her home; she parks about a quarter of a mile down the hill and uses this ingenious device to get her goods up to the house – the Modern Mule.

At last I arrived in Rapallo. It took me over an hour to make this walk, but only because I stopped to take so many photos. It was a glorious day to be out and about and hard to find an excuse to be indoors.

But I had to go to driving school…

The Best Thing We Ate This Week – Tagliatelli al Frutti di Mare

15 Monday Sep 2008

Posted by in Italian recipes, Italy, Liguria

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Spring cleaning around here happens in August, if at all.  I don’t know why I wait until just before the mice move in to clean the house from stem to stern, but that’s what I do.  Like clockwork, I finished the Deep Clean of the kitchen last week, and the first mouse walked into the live trap three days later.  Bah!

While cleaning, though, the Captain and I went through all the cookbooks in the kitchen to see if there were any we could live without (there were three).  We stumbled upon a very slim magazine called “Primi Piatti, Speciale Pasta Corta” that was languishing on the top shelf.  Neither of us can remember where on earth it came from.  But it was great fun to rediscover it.

The Captain is a meat eater, first and always.  But on Fridays he frequently cooks up something yummy from the sea.  Lately we seem to have been on a fresh tagliatelli kick – well, perhaps I should say ‘fresh’ as we’ve been buying packaged fresh pasta at the grocery store.  It is not, perhaps, as fresh-fresh as from the pasta fresca shop, but it is a lot fresher than dry pasta. Although the recipe from our funny magazine is for farfalle (all the recipes are for short pasta), we substituted tagliatelli with no ill results.

This is easy to fix, and a joy to eat. It’s almost a meal in itself, but we followed up with a tomato and red onion salad, and then nectarines. The recipe is over on the right under recipes.

Buon appetito!

The Best Thing We Ate This Week – Pompelmo Rosa Gelato

01 Monday Sep 2008

Posted by in Italy, Liguria, People, Rapallo

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Gelato!  Who doesn’t love it?  Why is it so much better than ice cream?  I don’t know, but I suspect the freshness and wholeness of the ingredients have a lot to do with it.

Ms. Adventures in Italy (Sara Rosso) writes a terrific blog which features the always entertaining writing of a young MBA who moved from Silicon Valley to Italy in 2003. She’s an excellent photographer as well; her photos of food will make you drool. Check out her blog here.

One of her fun projects is the Tour del Gelato in which various bloggers in Italy and elsewhere write about the Best Gelaterias they have found.

This week’s Best Thing That We Ate is the Pompelmo Rosa (pink grapefruit) Gelato from the Frigidarium on the Lungomare in Rapallo, which is our entry in the Tour del Gelato.

Chicco (Francesco) Barbetta and his wife Anna make and serve the best gelato I’ve ever eaten in my life. In the background of this photo of the Pompelmo Rosa cone you can see some of the fresh fruits that will soon be in Chicco’s confections. I adore the Pompelmo Rosa – it is both sweet and tart, an identity crisis that is very pleasant on the tongue. It is also not as rich as the creamy flavors. The Captain favors Malaga, which is basically rum-raisin. It’s pretty good, but to me not as good as the divine Pompelmo.

The flavors Chicco and Anna offer may vary, depending on the season, but by and large they have a stable menu.  They also have gelato cakes made on the premises, and other frozen delicacies.  Their little tables with gay blue tablecloths are likely to be filled on a hot, sunny afternoon.

Chicco does not just make gelato – he gives a lot of his time to the Croce Verde, driving patients to doctors’ appointments.  He’s also been known to visit the local golf course where he has earned a low handicap.

I wish I could give you a recipe for today’s Best Food, but I can’t.  You’ll just have to come to Rapallo and visit the Frigidarium and taste for yourself.  Let us know when you’re coming – we’ll meet you there.  There’s never a bad time to eat gelato.

Whose beach is it, anyway??

28 Thursday Aug 2008

Posted by in Italy, Liguria, Rapallo, Uncategorized

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“A man may stand there and put all America behind him.” Henry David Thoreau

He was speaking about the great Outer Beach on Cape Cod, which is now a  national park which includes forty miles of sandy beaches.  That’s right – forty miles.  There is lots of beach access, and if you’re willing to walk for a while you can have a stretch of beach all to yourself.  Even the ‘crowded’ parts of the beach are spacious by Italian standards – if you don’t believe it, check out the Coast Guard Beach webcam here.

If Thoreau were to visit my favorite beach in Paraggi, he might well have written, “A man may stand there and have all of Italy beside him.”  Public beaches in Italy are crowded.  With 5,310 miles of shoreline you might well wonder why. One reason could be that for every Italian there is only .47 feet of shore, whereas each American has 1.58 feet of his shore.  But the real reason is simple: most beaches are not public.

Let me correct that last sentence.  The State owns all the shoreline, and grants access to the public for 3 meters from the water’s edge (tides are not a huge issue here).  But the State also leases most of its beach property past the 3 meter mark to concessionaires who put up hundreds of gaily painted cabanas in which clients may change clothes.  They also cover every square inch of ‘their’ beach with beach beds fitted out with umbrellas.  It’s a wonderful way to go to the beach, if you like lying next to who knows whom and don’t mind paying for the privilege (in Paraggi it’s E30 for one day).  On the other hand, the amount of space given to public beaches is, in many areas, very small, so you will be lying on your own beach towel next to who knows whom anyway, but you’ll be lying on the sand (or stones) without an umbrella, unless you’ve cleverly remembered to bring your own. (It was only recently that a law was passed decreeing that there must be any free public beaches at all.)

In the photo above the public part of the beach is hard to see – it’s between the aqua umbrellas on the right and the almost invisible furled up white umbrellas.  This photo was taken about 8:45 a.m., early by Italian beach standards – but one must go early if one wants a patch of sand.  Here’s the beach an hour later:

Kind of narrow, isn’t it? It’s still early.  In another hour people will be leaving disappointed because there literally won’t be a square inch of space left in which to put one’s fanny.  Meanwhile, the private beaches surrounding this postage stamp are three quarters empty.

We’ve been told that we can put our towels down anywhere in the 3 meter ‘safe zone,’ but we have also been assured that we’ll get some very bad looks.  Anyone who’s received an Italian ‘malocchio‘ knows it’s a good thing to avoid.  Being a feisty American, though, I’m tempted to test the system.

What really seems too bad is that the public’s view of the beach is completely obliterated from the street.  Here is the view from Paragi’s seaside passagiata:

Nice cabana color – but I’d rather see the water!

The sea here is incomparably beautiful, a color somewhere between aqua and emerald, and it is full of little fish that like to show off for snorkelers.  Everything about a visit to the sea is a joy, except for the sitting around on your towel part.  And in fact, even that isn’t so awful once you’re used to it.  In general other beach-goers are respectful of your property and careful not to kick sand on your towel.  And it’s a great way to meet people. Just as everyone shares the narrow roads, they also share the narrow beaches, with a minimum of complaint or pigginess.

Disclaimer:  Paraggi is very beautiful and many people like to go there; other beaches may not be as crowded or be as encumbered with cabanas… but many are.  There are also half-way beaches – they have beds but no cabanas.  We’ve been told one is welcome to sit on the sand at these places, but we haven’t tested the hypothesis yet. We have been guests three or four times at private beaches, and it is wonderfully comfortable to lie on the beds and fun to chat with the neighboring sunbathers.