Let's Talk About Food

So last Friday we went on a culinary tour around Bologna. Our first important stop was a fantastic bakery, half devoted to pasta and half to desserts. I have never been in a single more appetizing room. Tiles of chocolate with hazelnuts baked in? Yes please! We got samples of a few treats and an offer to come visit for a bread-making lesson (they start at 2 in the morning!). I'll be taking that trip if and when it happens, and am sure I'll seek out the place again when I feel like really spoiling myself. After that, we were brought to a restaurant where--surprise!--there were plates of meat and cheese all prepared for us and ready to go. Plates of prosciutto--call them mortresses, if you're into obscure vocabulary (I learned this word shortly before I left and am thrilled to be using it)--are standard fare in Bologna, and that's absolutely fine by me. The Bolognese love their pork, and it's an ingredient in nearly everything. All of the vegetarians in the program have taken a hiatus from their morals to join us barbarians in meat-eating because its simply too hard to avoid pork. In addition to that, it's difficult to find vegetable-only dishes, even simple salads. When I'm on my own I try to maintain a steady flow of greens just in case my mother is somehow watching, but it's not so easy here.

I tend to eat light when I'm in charge of my food supply--I lost weight when I went to college--and here that works out fine. Why? Listen closely, because this is important. When in Italy, expect to eat 2-3 completely unexpected meals every week. Monday night I went to a friend's apartment to do some group reading, and his Italian roommates offered something to eat. They first game out with a tray of some meat to snack on (I told you about the pork thing), and then called us into the kitchen for a great tuna-pasta dish that his roommate "invented on the spot because he had nothing to do." We sat at the table for the better part of an hour, after 10:00 at night, eating this great meal I hadn't remotely expected, and before they let us go back to our reading, after refusing to allow us to help clean up.

Last night we took a bus into the hills outside the city to a farm where we got a lesson in pasta-making. A few of the other students got hands-on; here's a photo that I'm borrowing from somebody's Facebook of two of our students giving it a shot:

The farm was staffed by a squadron of identical little old ladies who ran this way and that with the ingredients and showing off their skills. I had never seen a recipe that called for a handful of butter before, but now I know that that's what goes into biscotti cookie dough. Afterward, we were brought into a backroom where--SURPRISE!--another three-hour meal was waiting. We thought we were done after the first course, but no, it just kept coming, and we got back around 12:30.

Yesterday it snowed, and it snowed a lot while we were at the farm. This is why I left Ithaca! The farmhouse we left was quite possibly the coziest place on Earth, all stone and wood and fireplaces, and it would have been fine by me if we had stayed the night there. Alas we had to return. The bus ride back was quite something, as we cruised through several inch-deep snow on unplowed highways, including one very steep hill. The driver did drive cautiously, and I give him serious credit for that considering how everyone else drives in fair weather.

So there's your food entry. In the next few days I'll give you an apartment introduction, and we'll be going on another tour of Bologna Saturday, plus some friends and I might spend Sunday in Florence.

Old Things Are Cool

So after a week and a half of seeing unimpressive apartments, I visited several on Wednesday and saw two in one day that I would gladly take.  I decided one one right around the corner from the hotel and BCSP offices where I'll be living with two Italian boys, both students, who as far as I can tell don't speak any English at all.  It's a bit small (I can't have the bed until the old tenant moves out on Tuesday, and will be sleeping in a cot in the kitchen until then), but they're really nice and the location is ideal.  I visited way too many places that were too far away for my liking, and am really happy that I get to stay in this neighborhood.

All of the other Cornell students and I made it into the advanced Italian pre-session course.  The classwork isn't anything different from any other Italian course I've had.  One Wednesdays, we do cultural tours with a local museum official:

As I learned in my history of Florence class last spring, towers were basically the HDTVs of medieval Italy.  Any family who could afford it had to have the tallest, greatest tower in the area to prove that they meant business.  They allowed for defense of the city, and provided a place to hide when the lower classes demanded silly things like political representation and living wages.  With all the bigshots in town trying to out-phallus each other, the city in that era looked like this:

That diorama comes from a museum at the Piazza Maggiore we visited, which was once home to the archbishop of Bologna.  It was full of artifacts from all parts of the world, mostly Europe, and various eras of history.  Little old ladies stood in every doorway to tell you to watch your step and to turn off your camera flash.  Here are a few more shots:

 

The man to the left here is the historian.  Down two treacherous "stairwells," which were really just steep ramps with the added peril of bumps to trip on, there was this painting of Irnerius, the apocryphal figure who supposedly wrote the books of Roman law initially studied at the University.

 In the southeast area of the central city there are three interconnected buildings at the church of Santo Stefano.  I couldn't take pictures inside, but it was really neat to walk around what felt like a dimly-lit crypt. 

That was Wednesday's adventure.  We took a culinary tour today (yes, a culinary tour), and I'll talk about that next entry because this is getting long.  Last night we all went out for a birthday dinner, so an unfortunate trattoria had to accommodate 24 of us (we had reservations).  Very good times.  I'll leave off with this shot I took from the museum window; it's looking out from Piazza Maggiore down via Independenza, and is very representative of my central city neighborhood and the city as a whole.