This is How I Always Want to Spend My Evenings

The other day, I walked out of the apartment in an incredibly giddy mood -- blue sky, homework done, chocolate wafer in my pocket. I was so happy, in fact, that I started humming the theme song from Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. My mood soon worsened, however, when I remembered that Mr. Rogers is dead.
You know what's not dead? The art of Tuscan cooking.
Last saturday night, following the recommendation of her Italian host sister, my friend and I sought out a certain trattoria for a cheap and hearty meal on a cold and rainy night. This trattoria, quite literally a hole-in-the-wall with a doorknob-less door, had paper place mats, backless wooden chairs (known as "stools" in some parts), and paintings of busty, naked women lining the wall -- all the marks of a spot to get authentic Italian grub. And the food smelled promising, too -- at least we thought it was the food we smelled, because at this point we were still standing outside, stumped by the doorknob-less door. Perhaps   Florentine sewage is naturally laced with the scent of roasted rosemary and sauteed garlic.
Irregardless* of smells imagined or real, the food was delicioso (FACT: this is a real Italian word, not an impostor made up by an English student too lazy to look up the translation. I promise.) For primi piati, I ordered a dish composed of stewed bread and tomatoes. Price? Two euros. (TWO EUROS? All I can normally buy for two euros is half a pack of gum, which probably wouldn't taste nearly as good stewed with tomatoes).
We both got the same thing for our main course: roast beef and potatoes. After three weeks of copious amount of pasta, we needed some red meat. And our roast beef was very red; the center of each tender slice was as bright as my inflamed cheeks after I down a glass of Chianti. Once our plates were cleaned, we sat there in an iron-induced stupor, mumbling silly but true things like, "I can't remember the last time food has made me smile."  
Having saved a few euros by opting out of wine, it was just too easy to justify an after-dinner trip to the gelateria Grom. Grom, according to many Florentines, is like the McDonalds of Italy, if McDonalds used only fresh, organic ingredients cultivated on its own farm.

Pro Tip: "Caffe" in Italian actually means espresso, so
beware of ordering "caffe" gelato at 10 o'clock at night.

I chose a combination of cioccolata and caffe; food made me smile a second time that night. 

Our evening could have only gotten better if we had happened to stumble upon a Tunisian street-style dance-off. And, what do you know, we did.  Up on a raised stage in Piazza Republica were about 10 bandana-clad youths engaged in a fierce dance battle, stomping it out while images of Tunisian deserts and mosques flashed on the screen behind them. The crew combined street moves a la Step Up with traditional Tunisian dances, so it went something like: snake hands snake hands FIST PUMP snake hands snake hands HIP GYRATION.

Our further wanderings led us down to the Arno, where we perched ourselves on the ledge of the bridge, the one whose name is not important cause it isn't Ponte Vecchio, and contemplated the inky water below. We dangled our legs over the edge, trying to forget the story told to us during safety orientation about the drunk girl who fell into the river and drowned.
We spent a few hours talking of the philosophical and metaphysical and spiritual, of boys and how soon until it would be acceptable to return to the previously mentioned trattoria. The breeze picked up, though, and I could only stand the shivering for so long. I scooted back around and jumped off -- just in time to see a shooting star jet past the tower of Palazzo Vecchio. This is real life.
That night, walking back together through Piazza Annunziata, no gypsies eyed our bags greedily, no hairy men tried to convince us that the oregano they were hawking was really weed, and the homeless stayed sound asleep under the awning of the church.
 I arrived back at my apartment in an incredibly giddy mood.


* Were any English majors irked by the inclusion of this "word"?

The Brothers

Tonight marked the arrival of the eldest Ficari offspring, Giacomo. Giacomo is 25 and tall and thin and quick to smile, making him a little less intimidating than his fashion-forward, playgirl brother. Less intimidating, that is, until we got to talking. He told me about his recent graduation from the toughest economic school in the country, his thesis on private versus public energy companies in California, and how his girlfriend turn down her acceptance into the Harvard MBA program.
We also talked about politics, American politics, i.e. about people like Ron Paul and Mitt Romney, people I pretty much forgot existed after November 2008. Yet here was this Italian guy, analyzing the relative merits of Ron Paul's economic plan. The only European head-of-state I'm slightly familiar with is France's Nicolas Sarkosy, and that's just because I think it's mad awesome that he married a former Italian supermodel.
Right as Giacomo launches into a description of his first internship with Procter and Gamble, in walks Tommaso, full of swagger in his Valentino suit, shirt practically unbuttoned down to his navel. Giacomo looks up, smirks, and asks, "Ah Tommaso, so which of the men unbuttoned that third button?" Tommaso had just gotten off work.
From what I understand, Tommaso's after-school job mainly involves hanging out with the filthy filthy rich. Tonight said filthy rich were oil big shots, and I mean BIG shots, from Lebanon and Colombia -- a distinguished group of gentlemen who finished off 15 bottles of vodka at their afternoon meeting. Keyword "afternoon." Tommaso, prized by the company he works for because he can speak four different languages (!), books clubs and cars for these bearers of wealth, but he's often present at the "meetings" where lots of booze is drunk and business is done. Even with his love of Tom Ford and Valentino, Tommaso's still often shocked by the nonchalant attitude toward money affected by these men. That night, one Colombian oil lord spent 750 euros on roses for the hostess. Tommaso continued to talk of excess of wealth but I didn't catch all of what he was saying, mostly because it was all in rapid-fire Italian, but also because I was still in shock over the fact that this 20-year-old was wearing a pocket square.
Tommaso was only making a pit stop at home to eat dinner before joining the men later that night. He took a phone call from one of them now. Everyone at the dinner table grew hushed as we all strained to hear what Tommaso was saying -- "No, I do not think it's possible to book the whole club." "Yes, I will see you later, ready to drink." "A whole bottle?" These men are in their fifties.
Now Tommaso was calling escorts for them; I did not ask him how he knew the number. The holy wine we dunked our after-dinner biscottis in (which made me say, "Holy sh*t, this stuff is strong") was going straight to my head, and I kept thinking this world -- of money, drinks, hookers, money -- is so strange and tantalizing and terrifying, but sadly (and thankfully) it is a world I will probably never know.

An Assignment

Yesterday I had a meeting about an internship with The Florentine, the english language newspaper here that publishes every two weeks. In preparation, I came up with a list of seven (7) terrific ideas to show my potential editor so that she knows that I'd be an active, aggressive, creative, on-the-ball, all-around awesome intern. After reading off my list (while using emphatic hand gestures, because words alone did not capture how terrific these ideas were), my potential editor stared at me blankly for a moment and then said, "Is that all?" 

Okay, so my list of ideas didn't quite make it to the double digits, but it's about quality over quantity, right? And I had some pretty good story suggestions -- some of my ideas (i.e. more than half) were so good that they had already been published in previous issues! For some reason my potential editor saw this as a bad thing. 

But I still got the internship. And my first story is due in seven (7) days. And it's supposed to be about mushroom hunting. Specifically, my personal experience in mushroom hunting. Which is kind of a problem, since I have never been mushroom hunting, and I am way too poor/unwilling to pay 120 euros for a mushroom hunting guide. I also do not have a mushroom hunting license. 

So ... does anyone have advice on illicit mushroom hunting in the immediate Tuscan area?

P.S. 18 people have died in the last 10 days while hunting for mushrooms in Northern Italy. I am SO excited about this assignment. 

Ay, Carrara!

Marble comes from mountains. Today, we visited the mountains from which the best marble comes. The place where Michelangelo hand-picked his slabs. The cliffs of Carrara.
But first, a quick stop in Pietrasanta, one town over and a few hundred feet further down. Pietrasanta, "sand stone," has become a bit of a sculptors' colony because marble is so cheap there. The town's dramatic backdrop is the Apuan Alps, which have been providing the world with beautiful white marble for the past 3,000 years. Marble is made of condensed shell, bone, and such -- or as our chipper British tour guide put it, "If we were to die right now and sink to the bottom of the sea, we would eventually become marble."
Said chipper tour guide gave us an inside look at one of the area's sculpture workshops. The men who chip away at the slabs of stone here aren't artists per se, but artisans -- very skilled at their craft of carving, but they carry out others' commissioned designs. During the night, however, I'm told many slave away over their own artistic visions.

Love the paper hat. 

A thin layer of snowy white marble dust covered everything -- the kind of dust that ends up in our tooth paste and parmesan cheese because it's rich in calcium carbonate.

The mosaic makers were in the next shop over, busy working with Venetian glass. Walking into the studio was like stepping into Olivander's Wand Shop, except the rows upon rows of dusty brown boxes were packed with bright squares of glittering glass, rather than phoenix feather-filled wands (yay for Harry Potter references). 

Curly Hair in the back corner also models for Giorgio

Armani. No Joke. His mosaic-making specialty is lively-

colored skin tones.

At midday, we all piled back on the bus for the 30-minute ride to the mines of Carrara. Up a steep incline, through a tunnel, and the next thing I knew we were out of the tunnel and it looked as though the bottom had fell out from beneath the bus. There was nothing anchoring us to either side except a thin asphalt bridge stretched across the deep ravine. And in front -- the Carrara marble quarry.

In the winter, if you look up at the mountain you can't tell where the marble ends and the snow begins. The mountain is too steep to build big hair-pin turns for the marble-toting trucks to travel on, so special zig-zag roads have been built so that a truck travels forward up the first zig, then reverses and travels up the next zag while facing backwards. We did not travel on the zig-zag road.

This quarry is unique in that the miners cut away the marble from the inside out, rather than cutting into the mountainside. This means we got to travel INTO a mountain -- after a brief trip through an underground tunnel, we stepped out of the vans into giant gray caves of solid stone. The marble is so porous that the day's steady rainfall dripped down to the quarry floor, turning the marble dust into gray mud. Damp, cold, and dead-silent, like Peter Jackson's vision of the Mines of Moria (an HP and LOTR reference in one post, too much?) 

Look Ma, I'm in a marble quarry!

We took a brief tour and snapped funny pictures of each other standing in front of heavy machinery before heading back up to the earth's surface. I didn't leave without first snatching up a little piece of renegade marble, though. I stuck it in my pocket, where it stayed the whole bus ride back, cold and gleaming like crystal.

Do Do This At Home

What goes on behind this door?

This is where I live, 4th floor. I think that's my host brother's red vespa out front.

Good cooking, vegetables aside. Today we had bruschetta. Real bruschetta. Pronounced BRU-SKE-TA. This is how it went:

First, my personal chef/ host father Ferdi (who doubles as a surgeon) pan-grilled fresh slices of italian bread. The bread was given to him by a friend; it's from the south of Italy, and it takes a whole week to rise, not a few hours like yeast-infected bread. Ferdi then cut up chunks of garlic and showed me how to rub the garlic directly on the toasted bread. Toasting the bread hardens the outside, so that when I ran my piece of garlic all over its surface it was grated away to a sliver. Next, of course, comes the olive oil. Pour it in "C" motion for even coverage without over-dosing. 

Two big spoonfuls of Ferdi's tomato concoction go on top. Stewed tomatoes, still warm, mixed with garlic and just two other spices that I forgot the name of. Delicious. After the fit I threw in my last post, one might be tempted to say that vegetables are growing on me (not literally, that'd be weird), BUT tomatoes here are so so sweet they hardly count as vegetables. 

Finally, basil on top, shredded with my own hands, fresh fresh fresh.  

Serve with Pecorino white wine. Not related to the cheese. I think. This wine is also known as the best wine I've ever tasted in my life.   

Eat, savor, repeat.

Vegetables, Smeshtables

You all know me well. You know I like to beat the evening rush at the dining hall. You know I take forever to tie my shoe laces. And you know I don't like vegetables. Even if you don't know me well, you still might be familiar with that last character quirk. I am open about my feelings towards the lowest of food groups. My host mother, however, is not exactly in the know.
Host Mother Judith buys only organic. She wakes up early every morning, goes to the market and hand-picks the freshest produce to whip up into a delicioso dinner later in the day. I should be grateful to partake of such wholesome nightly repasts, you say? (I seriously hope none of you would ever say a sentence like that). Well I am, but spinach has been a major player at dinner all week.
Spinach and I go way back. Back to that night at the dinner table when Mom practically force fed me the stuff, and I, in an act of defiance, promptly threw it all up. I've been slowly reintroducing the leafy green back into my meat-and-potatoes diet, but only in small doses, and only raw.
Tonight we opened with spinach and pumpkin soup. Hot and steaming. Puréed all together, like it was trying to trick me into thinking it was just a bowl of green goop. Which I'd rather eat. But you can't really tell that to the woman who is opening up her heart and home to you for the next three months.  
I swallowed my first spoonful. It was thick, it was fragrant, it was so so spinachy. Each new spoonful triggered my gag reflexes. And I couldn't even discretely spit a mouthful in my napkin, like I do back in the good ole' USA, because Judith's napkins are cloth.
I powered through it, though. In Italy, even a regular Monday night dinner is served in several courses. And my family couldn't start the next course until I finished that dang soup. These people were counting on me.
Finally, it looked as though I drained the bowl. "Are you feenished?" Judith asks. "Si, grazie."
She gets up and walks over to me, looking into my bowl. She picks it up, tilts it a little, then scrapes what's left of the soup up with my spoon and then sets it before me again. "Where I grew up, I always had to feenish all my soup."
Fine, okay, but where I grew up, being extravagantly wasteful is practically a pastime. But I'll feenish your dang soup.
And so I did. Or so I thought. She walks over again, inspects the bowl, and still finds something to scrape off the sides and into my well-worn spoon. The only thing that got me through that last spoonful was knowing that I already marked up my map with the locations of all the gelaterie in a three-mile radius.
Ah. Basta. Full. Of vegetables.
Am I now a carrot convert? No. But I will fake it until I make it. Potluck at my house in three months; I'm bringing the spinach dip.  

* Full Disclosure: the soup wasn't that bad. It helped that it was followed by steak.

A City Awash in Olive Oil

I've almost completed my first week in Florence. That I will be here for the next three months definitely hasn't hit me yet. We've all been doing circles around the city, wafting through the sea of tourists, marking off the list of must-sees we've all composed in our heads; the Duomo, check, Ponte Vecchio, check. I need to slow down.
I do that over dinner. For the next three months, I will be eating pasta nightly with my host family, the Ficari's. Already they've taught me an easy way to become instantly Italian: pour olive oil on everything. Everything. Slathered on bread, sautéed with pasta, tossed with salad. They even poured it straight from the bottle into my bowl of vegetable soup.  It is Italy's answer to American ketchup. Although I doubt red cabbage salad would taste good tossed with a big douse from a bottle of Heinz.
The very first night here, I was served a main course of pork rolled with spinach. My host father, Ferdi, poured a big dollop of oil over my slice of meat. My host mother, Judith (pronounced U-dit), didn't think that was enough and my meal was drenched again.
All this oil is okay though, my hosts say, it's healthy. High in Omega 3. I just have to get used to a food pyramid thats been turned completely upside down.

I felt it would've been awkward if I took pictures at the dinner table, so here's an unrelated photo of the view from my bedroom window.