20 April 2011

Italy Takes Over the World

Let’s take a look at the data: By most measures, Italy will rule the world one day. You say China. I say Italy is sneaking up on the outside track.

Italy has already captured the travel market. Guidebooks to Italy greatly outnumber guides to China. More Americans visit small towns in Tuscany than villages in Shanxi. More people can name Italy’s President than China’s General Secretary or Premier. It’s not even close.

In China, everyone’s heading to the cities, looking for work and adventure. In Italy most people stay put, waiting for you to pile out of the next tourist van. Some have neighbors who once visited the nearest big city. That’s more than enough excitement.

According to the nation’s biggest book distributor, current books on China outnumber those on Italy. However, add the word “travel” and the figures reverse – travel books on Italy more than double those on China. There is one current travel book on Italy for every 4,754 Italians, but only one for every 75,616 Chinese. You could look it up on the InterGoogle. I did.

That’s how Italy takes over the world – one travel guide at a time.

Writers such as Rick Steves, the Frommers, contributors to Lonely Planet, Let’s Go, Fodors, Insight, DK, Rough, Michelin, Brand, Blue – all continue to produce guides to the place. The one I take along is the latest Rick Steves, the most user-friendly and consistently updated. He’ll get you into places by the back door, find you a nice place to stay, and hold your hand while you wander famous museums listening to Steves on your Mp3 player.

Rick Steves is highly selective and does not try to cover everything. When Steves omits a place fewer Americans visit (and the reverse is true – Americans appear anyplace Steves recommends – he single-handedly made fashionable the small towns along the Cinque Terre coast of Liguria).

If you want comprehensive information look to Michelin or the Blue Guides.  Lonely Planet is fairly inclusive and often provides extra detail. Lonely Planet favors the low-end of budget accommodations. Frommers and Fodors guides are budget-worthy but include more expensive places, too.

The best full-color maps and other visuals can be found in the DK Eyewitness Guides or National Geographic Traveler Guides. These are better for study than to lug around. Rough Guides are interesting for their distinctly British point of view.

One standout among these guides is the new series Insight Select Guides to places such as San Francisco, Istanbul, London, Hong Kong. My copy of Rome Select would look modishly fashionable casually resting on a cafĂ© table across from, say, the Trevi Fountain. It has a beautiful fabric cover, a bookmark ribbon, and reads as if it was written person to person. If you’re in the mood for romance, ancient history, local flavor, modern art or a coffee break, Rome Select has you covered.

Some years ago Susan Cahill edited The Smiles of Rome, A Literary Companion for Readers and Travelers and the collection is basically timeless. Entries include articles and excerpts from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James to Federico Fellini and Muriel Spark. If you did take this book with you, you’d find yourself searching in St. Paul’s footsteps along the Ostian Way, or wondering at a statue of Moses in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli where Sigmund Freud once pondered “the complex soul of the artist.”

Most things in Italy are in the habit of changing slowly. That’s why film maker, cookbook author and restaurateur G. Franco Romagnoli’s book A Thousand Bells at Noon, A Roman’s Guide to the Secrets and Pleasures of His Native City resonates a decade after it was first published.

“Like a lung timed by traffic lights,” Romagnoli writes of Piazza Barberini, “the square inhales and exhales cars and buses from the seven streets that empty into it.”

Another series that has been around for some years and ages well is The Travelers’ Tales Guides. 30 Days in Italy, True Stories of Escape to the Good Life  includes this closing rhyme:

Paris has la Tour Eiffel
Babylon had its tower as well
But neither has the power to seize ya
Like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.


NOTES:

Rome Select, various authors. Insight Select Guides hard cover $15. ISBN 9789812822710.

The Smiles of Rome: A Literary Companion for Readers and Travelers by Susan Cahill. Ballantine Books paperback $14.95. ISBN 034543420X.

A Thousand Bells at Noon: A Roman Reveals the Secrets and Pleasures of His Native City by G. Franco Romagnoli. Harper paperback $14.99. ISBN 0060519207.

Italy, the Romagnoli Way: A Culinary Journey by G. Franco and Gwen Romagnoli. Lyons Press hard cover $24.95. ISBN 1599212447.

30 Days in Italy: True Stories of Escape to the Good Life. Travelers' Tales Guides paperback $14.95. ISBN 1932361421.

A few more:

The Colosseum by Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard (Wonders of the World). Harvard University Press paperback $14.95. ISBN 0674060318.

Rome from the Ground Up by James H.S. McGregor. Belknap Press paperback $22. ISBN 0674022637.
One reviewer wrote: “I can't really have a favorite book on Rome, can I? No, but...well, this comes close. In three hundred pages of clean, muscular prose, McGregor has done the almost impossible task of pulling the glories of this city together in a neat, readable, incredibly well informed study...”

McGregor also has written “From the Ground Up” books on Paris, Venice and Washington DC.

Administrative map of modern China...

Italy: 12,620 books and 60 million people = one book for every 4,754 citizens.
China: 17,192 books and 1.3 billion people = one book for every 75,616 citizens.

14 April 2011

Glasses of Exotic Nutty Stuff

Lovely now; surprisingly youthful. Delicate grapefruit aromas. Flinty, buttery, vanilla toastiness, nice weight on the palate. Floral, sweet citrus and pear, sweet cream, roasted nuts and vanilla flavors. Soft floral and butterscotch notes.

If this was a woman I’d fall slobbering at her feet. If this was a potluck I’d think I’d stumbled into a BMW convention. But if this was a glass of wine, well, I’d ignore the foo-foo, drink whatever they served and ask for another.

With all due respect to the excellent winemakers at Hafner Vineyard, isn’t all this wine perfume a bit much? Is there anything else created by people as over described as modern bottles of wine?

You could make a meal out of what some can find in Chardonnay.

First course: Grapefruit baked with butter and vanilla. Then pears in sweet cream, roasted nuts, butterscotch pudding to finish. Not nutritious, but pretty tasty, I’d bet.

“Winespeak can only take you so far,” note Kathleen Burk and Michael Bywater in their book Is This Bottle Corked? The Secret Life of Wine. “After that it is up to you...”

The authors quote a range of wine descriptions, from leather, pencil shavings, rubber, stone and compost, to licorice, chocolate and coffee. Since few can “really discern more than a small handful of scents and tastes” you might be better off to “just pour yourself a glass, drink it, and decide whether or not you like it,” they say.

If a reviewer writes a particular wine reminds her of “cat’s pee on a gooseberry bush” you might pass. Another wine evokes “a rugby club changing room.”

The authors of Is This Bottle Corked? have put together a number of brief essays on some of the main topics that might intrigue imbibers. The authors may sound at first a bit flip, but contained in their lightweight approach is a great deal of significantly useful information. “Flavor,” they explain, “is actually made up of two components: its ‘nose’ and its taste...certainly, part of the fun of drinking wine is catching the differences between what a wine smells like and what it tastes like.”

In another wine book prize-winning wine writer and British TV/radio expert Oz Clarke says Let Me Tell You About Wine, a Beginner’s Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Wine. His book is richly illustrated with photos, graphs and charts. Clarke invites the reluctant sipper into a comfortable relationship with the glass, and the book could not be more friendly to beginners.

Right at the start Clarke breaks down wine tastes and smells into 18 basic groups, each of which he then matches with the best wines in the world. Group 6 as one example is “Earthy” -- savoury reds which “are the classic food wines of Europe, the kind where fruit flavours often take a back seat to compatibility with food and the ability to cleanse the palate and stimulate the appetite.”

In this group he recommends Bordeaux and Chianti from Europe, Cabernets and Merlots from places closer to home.

“Your chances of walking into a wine shop and coming out with a wine that’s enjoyable to drink, whatever the price level, are better now than ever before,” Clarke writes. “The last quarter of the 20th century saw a revolution in wine, in terms of both style and quality.”

That’s fine with me. So set up another glass of that gooseberryish perfumy tropical fruit, crisp, refreshing, tangy, bone dry, peach pineapple and honey, black pepper, mellow, intriguing, herby, sweet-sour, blushing, succulent, subtle, sharp, toasty, exotic, nutty stuff... right now!



NOTES:

Is This Bottle Corked? by Kathleen Burk and Michael Bywater. Harmony Books $19.99. ISBN 9780307462916.

Oz Clarke’s Let Me Tell You About Wine by Oz Clarke. Sterling Publishing $19.95. ISBN 9781402771231

Oz Clarke on the web...

07 April 2011

What's Wrong with the Vongolari?

The Italians. Besides being the name of Luigi Barzini’s excellent book of some years ago, to say the word “Italians” is also to say whew, who will ever understand them? Everyone has theories, but even Italians don’t understand the Italians.

Some things are easy to see: Italians are tribal. They owe loyalty first to family, last to nation. Their accidental country today is only slightly more unified than Libya and slightly more successful than Tunisia (with both of which countries Italy is historically tied). It’s easy to see the huge gap between south and north, commonplace to complain about cynical politicians and do-nothing bureaucrats. You can see all that and not begin to unravel what makes Italy, Italy.

I’ve decided to go to Rome next month to clear up the confusion. I’ll inspect any number of heavenly meals, talk Italian with a few patient natives, and let you know what the heck’s going on over there.

To prepare myself I’ve been poring over guides to Rome and reading the Italian detective novels of Andrea Camilleri, a native of Sicily now living in Rome, and Donna Leon, an American who lived in Venice for thirty years.

Both authors wrestle with modern Italy on every page, trying to explain and understand how Italians came to live in such a gorgeous and messed-up place.

In “August Heat” by Andrea Camilleri, Inspector Salvo Montalbano discovers that his suspect “happens to be the mayor’s brother-in-law” in the fictitious town of Vigata, Sicily, and gets almost all the city’s building contracts.

“And they let him do that?” the Inspector asks, as if he didn’t already know the answer. “Yes they do, because he pays his dues in equal part to both the Cuffaros and Sinagras...” the two dominant Mafia families in the area.

“So the final cost of every contract ends up being double the figure established at the outset... poor Spitaleri can’t do it any differently, otherwise he’d be operating at a loss.”

So much for the Mafia. In case a reader of these mysteries set in Sicily might imagine noble Venice relatively free of corruption, Donna Leon early in her book “A Sea of Troubles” is quick to point to another state of things.

Leon’s mystery is set on the island of Pellestrina, on the Venetian lagoon, home to a number of close-knit fishing families.

“I don’t know enough about the way things work out here,” a policeman from Venice reports, “but that’s the feeling I get: there’s too many of them and too few fish left...”

In one scene Commissario Guido Brunetti interviews a lagoon pilot whose job brings him in contact with these fishermen.

“The vongolari (clam fishermen)... “they’re hyenas. Or vultures. They suck up everything with their damned vacuum cleaner scoops, rip up the breeding beds, destroy whole colonies... The bastards dig them up right in front of Porto Marghera, and God knows what’s been pumped or dumped into the water there. I’ve seen the bastards, anchored there at night, with no lights, scooping them up, not fifty meters from the sign saying that the waters are contaminated and fishing’s forbidden.”

“But isn’t there some control, doesn’t someone check them?” Brunetti asks. “(The pilot) smiled at such innocence... there are all sorts of inspectors, Dottore, (he) answered... but that doesn’t mean anything gets inspected, or, if it does, that whatever they find gets reported.”

“Why not?” Brunetti asks, as any reasonable reader of this mystery might. “Instead of speaking... he contented himself with rubbing his thumb across the end joint of his first three fingers.”

Both Donna Leon and Andrea Camilleri love the land and the people. At the same time they clearly are unsettled over things they’ve learned. The way things work in Italy makes its residents crazy, angry, or much more common, indifferent.

There is no other country in the world where things are so messed up and at the same time so beautiful. The ever-clever Italian way of life is an affront to things most Americans believe. Life in Italy is a riddle not likely to be solved no matter how many excellent books are published, no matter how many times one travels there.



NOTES:

“A Sea of Troubles” by Donna Leon. Penguin paperback $14. ISBN 9780143116202.

“August Heat” by Andrea Camilleri. Penguin paperback $14. ISBN 9780143114055.

Publisher web sites for Donna Leon include Grove Atlantic Press  and Random House UK 

Andrea Camilleri on the web can be found here and here and even here with an explanation of how the town of Vigata came to be invented.