Category: Life in Italy

What Day Is This?

Published on by Rick Bailey3 Comments

My last name ends in yogurt. 

Tizi is on the phone with a health-care professional up the hill, at the hospital in San Marino. It’s the day before our departure. Both of us have just tested positive for Covid. Over here they call it a tampone–the skewers that go up your nose and into your sinus cavities, swabbing around for evidence of the plague. We get our test at the pharmacy in Grotta Rossa, a little drive-through village between San Marino and Rimini. The pharmacist takes us, one at a time, outside onto the drive, turns us in the direction of the sunlight, and in go the tampone and out they come, and we walk, blinking back the tears, back inside to pay the 15 euros each. The pharmacist says she’ll have results in 15 minutes.  

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Walkabout

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I’m cursed with the gift of waking up early. It’s morning in Matera, in a cramped hotel room whose main redeeming quality is the view.  

I always leave a hotel early in the morning, before Tizi gets up, before the breakfast service.  I leave with a “biglietto di visita” in my pocket, so if I get run down by a car or knocked out  and robbed, whoever stumbles upon my body will know what hotel I belong to and inform relevant parties of my temporarily compromised condition or, worse, my demise.

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St. Joseph: A Broom, a Pastry, a Fire

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March 19 is St. Joseph day.  Father’s Day in Italy.  March 20 is Spring Equinox.  We’re celebrating. Sort of. We’re cleaning the garage. Not something I ever imagined doing in Italy. 

Three floors below us is one of two parking garages. Each of the ten apartments in this building comes with a designated garage space, complete with a locking door, behind it an area just large enough for one very small car and some garage-appropriate junk. We’ve never used the garage. I think most of the residents don’t use their garage because it would mean five minutes of back-and-forth maneuvering to get a car in or out of its little stall unscathed. Tizi and I have been coming here together since 1978. Until a few years ago, I’d never seen our garage. Tizi always said her Zio kept some stuff in there. Zio Pino. Pino short for, the diminutive of, Giuseppe. Joseph. 

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Correct Coffee

Published on by Rick Bailey2 Comments

“Did you drink my coffee?” Tizi asks.

“Yes, by accident.”

We’ve just finished a satisfying lunch. In Italy a post-prandial blast of espresso adds an exclamation mark to the experience. Lately she’s been taking her coffee “corrected.” With a dash of “mistra,” the local anise flavored grappa. Typically my wine intake at the table is higher than hers, so I finish with straight coffee. This day the server gets the two coffees mixed up. As soon as I toss it I know, Yes, this one was hers. And Yes, this is how I should be drinking mine. Correct.

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Baby, You Can Drive Your Car

Published on by Rick Bailey1 Comment

Driving into Rimini the other night, I saw a road sign that made no sense. To me the sign said, like, Do something. Or possibly, Don’t do something. And do it, or don’t do it, soon after you see this sign. Maybe right way. I didn’t do anything. In so not doing, I figured I had a 50 percent chance of being right. This is my modus operandi. Don’t do anything, and don’t do it very slowly so you can change course if needed. 

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Going Home

Published on by Rick Bailey2 Comments

All these years I don’t know how I missed it.

Almost fifty years we’ve been coming together to this apartment in San Marino. Mornings I open a cupboard door, take down the stainless steel espresso pot, and make coffee. There are half a dozen cups from my mother-in-law’s China. Not the good stuff in the credenza in the little dining room. This is her every-day stuff. A cup holds half a pot of brewed espresso. Since she’s been gone, I’ve broken one or two of those cups. Dropped on the tile floor, they explode into pieces. 

On this trip, in the back of the cupboard I found a special cup, white, glazed on the side of it a leafy bunch of oranges, one cut in half, and a couple goofy improbable white flowers. 

Above the fruit, written in flowing cursive, Florida.  

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Back Roads Back

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“You can’t hear that?” Tizi says.

“No.”

She rolls on her side, facing me in bed.  “Try.”

“Try,” I say. “You either hear something or you don’t.”

It’s 4:00 a.m. She wants me to hear a bird. I want to hear the bird.  I get up and walk to the foot of the bed where there are double doors that open onto a balcony. We have the serrande lowered all the way to shut out most of the light and provide a little dead air space. Every morning, without fail, I hear a dove out there. Wherever I am in the apartment I hear the dove. Also a couple roosters will start up in another 30-45 minutes. I’ll hear those. But this bird, the one she has been remarking on the last few mornings, I do not hear.  

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Go Gentle

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All roads lead to lunch. 

We are on a trail in San Bartolo, in what they call a “natural park.” It’s an area of rolling hills and stunning views along the sea above Pesaro. You drive up into it on a road called “the panoramica.” The term is apt. Our plan today, like most days, is to be active throughout the morning, work up an appetite, then have a big lunch. Nearby, in Marina Alta, is a seafood restaurant called da Gennaro. The da is like “chez” in French. It’s Gennaro’s place. The food is amazing, at a reasonable price. 

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Where We Are?

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It takes a while to get my mouth working.

Tizi and I arrive in San Marino on a Thursday afternoon, focus the rest of that day on getting heat turned on, hot water flowing. After 14 hours of travel, it would be nice to have a shower? From the need-to-do-right-away list, pick one and get busy. Mop the floors. Pick up the carcasses of the cimicie, local bugs that like to come indoors and die. Shake out sheets laid over a few pieces of furniture. And dust.  Dusting is your new career. Launch the washing machine. Make beds. Look out the window to make sure everything is still there. Shaggy pine trees? Check. Mountain? Right where we left it. Elementary school? Check. Adjacent homes, castle, green hillside, park and dog run, construction cranes, vineyards? All checks.

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Baked Tomatoes

Published on by Rick Bailey2 Comments

Boy, was I wrong.

Wrong about local tomatoes that are coming into the farmers’ markets right now, gorgeous, firm, red, both sweet and acidic beauties that I’m using to bake alla gratinata.  

Wrong because in the off season, I content myself with hydroponic vine-ripened tomatoes that do have a little flavor, that are firm enough to be transported who-knows-how-many hundreds or more likely thousands of miles to get the local Kroger, firm enough to withstand 120 minutes in the oven at 350 F and miraculously retain their shape and make a pretty good graté. But the local tomatoes are besting the vine-ripeneds this summer, blowing them right out of the oven.

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