If you’re ever in Padova, you don’t want to miss this pizza experience. Yes, pizza experience. We intended to have a cicchetti lunch, preferably one that involved a table and four chairs, on a sunny Saturday at 1:00 p.m., when everyone in Padova was descending on the Via del Santo and Via delle Erbe with…More
Category Archives: Food
Bologna Inroads
The first time I tried driving into Bologna from the airport, I made the obvious decision: Look for the bullseye sign that says CENTRO. Usually if you go in that direction you’ll come to the old city. First sign I saw I went for it, and drove around in circles for half an hour or…More
And for Lunch . . .
At home we cook. When we’re in San Marino and Italy we eat in restaurants. The food is good. On the menu, local dishes we like. We have favorites places where, when we go back, everyone is almost always still there. It’s old home week. That adds to the pleasure. We feel almost local. But…More
from Get Thee to a Bakery
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” my wife says. It’s a sunny Saturday morning, early September. I’m climbing a ladder leaned up against the house. It’s that time of year. The air has begun to change; it’s both crisp and faintly rotten-smelling. Where we live we are rich in cottonwoods, proving that riches can also…More
Ravioli, Richard the Third, and a Dead Bird (from American English, Italian Chocolate)
It was not what I expected to find. “Last night I dreamed I killed someone.” I was checking a journal I keep to see where we ate those ravioli one year, the ones with the poppy sauce. A friend of mine wakes up every morning and writes down his dreams. An otherwise right-handed person, he…More
Fava Fave
“I know how to piss them off,” God must have thought. “I’d like to see the humans try to eat these things.” He meant fava beans. Also known as vicia faba, by those who speak Latin. Also also known as broad beans, field beans, tick beans, and horse beans (Vicia faba var. equina). After the…More
Drink Up (it’s sfuso)
Years back a pipe burst in our apartment bathroom in San Marino. Three thousand miles away, we got the news: a trickle of water had found its way into Mr. and Mrs. Riccardi’s apartment below ours and continued to flow until the water to our unit was shut off completely. Repairs would be needed. It…More
Delicious Bologna
We plan a trip into Bologna to coincide with returning a rental car and picking up another rental car at the airport. It’s a swap. It’s a pain. But you can only rent a car so long, for reasons I won’t go into. After traffic and car complications, we got into the old city around…More
Rimini Eats
Your better judgment can be over-rated. Last night I thought: There’s going to be traffic. I thought: We’ve had no sleep. And of course: We’re likely to over-eat. I didn’t think that. I knew that. But we went anyway. To Rimini, in search of food. Tizi said we can go to Biberius, what used to…More
Take Two
I’m blessed with the ability to eat bad food. I would never have said it to her face (because I was a good boy and because, in truth, I did not know) my mother was not a great cook. I remember salmon patties for dinner, and still to this day, when I think of them,…More