Reading Rainbow: Vacation Reads

Vacation us one of the few times of  year that I read as much as I used to. I’ve read five books since Tahoe in July: Olive Kittredge, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Farm City, Zeitoun, and My Life in France. (I also got about two-thirds of the way through Don DeLillo’s Falling Man but I’m not sure I’ll pick it back up. Although I loved the excerpt of Falling Man in The New Yorker, the book has mostly confirmed that I’m not a DeLillo fan.)

My favorite was Olive Kittredge. I’m a sucker for interconnected stories, and I also have a real weakness for books that I think of as “quiet books”, books where the drama stems from elements of everyday life: a parent coping with a child that chooses a different life than they expected, maybe, or the confusion of finding oneself alone after many years of marriage.

Olive Kittredge doesn’t have to create drama through a traumatic event like a kidnapping, a drowning, or some sort of abuse, instead Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel makes normal life riveting. The stories that make up Olive Kittredge offer a  look at marriage, shown from many different perspectives and at many different stages. The book also focuses on the often-lonely lives of older people, people who are no longer defined by their roles as mother or wife, daughter or son. (Reading Olive Kittredge made me much more sympathetic to some of my older relatives.)

My other fiction choice, Oscar Wao, was ultimately disappointing. Those who haven’t read much Latin American/Caribbean fiction will probably enjoy it more than I did, but aside from the copious Eggers-style footnotes, I found much of the storyline similar to that of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, or Edwidge Danicat’s novels and stories.

I thought I’d already heard every hell that Hurricane Katrina wrought — and then I read Zeitoun.

Zeitoun tells a story that the media missed: the story of one man, a pillar of the community, who stays in New Orleans despite the calls to evacuate because as a popular local contractor, he feels responsible for his home and the many homes in the area that he worked on. But what unfolds after the levees fall sends Zeitoun and his family on a totally different American journey.

Dave Eggers latest is nowhere near as brutal (or as moving) as What is the What, but it’s just as compelling a story. Worth reading.

As a farmer-obsessed reader, Farm City was an easy choice. I was charmed initially by how the first part of the book echoed moments of my own childhood. (Like author Novella Carpenter, my parents were novice farmers for a time. Like Novella as the book begins, we had a cardboard box of baby chicks under our kitchen table.) But Novella took her farm far beyond poultry: she harvests honey from her bees. She raises rabbits and eventually struggles to keep up with the appetite and the strength of two huge pigs. While my parents brought chickens to their rural one-acre “ranch-ette” as my grandfather called it, Novella’s farm is in Oakland — and her adventures as an urban farmer are entertaining and inspiring.

I love the idea that a perfect meal or a trip to a new place can change one’s life but I don’t often think of it as reality. Julia Child, though, had just this experience as she documents in My Life in France. Her life was changed by a meal (sole meuniere) and a place (France).

I felt a little strange about bringing it with me to Italy (shouldn’t I be reading something called My Life in Italy?) and I still cringe at buying a best seller (especially at a time when so many other best sellers are vampire books), but My Life in France turned out to be a perfect travel book because it celebrates all the things one hopes to find when traveling: new people, new foods, and, often, a new lease on life.

Rome

I didn’t expect to love Rome.

It sounds silly in hindsight, since really, what’s not to love about Rome? But after our trip to Florence last year, I’d started to think that Italian cities might not be my thing.

In Florence, I tired quickly of the big tour groups clogging up the streets and the sights. I was annoyed by the seemingly endless scooters flying by, their roar echoing off the stone buildings. The streets felt too small for the incredible number of people traveling on them. To me, being in Florence felt like being in a crowded museum and everyone wants to see the same painting.

But while Florence felt cramped, Rome was expansive. Its sites were huge: the Spanish Steps, the Colosseum, and the Trevi Fountain are all big enough for lots of people to see at the same time.

Perhaps Florence had prepared me, but it seemed like there wasn’t as much scooter traffic in Rome and fewer tour groups (except for at the crazy-crowded Vatican museum with everyone looking up waiting to see the Sistine Chapel). Perhaps there were fewer scooters because Rome has a subway, the Metro, solidifying another belief I have which is that real cities have subways.

We stayed close to the Termini station which was tourist-filled and a food wasteland. We wouldn’t stay in that area again. Had we known better we would have booked an apartment in the Piazza Navona or Campo de Fiori areas, but since there’s a Metro stop at Termini, our location hardly mattered. We were two stops from the Colosseum on the blue line and three stops from the Spanish Steps on the red line.

Rome also confirmed that for me to really like a place, I have to eat well and eating well was easy in Rome. There were many Slow Food restaurants to choose from, and most offered delicious, simple pastas: carbonara, gricia, cacio e pepe, amatriciana.

Some of my favorite food in Rome — aside from that unbelievable gelato at San Crispino, of course — was at Antico Forno Roscioli. Our first lunch there satisfied my need for simple, fresh food. We shared a bowl of farro salad, a side of spinach and a slab of their fabulous pizza with squash blossoms and anchovies. Naturally, we went back the very next day for more.

Note to those planning a trip: don’t just look for good restaurant recommendations. A good, casual lunch option is a life-saver after a long day of walking and sight-seeing.

As if Rome wasn’t dramatic enough in the sunlight, we had thunder and lightening almost every night of our stay in Rome. While I was initially grumpy about getting wet, it was a thrill to suddenly see the Pantheon and Trinità dei Monti, the church behind the Spanish Steps, flash white as lightning brightened the night sky.

Capo Market, Palermo

One of my favorite parts of traveling (after eating, of course) is going to food markets.

In Paris, we discovered that one could buy a whole rabbit at the local markets and have it skinned and gutted right before your eyes. At the corner of a meat stand, there’d be a pile of pelts and a box of entrails.

Bologna was the first place I saw horse meat for sale.

But the Sicilian city of Palermo has more food markets than any other place I’ve visited. There are four markets every day, almost all within walking distance of each other. We were closest to the Capo Market, considered one of the largest and more vibrant, and marked by the one of the old city gates.

There were the Italian grandmothers crossing themselves as they passed the many churches on the bustling market street. But Italian grandmothers are a common sight all over Italy.

What made Palermo stand out was the Islamic influence: the women in headscarves, the men in caftans, and little boys wearing crocheted caps. It felt like it could have been a market in Morocco or Turkey.

There were dogs in the markets (and throughout the city) and none begged for food.

The ever-present Italian scooters pushed their way through the narrow, pedestrian-filled streets.

Vendors called out their wares, pulled open a fish at the gills to show a shopper that it was fresh and smoked cigarettes – sometimes all at the same time.

Most of the produce was familiar to us – grapes, plums, pears, tomatoes, cranberry beans, string beans, eggplants. Pumpkin-sized squash was sold by the slice. Crates of produce were tied up with ribbon like a birthday present. One vendor sold boiled potatoes out of a giant metal pot, and roasted peppers and onions were available on a nearby tray.

But the meat stands were full of things I’d never seen before. There was something that looked like a wand of twine that I have to assume was intestines wrapped into a stick-like shape. At one meat stand, a man matter-of-factly chopped round red orbs into two clean pieces and we realized suddenly that what he was chopping was the head of an animal.

We turned a corner and found this man singing to himself as he skinned a goat.

We were probably in market just 10 minutes before I turned to Mr. WholeHog and said, “This is the most foreign place I’ve ever been.”

Sicily

Before our first trip to Italy last year, a friend of a friend who’d done a study abroad in Italy suggested that if we had time, we should visit Sicily. We didn’t have time on that trip, but in the food markets in Florence we noticed that much the produce was from ‘Sicilia’.

So we went to Sicily on this trip, spending just four days in a place that deserves at least a week.  Sicily has so much on one island: ancient ruins, an active volcano, smaller islands, nature reserves, beaches, cities, salt flats, wineries and farms.

Given the brief time we had, we concentrated just on the Northwest coast: three nights in Palermo exploring the city’s many food markets, and getting lost amid the narrow streets, a day trip to calm, clean Trapani (but sadly not enough time to get to Erice), and a day in Cefalu to swim before we headed to Rome.

Flying into Palermo, it was immediately clear that we were somewhere very different. Sicilian hills were huge, steep and reddish -colored compared to the rolling green hills of Tuscany and Liguria. They rose up dramatically from the shoreline. (We tried but never got a very good picture of what it looked like. You can get a sense of it in this wikipedia photo.)

Palermo

Even after three nights in Palermo, I’m still not sure what to say about it. We had a great conversation with the two locals we were staying with and that’s something I didn’t get anywhere else on this trip, but I never really got a good sense of the city as a whole, perhaps because I was frequently lost in it’s a maze of narrow, windy, stone streets.

I had decent food, lots of seafood, but nothing that notable, aside from the gelato in brioche. (Mr. WholeHog, on the other hand, was adventurous enough to try a typical Palermo sandwich consisting of veal spleen and lung). The food markets, on the other hand, were the most striking part of my visit to Palermo and deserve a separate post.

Trapani

Coming from often crowded Palermo, Trapani seemed almost deserted. It was clean and quiet. There were many pedestrian only streets so I got a much needed break from the constant scooter traffic in Palermo.

We had a lovely lunch in Trapani at the generically-named Cantina Siciliana. It’s the kind of restaurant you hope to find when you travel: a small, family-run place with a deeply local menu and an extensive all-Sicilian wine list. We ate what we’d heard was the local specialty: fish with cous cous (they spell it cus cus) that’s been cooked in fish broth, along with some grilled vegetables, a crudo of local seafood, and a great Sicilian white wine (that I can’t remember the name of).

Cefalu

An hour away from Palermo by train is Cefalu, a touristy beach town. Maybe there’s more to Cefalu that we could have discovered if we were there longer than 24 hours, but aside from the chance to see another element of Sicily but I was indifferent about our stop in Cefalu.

The beach was nice, but the water was nothing like the gorgeous water in Corniglia. The town was cute. Like the towns in the Cinque Terre, there are stone steps and tiny streets running throughout. It’s built right on the water and many restaurants offer seating out on the water on what are essentially little piers built over the rocky shore.

Our four days in Sicily didn’t bowl me over but we saw such a small corner of the island. Having spent time now on the Northwest coast of Sicily, I’d like to see the other coast — Siracusa and Noto, especially — and I’d like to go inland.  I’d make more of an effort to see the ruins next time, and I’d like to see more of the agriculture, maybe visiting wineries or olive oil producers.

Corniglia, Cinque Terre

Travel Lesson #1:  Stay a night in the town or city you flew into. It’s tempting to head straight to your destination — especially if you’re headed to the Cinque Terre, but after flying across the US and the Atlantic, you’re in no shape to deal with more travel.

Especially if there’s a train strike.

Yes, Mr. WholeHog and I are now 2 for 2 with Italian train strikes. A year ago in Bologna, we arrived at the station to find a half-day long strike. On this trip, we flew into Pisa and encountered yet another strike.

But, in our experience at least, Italian train strikes don’t shut down the entire system, just some parts of the system. In Pisa, we learned that there were no trains leaving from the airport station, but there were trains leaving from the central Pisa station and a bus right outside would take us there. Problem averted.

In a way, the strike was an immediate reminder that traveling may require you to deal with unexpected delays or inconveniences. Like train strikes.

Or forest fires.

We arrived in Corniglia, our favorite of the five towns in the Cinque Terre. We checked into the apartment we’d rented and admired the view from our terrace. Then we noticed the smoke.

The hill behind the town and behind our apartment building was on fire. The plume of smoke

From our terrace, we watched a helicopter and a yellow plane pull water from the ocean, and from our bathroom window, we saw the planes drop the water on the quickly-spreading fire. Our apartment soon smelled like a campfire.

But no one in town seemed alarmed. There were no calls for evacuation, no one ran for the shuttle bus with their belongings. The townspeople lined up along the main street to watch the planes try to douse the fire, the tourists continued to trek through on their way to Vernazza or Manarola, and there were plenty of swimmers and sunbathers at a nearby beach.

So I accepted that my bridesmaid dress for Natalie and Rob’s wedding might smell like barbecue, I assumed that the Italians would fight fire as well as Californians, and I went out for a swim.

Many people think that there’s nowhere to swim in Corniglia since the town is perched up on a hill over the ocean, while the other towns are seaside. This is untrue — you need to walk a bit to a rocky beach near the train station or go down a few hundred stairs to the Corniglia harbor, but there is swimming in Corniglia. I happen to like that others think Corniglia has nowhere to swim, though, because it keeps Corniglia’s swimming holes less crowded.

I was particularly fond of Corniglia harbor, a gorgeous swimming hole with a pool-like ladder leading right into the blue-green water. It was quiet and peaceful, aside from the helicopter touching down nearby.

The swimming in the Cinque Terre was terrific in September, and Natalie and Rob’s wedding was lovely, but I’d been spoiled by our first visit to the Cinque Terre a little over a year ago.

I missed the pink and yellow wildflowers that grew along the hiking trails and along the bluffs in May. Mostly, I missed the sense of discovery that comes with exploring a place for the first time. This time around, I knew the views were spectacular, I knew the pastel-colored towns were charming, I knew that I loved anchovies already and that I’d eat trofie with pesto daily.

I also came with expectations from my first visit, so I was more easily disappointed when a favorite restaurant was closed for the week. I questioned whether the focaccia I’d loved on our first visit was really as tremendous as I’d remembered. Were the trains slower? More crowded?

And, of course, the fire impacted our trip this year. Aside from the noise of the planes trying to put out the flames and the smell of the smoke, the fire also cut out the ATM and internet access in Corniglia, and it closed some of the hiking trails in the area as well.

It was a different trip the second time, not necessarily bad, just not exactly what I’d carried with me since May 2008.  What I remember most fondly about this second trip are the things that were new this time around: finding a new favorite place to swim in Corniglia and seeing my friend get the wedding she wanted.

I Went to Places Unknown

We’re back from what felt like a whirlwind trip of Italy. We traveled up and down the boot, from the Cinque Terre to Sicily and back up to Rome. We were on beaches and in cities, walked on sand and cobblestones. We attended a wedding with many other Americans and went to areas where we saw almost no other Americans.

This much travel is unusual for us. On prior trips, we’ve stayed longer in one place. We spent 10 days in Paris alone in 2003. Last year, we were in Florence for a week. But on this trip, we had just a few days in each place before we headed out to somewhere new.

The positive of going to so many places is that you get a taste of many different places, and you don’t end up stuck somewhere you dislike. We had considered staying in Naples and I am so, so glad we stayed in Rome and went to Naples just for the day.

Since Italian food is deeply regional, traveling so much meant we ate a lot of different food.  We had focaccia and pesto in Liguria, cous cous in Trapani, pescespada (swordfish) in Palermo, margherita pizza in Naples, and simple, perfect pastas in Rome.

We again sought out Slow Food restaurants whenever possible, visiting Cantina Siciliana in Trapani, Da Sergio and  Dal Cavalier Gino in Rome, and Europeo in Naples.

The one constant in all regions we visited was gelato. In Sicily, it’s often served ‘con brioche’ (shown below). Yes, that’s two flavors of gelato tucked into what is essentially sweet bread roll. It’s a very intense ’snack’.

In Rome, we stumbled on San Crispino (warning: website may tempt you to buy a flight directly to Rome) and we’ll never be the same again. San Crispino’s gelato is denser than the gelato I’d eaten before, and the flavors are completely authentic. Nocciola (hazelnut) is available in almost any shop, but San Crispino’s version tastes most like an actual hazelnut. And no other gelato shop offered a flavor studded with chunks of meringue and caramel.

We learned a lot from this trip. We know now that we ultimately prefer to travel at a slower pace and to spend more time in fewer places.  Nearly everywhere we went deserved more time and focus than we had available. There’s so much more I’d like to see in Sicily and we barely scratched the surface of Rome.

By staying in an apartment, at a hotel and in a bed-and-breakfast on this trip, we’ve learned that we’re happiest in an apartment. It means less help (there’s no concierge to make dinner reservations for you), but we love having a kitchen and getting to actually shop at the local food markets, rather than just observing. Our previous apartment rentals in Paris and Florence made us feel more like locals than tourists.

I’ll post more about the places we visited, but overall, I’m happy to be back in California. This trip reminded me how much we have here in the Bay Area. Eating pasta in Rome made me better appreciate the menu at SPQR on Fillmore Street. The pizza at Europeo was pretty similar to the pies we get at Pizzeria Delfina. Our Ferry Building farmers market is so diverse that we recognized most of the produce at the local food markets we visited in Italy.

After the hazy, humid days of Italy, California’s startlingly bright skies and San Francisco’s lovely cool breezes feel just right.

Arrivederci!

We’re off to Italy!

This picture of Florence is from our 2008 trip.

I’ll Walk Your Lands

Almost every year at Tahoe, my parents want to go on a hike. As a kid, I often balked at their suggestion. I wanted to be at the lake with my cousins not up on some mountain. And didn’t we spend every family vacation camping and hiking anyway?

Now my parents are more savvy. Instead of suggesting a hike, they ask who wants to go on a “wildflower walk”. (See lupine and Indian paintbrush above).

I end up on more of these “walks” now because Mr. WholeHog didn’t seem to get enough camping or hiking in as a child. He jumps at the opportunity to see more of the Sierra and he seems actually interested in my parents wildflower lecture lessons. (He is, in many ways, the son my father never had. He enjoys the outdoors and plays guitar.)

Even I had to admit that this years wildflowers were worth missing another day at the beach. At times, the path was almost overgrown by the waist-high flowers.

The wildflower walk goes past a number of lovely Sierra lakes nestled around the foot of Round Top. We walked past Frog Lake, took a short break at Round Lake and had lunch at Lake Winnemucca (shown in the picture, above, if my memory serves).

Despite my family’s many camping trips in the Eastern Sierra, it still feels like a strange, tucked-away corner of the state. Most of my own hiking and camping excursions have been on the coast and without the ocean in sight, I had no sense of direction. I didn’t know what direction we were headed or what mountains we were looking at. (Even now, posting these pictures, I can’t say for sure which lake is which or what moutains I’d photographed).

But my dad loves this part of the state and he knows it well. He’s climbed nearly every peak in sight and he knows what other lakes and mountains are beyond.

If I remember correctly, Dad identified the mountains in the picture above as Pyramid Peak and the back side of Mt. Tallac.

You Might Think That I’m A Fanatic

The first thing I missed about Italy on our return was gelato. We had gelato in nearly every town we visited. We stopped for gelato when we felt hungry or when we just needed a reason to take a break. The flavors were endless.

A list of the gelato flavors I tried in the two weeks we spent in Italy:

• Stracciatella (sort of like a chocolate chip)
• nocciola (hazelnut)
• zucca e canella (pumpkin and cinnamon)
• limone (lemon)
• melone (melon)
• a special “Vernazza” flavor which was basically french vanilla with cherries
• canella (cinnamon)
• bacio (hazelnut and chocolate)
• extra-dark chocolate
• torroncino (nougat!)
• chocolate and chili
• panforte
• licorice

Old School Flavor

To eat well in Italy, we just followed the snail.

The snail is the symbol of Slow Food, an organization that encourages people to think about where their food comes from, to eat locally, and value food traditions.

In many ways, Slow Food is what many of us associate with Italy — leisurely meals made from recipes that have been passed on from generation to generation, handmade pastas, a sauce that has been cooking all day long, and an Italian grandmother behind the stove.

We didn’t plan to go on a Slow Food Tour of Italy. I always travel with a list of restaurant suggestions and, for this trip, we also had recommendations from some of our favorite farmers market vendors. And I knew that Slow Food isn’t always on target since its founder, Carlo Petrini, published a completely inaccurate account of my local San Francisco farmers market. (Hey Carlo, at least our farmers don’t smoke over their produce).

But Slow Food proved to be a reliable resource on our travels. While there were a few duds among our Slow Food adventures, and a few terrific meals that weren’t Slow Food certified, many of the best things we ate in Italy were snail-approved.

My Favorite Slow Food Finds

Coffee

Terzi
via Oberdan, 10, Bologna
Terzi is no Blue Bottle, but it was the only place we encountered in two weeks that had us choose what beans we wanted when we ordered our espressos and then freshly ground those beans. Everywhere else we went used pre-ground beans.

Focaccia

Il Frantoio
Via Goberti, 1, Monterosso
One of the most delicious and cheap meals we had: 2 euro buys a slice of truly transcendent focaccia. Our favorites were pesto e pomodoro (pesto and tomato) and the formaggio (cheese). We ate that focaccia twice in one day and made a special trip back the following morning for more. The nearby view of the Mediterranean is pretty nice, too.

Gelato

il Gelatauro
San Vitale, 98/b Bologna
One of the best things I ate in Bologna was a pistachio cookie here (you’ll find pictures of the kumiri cookies here). But it is primarily a gelato shop. I had zucca e canella (pumpkin and cinnamon). Mr. WholeHog had some crazy bergamot flavor.

Grom
All over Italy (and now in NYC!)
Seriously intense flavors – their extra dark chocolate is really over the top. But I loved the unexpected and surprisingly successful flavors like licorice or nougat (torroncino).

Restaurant

Hosteria Il Carroccio
Via Casata di Sotto 32, Siena
I wonder if I would have liked Siena so much if we hadn’t had such a tremendous lunch at this small restaurant near the Piazza del Campo. Everything we had here was simple and delicious: ribollita, a “green bean torte” (basically mashed potatoes, green beans, and a spectacular tomato sauce – one of the many Italian dishes that were much more than the sum of its parts), wild boar, and grilled pork with pistachio, radicchio, and pecorino.

Mr. WholeHog started on the maiale (pork) while I finished the ribolitta and the look on his face after the first bite told me just how good it tasted.

Best Meal (Ever?)

Solociccia
Via Chiantigiana 5, ingresso da via XX luglio
Panzano in Chianti Firenze

I never saw the Slow Food snail at Solociccia (“only meat”), but it was easily the slowest meal we had — and the most leisurely at 2 hours. Dario Cecchini comes from a long line of butchers, and at Solociccia, he serves his family’s recipes. He states online and on the menus that the food is “thoroughly Tuscan”. Believe me, you wouldn’t want it any other way.

My favorite of the six absolutely incredible meat courses we were served was the simple, perfect slices of roast beef. Mr. WholeHog loved the “ramerino in culo” (beef skewered on branches of rosemary).

Not Slow But Good

Trattoria Sabatino (Florence) was a mere half block from the apartment we rented in the San Frediano area of Florence. It was frighteningly cheap and quite good. We particularly loved the polenta with sugo. Tables can be communal which I liked because we got to see what the Italians ordered.