The perils of cooking off the cuff

The end of the CSA season is full of crucifers--cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and brussels sprouts--and root vegetables, especially carrots and beets.

For weeks, when I was too busy to shop and cook deliberately, I kept seeing yummy-looking kielbasa sausage in the farmers' markets, and thinking, "I remember my mom making kielbasa with sauerkraut. That sounds cozy. The first thing I'm going to do when I get some time to cook is make kielbasa with sauerkraut."

So while math class was going on in our home last Tuesday, I found a recipe for sauerkraut in The Art of Simple Food and started a batch. Making sauerkraut didn't turn out to be nearly as hard as I thought it would be. You chop up cabbage and work salt into it with your fingers until it starts to release its liquid. (It says 3.5 tsp. for a whole cabbage. I used a half. You can put in a teaspoon of caraway seeds, too.) Then put the cabbage a non-reacting 2 qt. container. It's supposed to create enough liquid to cover itself, but if it doesn't you add brine made from 1 c. filtered water and 1 T. salt., and then put a weight in the top of the container to keep the cabbage submerged. And then you cover it with a dishtowel leave it for a week or more. I used some glass storage jars that I usually keep hot cereal in for the container, and for the weight I used a water bottle. After a couple of days, I had nice purple water spilling over the top of my container!

Then I went to both local farmers' markets to look for the kielbasa. No one had it. Finally I figured out where I had seen it, but it was all gone. They promised a "date with the pig" later in the winter. But now I had sauerkraut started! No kielbasa at Whole Foods, either. Two days later, I found some at a local gourmet market.

So then I asked my mom for the recipe, only to find that she had no recollection of it whatsoever! (Obviously it was not a treasured family tradition, except with me.) But by this time I was committed, so I found a nice Choucroute recipe in the NY Times. I didn't necessarily want all the meat this recipe called for, but the base looked delicious!

Last night I tasted the sauerkraut. Not quite sour yet. But while looking for the kielbasa recipe, I had found the very same Ligurian walnut sauce I used to like so much when I stayed in Cortona 26 years ago. Only this recipe added broccoli rabe, which I happened to also have on hand. And about this time of year I really start craving dark greens, so why not? (Some stands are still selling greens, raised in a greenhouse, no doubt.)

Bob had another idea: He took the two cups of white wine I was saving for the kielbasa, and poured it to go with the farfalle and walnut sauce. After all, it did say "perfect for cream sauce and pasta" on the back.

(I'd insert a photo of the walnut sauce and pasta here, except that we ate it too fast, and besides, it looks just like the photo in the NY Times recipe, except that I used farfalle.)

This afternoon I finally read through the entire kielbasa recipe. Hmm, two hours was just too long to wait to start cooking after Bob came home with more wine, and I just didn't happen to feel like dashing out to the store to get some. So I substituted a dish that used carrots and beets instead. I've got pounds and pounds of beets and carrots, and more on the way tomorrow.

So, I still haven't made kielbasa with sauerkraut, but I guess that's what happens when you cook by the seat of your pants! But really, I wouldn't have it any other way, because I like cooking when everything comes together, seasonally, with what I've got on hand.

Maybe tomorrow.

***

December 18: We finally ate our sauerkraut and kielbasa, and though perhaps not quite worth all the fuss I put into it, it was quite good!

Basilica di S. Ambrogio

The facade of S. Ambrogio, as seen from its portico

This weekend when Bob was sending out follow-up e-mails for his business trip to Milan, we noticed that our inbox was filling up with "out of office autoreplies." Oh, yes! We'd forgotten, St. Ambrose's Day is this week.

St. Ambrose is the patron saint of Milan. His feast day is a major holiday, combined with the Immaculate Conception on the 8th. I have no idea how many of the Milanese go to church on these days, but no one is at work.

CZ and I were at the Basilica di S. Ambrogio just a couple of weeks ago during our trip, so I thought I'd post some photos of it in honor of this early Bishop of Milan who baptized St. Augustine.

These first two photos above are of 12th C. Lombard-style relief sculptures, the first on the doors to the basilica, and the second on the pulpit. The Lombard style is the sort of Celtic Romanesque style which seems to be characteristically Milanese. Lombard architecture is more "primitive" than the earlier Roman style, but it has a charm of its own. The church's facade (top of post) is also Lombard.

Most of these churches were actually first constructed in the 4th century (this one under the auspices of Ambrose himself), but only small parts of the original structures remain. And they used bits of the earlier Roman buildings as foundations. If you find all this jumble of construction and reconstruction a little hard to follow, so did I! If I counted right, there were at least six building phases going on in this one church. Even the altar above is made of bits saved from a roof collapse during the Lombard era.

The photos above are of medieval frescoes on a column inside the church, and of the mosaic in the apse. What you can't tell in the photos, of course, is that there was some lovely a capella singing going on in a mass behind and under the apse.

To the right, in the treasury, is an even older mosaic from the original 4th C. church. (Not pictured.) This older chapel is bracketed by an ornate Baroque foyer. Somehow, it works.

And this is just me outside in the portico, trying to figure out what all those signs say in Italian. I can't tell whether my confusion springs from the language or seeing so many different building phases at once. But I do know that Milan is very nice in the fall. Everything looks and feels quite different, and I find that Italian life has a cozy side. Or as they say, accogliente.

The light that shines in the darkness

This seems an appropriate way to start of the Christmas season: While we were visiting the church of S. Ambrogio in Milan, we came across this nativity scene in the church's treasury. It was made for Christmas of 1944 by Italian soldiers in a Nazi concentration camp. They worked in secret, using scraps of the men's clothing and anything else they could find. When they were liberated, they left behind the ox to commemorate those who died while in the camp. If you look closely, you'll see that the figures include a Franciscan friar, a hunter, soldiers, and a woman weaving--that is, people from all walks of life. (Sorry, my photo, taken in dim light, is a bit blurry.)

Though I haven't found anything about this story online, and I'm not sure of the circumstances that would have caused the soldiers to be imprisoned, there were certainly Italians, as there were Germans, who ran afoul of the Nazis. This scene reminds me of the complexity of human circumstances, and of the mixture that comprises men's hearts. What an appropriate place to find the Christ Child.

"The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it."

La bella vetrina

Since we spent Thanksgiving week in Milan, I thought I'd post a few pictures of things we saw. This post is all shop windows:

Italians care a lot about making things look beautiful, so naturally their shop windows are carefully arranged. The windows not only provide spots of bright color in an otherwise brown city like Milan, but shopkeepers keep passersby intrigued by changing the displays frequently. Sometimes we'd see an interesting item in a window, only to find it replaced by something else later in the day. This disappearing display game, naturally, invites customers to venture inside a shop to find the lost item.

The window that first caused us to notice the rotating displays was one in a libreria (bookstore) on Via G. G. Mora, which is a narrow cut-through between two major streets in the southeastern part of central Milan. As we passed the window on our way back home from our first big walk around the city, I did a double take: "Wow! Those clothes are nice enough to make me want a Barbie!" So the next time I went out, I took a photo. And it's a good thing I did, because a day or two later, the Barbies all disappeared.

The same day, we noticed these recycling bins on a major thoroughfare. I thought they were very clever, with their three pull-out drawers for different materials and a bottle-squasher on top, all in a rocketship shape. Oddly, these bins were displayed next to a very traditional cabinetry setup, perhaps the only traditional-looking cabinetry store I saw in all Milan. (The Italians seem to like modern cabinetry stores. Sometimes you'll see two or more in a block. One near our apartment had lighting that changed colors at night when the store was closed.)

And then there was this "red blood cell" plate (let). I had noticed it near our apartment one day on my way home, and wondered why I hadn't noticed it before. But by the time I went out again with the camera, it had moved to a table in the middle of the store.

But this little pink pig moka pot caused CZ and me to stop right in the street when we saw it and pull out the camera. Its name is a pun: A maialetto is a little pig, but "mai a letto" means "never to bed." which is of course, a perfect name for a coffee pot, especially one that makes espresso. And the pig reminded us of our own little pink plastic pig, whom I'd hidden in CZ's suitcase. But CZ had found him and then lost him inside her backpack, so that's where he spent the trip. No doubt he was sulking! (Or maybe he heard about casoeula and hid.)

And finally, there was this little doll in the window of a large toy store in the Piazza Cordusio, near the Duomo. I'm quite taken by miniature toys anyway, but this little bambina wearing her colander as a hat was especially charming.

But perhaps my favorite display of all was one that I didn't get a photo of: Little pink and blue baby socks rolled up inside muffin-papers to look like cupcakes with rippled icing, and another set of baby socks in primary colors, displayed to look like half a dozen eggs in a carton.

Che belle vetrine!

Un altro guazzabuglio

Tower-building contest in physics class

Guazzabugli are all I seem to be capable of lately--but I suppose they communicate something of their own!

• My mom is doing remarkably well. She had her surgery and is now cancer free and recovering. She is in good spirits, and I had a very nice trip down to see my family. Georgia is so beautiful in October--I forgot!
• CZ is being evaluated for another joint-related practice injury. I think I'm beginning to understand what's going on now: She's loose-jointed, which means that, combined with hours of violin practice daily, she will always be at risk for injury even if her position is correct. The solution, the physical therapist says, is to strengthen the areas that are particularly injury prone. Meanwhile, she'll be getting an MRI and all that other doctor stuff, too.
• I'm trying to stare down the possibility that CZ may have a lingering eye convergence issue that we may need to take care of as well.
• I'm in the thick of preparing for our trip to Milan. Trying to communicate with people in another language, and in a business context, adds a whole new dimension to the preparations!
• CZ's first orchestra concert of the season is this weekend, and my mother-in-law is coming up for it. Right after that CZ has two concerto competitions. One is the day before we leave for Milan.
• I really liked this article on how the Narnia movies have changed C.S. Lewis' worldview, mostly through snarky dialogue between the characters.
• Homeschooling? We just do what we can. The photo is from last Thursday's physics class. I'm still not sure exactly how those tower-building contests relate to the velocity of orbits, but they sure do get a lot of laughs!
• Oh, and it's my birthday today!

Un guazzabuglio

Un guazzabuglio is a mishmash. It's currently one of Bob's favorite Italian words, and it also describes our life lately:

• Math and physics classes are in full swing in our home two days a week. Everyone loves Mr. Tenney! Sometimes I sit and listen in with my knitting, and I overhear geometric series word problems in which fairies shoot down space aliens. No one blinks an eye.
• We're trying to implement block scheduling. This was CZ's idea. I see her point: Who's got the time to be switching subjects every hour? She's always liked to go slowly and have plenty of time for music practice. Some subjects don't have a day of their own, though, so we have to fit them in edgewise.
• As usual, we don't even quite follow our own homeschooling plans. Ancient history seems to be sliding towards medieval, and Italian...Yikes! Our tutor Paola got really busy and hasn't been coming, so CZ and I have been sitting down to work out direct and indirect object pronouns and the confusing things they do to past participles on our own. We don't have an answer book. Oh, and CZ ordered a Finnish textbook with her own money and is studying that.
• Never, ever poke a clogged moka pot.
• We are going to Milan for Thanksgiving. Go figure!
• I am going to be with my mom next week while she has cancer surgery. They're hoping they found it early. I just want to see my mom.
• CZ is concert mistress in her orchestra again. This is its own reward, because she gets cool solos ;-). She has two competitions in November and I've-forgotten-how-many recitals and practice performances leading up to those. And she gets to play in the Redeemer orchestra this Christmas!

So, if I don't post for a while, I'm probably doing one of the above (with the exception of poking the moka pot). I'll be back as soon as I can.

Meanwhile, here are some recent illustrations of our guazzabuglio life.

We made lunch yesterday from farfalle, parsley, and the last red pepper of the season. I include it here because we decided that it looked Christmas-y!

This is trig, written in Elvish script. I think the moral of the story is: If you have nerdish tendencies, run with them!

I'm trying to finish this scarf for Knit Together, a ministry of Hope for New York. It's the third thing I've ever knit in my life, and I'm finally learning how to correct my own mistakes. I like to work on this because it gives me an excuse to listen in on math, physics, and orchestra rehearsals.

"Our" tree is turning! I look forward to this event every fall.

A recent sunset from the Svalbard webcam. Because we live in a city, we supplement our diet with vicarious nature scenes.

The little big picture

CZ, age three, very shortly after we moved to New York

I needed some perspective yesterday, so I got out my little journal of things CZ said when she was little. I know that all children say cute things when they are small, and I have my favorite things that other children have said, too. But I only have permission to post ones that CZ has said. (Yes, she got to edit the list.) I do think they show her particular personality and make me appreciate her. These are through about age six:

In the backyard: "That's toys-in-ivy. Want to get the toys out."

"Does the Holy Spirit have a stethoscope?"

"May I walk on water when I grow up?...Oh, I'll walk in water."

Saying her prayers after going to the Metropolitan Museum: "Thank you God for the paintings you made." "Well, " I explained, wanting her to understand the difference between God's creativity and man's, "Men made the paintings, and God gave them the creativity. She paused for a few minutes, folded her hands, and began again, "Thank you God for the frames. I know you made the frames!"

"I don't want this bagel anymore. It's starting to taste like puzzle pieces."

"On the holidays, Grandmommy cooks hollandaise!"

***

Under the desk, playing with the nativity scene, and narrating in a story-teller voice:

"Once there was a woman named Mary, and it was a wonderful sight..."

"Once there was Mary, Joseph, Jesus and sheep. And it was good, but their problem was the goat [donkey] couldn't fit in the barn..."

"Once upon a time, there was Mary, Joseph, Jesus, a sheep and a donkey. And it worked out really well and it was fine and alright, though Jesus just, just, crawled everywhere...to save Mary from crocodiles and stuff!"

"Once upon a time there was a barn..."

***

"Do stars have gravity?"

"I need to go to the doctor tomorrow and tell him I have hypochondria."

***

Me, reading the Bible: "As far as the East is from the West, so far I will remove your sins from you."

CZ, looking very surprised: "You mean they're all the way over on the West Side?!!"

***

Stretching her boots out in her stroller: "My boots are so yellow. They're as yellow as old cabs."

With her first 100-piece puzzle all laid out around her on the floor: "Is this a chapter puzzle?"

***

Looking rather wistfully out the window towards the street, on a cloudy day. "Every part of the world is crowded today."

Looking out same window, on another day, with growing horror: "How did it get to be Monday? Is the whole city Monday?!"

***

"A month is a long time, but you can't see it. In here is a month, and out there is a month, but you can't see it. You can see through it, like air...Can you see microwaves? They're like that."

"What is dinner time + dinner time?...Way past my bedtime!"

"I'm a happy girl, 'cause I have a little fort, and the reason I'm in here so much is...I don't know how to get out!"

"Mommy, I like the way there can be TV on TV."

After we missed the express bus because there wasn't enough room for everyone to get on and the door closed on someone's backpack: "Mommy, it's okay. We didn't want that bus...It was just full of lawyers anyway."

Standing with me while we were waiting for the elevator: "Am I imagining this?"

From the bathtub: "Mommy, the water's running out of float-ness!"

To Bob, conspiratorially, while playing Frisbee in the park: "Okay, get ready! You never know where Mommy's going to throw it next!"

"You put a puzzle piece where you think it goes, not where you hope it goes. You hope it goes everywhere."

Me, looking absently at a take-out menu: "Your hot dog comes with two sides."

CZ, puzzled: "Everything has to have at least two sides, or it wouldn't be real."

"Lotsarella, please!"

and

At Grandmommy's house in rural Georgia, sleepily describing the sound of crickets in the woods: "They sound like millions of car horns blowing, far away."

***

Sometimes we just need to look at the big picture, don't we?

NY Times drawing series

This morning I ran across--who would have thought?--an excellent series in the NY Times on basic drawing skills. This series will come out each Friday for twelve weeks. Oh, I am so excited to see this, for my own sake! If you want to brush up on your own skills, have children who are interested in drawing, or just want a good curriculum for an art class (for any age, because few people practice these skills anymore), this series looks extremely promising. I majored in drawing and painting, yet I never got this level of basic instruction. (Honestly, I think I majored in irony and kitsch, which can be valuable in its own way, but that's another story.)

I'm also going to drop the links (two so far) in my shared items on the sidebar. Happy drawing!

Helix online

Helix, Christmas 2008

I confess a soft spot for this gift store in downtown Athens, Georgia. I'd like it even if my sister and brother-in-law weren't the owners, but it happens that they are. And now you can shop Helix online. (They have no idea I'm posting this, by the way. At least not yet.)

It's also fun that when my sister comes up to NYC twice a year to attend the Javitz retail show, I get in a visit with her and also get a preview of what's to come. One of the items we talked about when she came up last month was Clocky. I know my sister didn't invent Clocky, but I must say, it's got her sense of humor.

I'm quite fond of CZ's Charley Harper cards from Helix, too.

And the Lomography blog looks fun!

All in all, I think this store stacks up nicely against many of the artsy stores in Soho. Not that I'm biased or anything.

Uccelli italiani

Eurasian Nuthatch (photo from Wikipedia Commons)

My other little ancillary post about Italy is on bird-watching. It was never a main activity during the trip, but I did take my binoculars, and I did keep my eyes open for birds while I was there. I did most of my bird watching from the gazebo of the rental house in Castelnuovo, during breakfast.

What I learned quickly is that Italian birds are very shy. Our house looked straight out into a stand of trees and bushes. Every morning I'd be waked at about 5 a.m. with a cataract of birdsong coming from these trees. There would still be plenty of singing going on when I got up an hour or two later (our hours varied, depending on whether there was a concert the night before), but I'd almost never see a single bird in these trees. Or if I did, it would dart into the underbrush before I could get a good look at it. American birds will usually let you look at them, at least for a few seconds.

Finally one morning I wised up and got up early. I went to an empty upstairs bedroom where I could peek out of the cracked shutters, and I had a little more success this way. It was very foggy most mornings, but I could at least see any birds that flew into the little fig tree right by the gazebo. This is how I saw a Eurasian Nuthatch, like the one in the photo above, and a couple of other birds.

About eight o'clock, while we were eating breakfast on the gazebo, the sun would burn through the fog and the swifts would start diving off the roof and into the valley, feeding on insects. They made a racket that is one of the characteristic sounds of European towns. Swifts, martins, and swallows circle every Tuscan town, especially in the morning and evening.

There was another sound I heard, all day long, everywhere I went. It was a very distinctive call, but I never could associate it with a particular bird. Every time I would identify a bird, I'd look to see if its call fit the description of what I was hearing, but it never did. I knew it must be a common bird, though, because I even heard it in Milan.

One I even asked Sr. Bertolani about it. He said, positively, that it was the canarini. I figured from what he was saying that he meant the European Serin, which is related to the canary and lives on the side of the hill where the house was. So that was the first Italian name for a bird that I learned. (Not that I've learned so many others!) But still, the song didn't fit the description for the Serin song in my bird book.

I never solved this mystery until we got back home. I finally e-mailed Cornell's ornithology department, through the Bird Guide site that's linked on my sidebar, and described the song. The person who answered my e-mail wasn't familiar with European birds, but she forwarded my question to someone else who was. And the verdict? The Common Chaffinch, probably the most common bird in all Europe! How could I have missed seeing the most common bird in Europe when I was there, with binoculars, and trying to keep my eyes open, for three weeks? It's beyond me, but there you go! I thought it was very nice of Cornell to go to the trouble to answer my question, though.

Here's my complete list. As usual, I haven't bothered to put it in strict taxonomic order:

Little Grebe

Great Spotted Woodpecker

Alpine Chough

Alpine Accentor

Common Blackbird

White Wagtail

Carrion Crow

Common House Martin

Barn Swallow

Common Swift

Great Tit

Blue Tit

Eurasian Nuthatch

European Serin

Blackcap

Italian Sparrow

and

Common Chaffinch!

Cucina italiana

Our home-made macchiato, with CZ's milk-froth (I'll try to get a better photo soon.) She's very fond of cinnamon.

It has taken me a month-and-a-half to blog a three-week trip! But I've got just a couple of small posts to write about little ancillary things having to do with Italy.

This first post is about little cooking items that I'm having fun using now that we're back home. With all the luggage restrictions these days, I didn't want to load up the suitcase with souvenirs, but I did buy a couple of small things for the kitchen, supplemented by a couple of larger things that I knew I could get at home:

I bought this moka pot at Bed, Bath and Beyond, not in Italy, but it's foundational, so it comes first. The Bialetti moka pot is almost a national symbol of Italy. Our tutor Paola gets almost teary-eyed when she talks about how the moka is now being supplanted by the home espresso machine. Nevertheless, our rental house had several of moka pots in different sizes. In Italy, you can even get cans of Illy coffee ground for them (and as you might expect, Illy is much cheaper there, too). We had moka pot coffee every morning in tiny espresso cups, and again after lunch.

Now that we're back home, I have my usual French press coffee early in the morning, but in the afternoon, CZ and I make espresso in the moka pot. We also bought a little hand-pumped milk frother to make macchiato. The glass was very thin and it broke after the first week, but CZ quickly figured out that the pump fit the French press carafe perfectly and now she makes it that way. We've been experimenting with different kinds of milk, but find even the same brands to be inconsistent. We've had the best luck so far with 1% Organic Valley.

A small milk/tea pot

When I drink my morning coffee around 6 a.m. at home, I like to have it while seated on the sofa next to the open living-room window. I do this because I like to be slightly cold when I drink my coffee, but our centrally-steam-heated building is usually too warm for that. I also like the window open because early morning is the quietest time of day in NYC and I like to sit and listen to the quiet. The only problem with my nice routine is that the breeze, combined with my habits of using a French press and of pouring half-and-half in my coffee, made it almost certain the coffee would be lukewarm by the time I got situated.

Our rental house had several small milk/tea pots. I quickly discovered that I could heat milk on the stove in the smallest one and enjoy very hot coffee. So I bought one of these nice small pots in Italy. The one in the photo above is about five inches high. I've just started using it this week, now that there's actually a breeze coming through the window in the morning. It works!

This next item is a mezzaluna, or half-moon. (It has nothing to do with coffee.) There was also one of these in our rental kitchen and I started using it daily. It's just a little curved knife with two handles, very handy for cutting ripe cantaloupe or getting a nice rocking motion going for fine-dicing herbs and onions. I didn't know what it was called until I mentioned to Sra. Bertolani that I used it every day. "Ah, la mezzaluna!" she explained, tracing the half-moon shape across the blade with her finger. So I bought one, for not very much, in the town's kitchenwares store. When I went to Bed, Bath and Beyond to get the moka pot, I also saw them there, too, but I like knowing that mine is from the town where I first learned about them.

And while I was at it, I bought a little icing syringe for cake decorating. I hadn't decorated cakes with icing in recent years (I used fruit instead) because I balked at all the preservatives in the storebought kind, but I hadn't seen a syringe here at home. This one looked easy to use, and it was lightweight. CZ tried it out yesterday while icing Bob's birthday cake. (By the way, she gets sort of giddy after eating a lot of icing.)

The cake reads, "Buon compleano, Roberto di [picture of a bicycle]. This is obviously an obscure joke. It stems from Bob's recent habit of signing all correspondence to friends and family with some imaginary Italian surname, most commonly Roberto di Bicicletta, or "Bob Bicycle." Enough said!

I also bought one large thing for the kitchen, but that was after we got back. A couple of weeks ago, the igniter in our aging oven went out--again. After four repairs in as many years, and living without the most convenient top burner for a year as well, I finally decided to get a new range. It's actually just an updated version of the old one, which I liked, but it has two things the old one didn't, a convection fan and a handy middle burner that can be used either for a Dutch oven (because it's oblong) or to heat a specially-fitted griddle insert. The whole thing heats up much faster too, and is much more reliable temperature-wise. I admit it--I love having a new stove!

Last Saturday Bob went on a seventy-plus mile bike ride, so we celebrated with brunch. CZ whipped up some ricotta-nutmeg pancakes and we put them on the griddle, along with bacon and eggs. Here she is experimenting with pancake shapes:

I'm glad it's cool enough to exercise more now, because with all these cooking supplies, it looks like we'll need it!

Once again, we wind up in Milan

Our hotel room

After almost three weeks of traveling, we had reached that point of any vacation in which we were very tired and had run out of clean laundry. And once again, as in 2003, we were ending our trip in Milan. The last city in a trip usually gets the short shrift, and knowing this, we tried to remain alert. We wanted to appreciate Milan.

We had had such nice hosts all through our trip that at first we felt a little at odds in this big, anonymous city. But being New Yorkers, we figured we could find our way around and entertain ourselves.

Because we were staying in the same hotel as on our previous trip, we already knew that we didn't want to have dinner that first night on the nearby Via Dante. We felt it was the Milanese equivalent of Times Square. So we asked the hotel clerk (a very kind girl whom we also remembered from our previous trip) where we should go. Once we got to the area she recommended, we still felt that the selection of restaurants was a little tourist-y (they were the kind where the waiters stand outside and try to get you to come in), but we finally selected one and found that the food was good, if expensive. We sat outdoors.

We had, unknowingly, chosen a restaurant on the street where the fortune tellers hang out. We had barely begun our meal when the first one set up her table. She was wearing a red dress, a red sequined shawl, a lot of make-up, and she had dyed-blonde hair. As groups of young people walked by, the women often dressed in shorts and heels, she would shout, "Ciao, ragazzi!" to get their attention. But the only two groups I saw stop at her table were both English-speaking, and the women were tall, pretty, young blondes. Can you guess what she told them?

There were also people walking their dogs, a toddler who wandered around the sidewalk near our table, and a man who kept trying to push a dozen roses on us. The rose-peddler was rather annoying, but on the whole, we enjoyed having some street life with our dinner. Bob got to use a new favorite get-rid-of-peddlers line that he had invented in Sarzana: "Parlo solo cinese." It usually gets a laugh (being so obviously false), and sometimes it gets rid of the peddler.

Towards the end of our meal, we realized it was getting dark, but from the wrong direction. The wind picked up, and we heard rumbling. But we were already halfway through dessert, so it didn't concern us.

Besides, we were very entertained by the fortune teller. She seemed to be hedging her bets against the storm, removing first one chair from her table, then another and another, and stacking them against the nearest store front. By this time she had been joined by several other fortune-tellers, none of whom were doing much business in this threatening weather. They sat at their tables like so many flies gathering, all up and down the street, candles sputtering in the wind. Bob wondered aloud whether she could predict whether it was actually going to rain. The next moment, a gust blew out all her candles.

We finished our meal and set off towards the nearby Brera Quarter (in the opposite direction from our hotel) with our map, hoping to see La Scala lit up in the dark. We made it as far as the Chiesa di S. Marco and were once again getting our bearings when the wind picked up suddenly and blew whirling dust in our faces. Lightning flashed, and it became very obvious that it really was going to pour. We spat out leaf bits, laughing, and started to beat it back to the hotel. We did stop briefly, though, under a bar awning where a crowd was watching the final game of the World Cup. Bob poked his head in and looked towards the screen. "Zero/zero!" someone yelled out. The question didn't even need asking. On the way back by our restaurant, there were even more fortune-tellers. I noticed one in a bright orange dress with a large, green satin hat. She almost glowed in the shop lights.

We had barely walked through the fortress-like doors to our hotel when we heard the storm break with a fury. But we were safely inside. We sat in our glass hotel room, watching the constant lightning outside and the end of the World Cup on the hotel-room TV: "E' finita! L'Espagna e' la campiona del mondo per la prima volta!"

The next day, CZ and I wandered around in the heat while Bob went to meetings. Lots of things were closed, because it was Monday, but we familiarized ourselves with the Parco Sempione, the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele, and the Duomo.

CZ took the photos of the interior, the bronze relief, and the candles, above

Bob had been going to various meetings with potential Italian clients all along, but in Milan, this became more or less the primary purpose for the trip. After one of these meetings, he came back to the hotel with an interesting story: He had met a young woman from Castelnuovo di Garfagnana who was perfectly fluent in both Italian and English. And the reason she spoke English so well was that she had spent her first eight years in Scotland--she was one of the Scots-Italians.

This young woman, Tamara (pronounced Ta-MAH-ra), offered to meet us for dinner after work so she could show us an area of town she liked, and so we could trade impressions of Castelnuovo. We ended up walking to the Navigli section, a student area in the southern part of town that reminded me somewhat of Greenwich Village. It was also the section of town that contained a lot of old canals that the Renaissance Milanese had once used to transport goods to the nearest river. Leonardo da Vinci had a hand in designing them. Now they made a nice excuse for a row of restaurants down either side.

We didn't have a particular restaurant in mind, but all of them looked better than the one we'd eaten in the night before, so we were happy. We ended up in one that had unusual takes on all the traditional Italian dishes. Tamara explained what it was like to grow up in Castelnuovo from the age of eight until she went back to college in the U.K. Yes, it was nice and cozy--maybe a little too cozy when you're a young single. She liked Milan better, though she knew that many people didn't. Tamara also said her native Scottish accent could be a little misleading, because every now and then while she was in college, she wouldn't understand some word, and people, not realizing that Italian was her first language, would simply think she was a little dense! It was fun to be able to get in-depth impressions from someone who knew so much of Italy.

By the time we walked home at around ten p.m., the whole district was teeming with students. They sat around S. Lorenzo delle Colonne, talking, smoking, and performing music. Once again I had that slightly confused, dislocated feeling that I'd had several times before in Italy. During the day, it seemd that the churches were overrun by tourists (of which I was one) and looked upon as places revenue. At night, they were places where people hung out. How did the Italians feel about them as churches?

Bob on his way to a meeting

On the next and last day of our trip, Tuesday, CZ and I each picked a sight we wanted to see. We spent the morning in the Pinoteca della Brera, Milan's chief art museum. It was fun to see so many of the principal paintings from art history survey courses in person--Raphael's The Marriage of the Virgin, Mantegna's Dead Christ, Bellini's Madonna and Child, Piero della Francesca's Madonna and Child with Saints, and an enormous Veronese dinner scene with Mary anointing Jesus' feet. We sat for a long time just taking in all that was going on in that one painting.

In the afternoon, we went back to an archeological museum that we had visited in 2003. I was a little disappointed to find that CZ had no memory of it, but I think she actually enjoyed going there this time. She likes the idea that Italian cities have remains of their previous incarnations underneath, and that if you look closely you can puzzle out what's what. This particular museum is built over part of the late Roman city walls near the emperor Maximin's palace. One of the wall's towers had been incorporated into a church cloister, which was in turn bombed during WWII, and then partially turned into a museum with the church still extant next door. This church, S. Maurizio, wasn't even particularly famous, but it had very well-done frescoes. And out behind the museum we found an archeologist at work, digging in the yard of the cloister. And of course, every set of ruins has its cats, who have been here all along. Once again, we were witnessing the continual layering that is Italy!

Frescoes by Bernardino Luini in the Chiesa di S. Maurizio, next to the museum.

A Roman sculpture from Caesarea Maritima.

Top to bottom: Dripstones in the shapes of dogs, ruins of an imperial palace (a couple of blocks from the museum), and an archeological dig behind the museum

A day on Lake Como

Mr. B and Vera

(This post is continued from The Hobbit House, below):

Vera's dad, Sr. B, met us down at the lake by mid-morning on Saturday. Vera had hinted that he wanted to take us out in his boat, but he didn't really tell us what we'd be doing exactly. I think he liked the surprise element! And like Sr. Bertolani in Castelnuovo, I think he liked to practice his English.

So first Sr. B took us to the western side of Lake Como as far as Bellagio, where we had stayed in 2003. He had told us about the way each town along the way earned its livelihood. He also pointed out every villa and told a bit about its history. At least one of them had been the setting of an old film. Almost all of them were grand.

During the previous parts of our vacation, every time we had told someone that we were going to stay with friends in Como, they would inevitably ask, with a mischievous grin, "Is your friend George Clooney?" Apparently George's residence on Lake Como is quite well-known, so it got to be something of a joke. Sr. B picked right up on the joke. Every time we saw a villa on the lake, he would say, "Many people think this is where George Clooney lives, but it isn't." (Occasionally he did know the person who lived there, though.)

As we circled back around at Bellagio, I thought we would just head back to Argegno, but this is where Sr. B revealed his surprise. We were going to a friend's restaurant, by boat! The restaurant was in the town of Careno, on the shadow side of the lake. Sr. B explained that the shadow side was where the locals who worked supplying the rest of the towns lived. Because it didn't get as much sun, the vacationers didn't flock to that side. Also, there wasn't much room to build, because the hills rose straight up from the water. But we liked Careno immediately.

This restaurant was apparently one you had to know about by word of mouth. It was meant to be approached from the water, where the proprietor's wife would go down to welcome the boats. You could possibly find it while in the town, but you'd have to go out of your way, down a steep hill. The restaurant had a name, but there was no sign outside, and even Sr. B himself didn't know it. He just knew the proprietor. And it didn't have a menu--they just served whatever they were cooking that day.

I must say that being taken by surprise to this restaurant, by boat, and hosted by Sr. B was one of the most special, fun, and quintessentially Italian things we did during the whole trip! The courses were all fish from the lake. There was a fish pate' appetizer, a salted fish almost like a large sardine, small friend fish with risotto, and finally, an apricot tart (thankfully, without fish!). This came with a bottle of wine and some limoncello. I was dubious about the limoncello, but it wasn't strong like the kind sold in the U.S. And this being an Italian meal, we sat talking for two hours, in the lazy afternoon heat.

After we were finished with lunch, Sr. B had another surprise. He got a set of keys from the proprietor and took us to a tiny church next door. It was only one room, with a couple of pews, a vaulted ceiling, and some frescoed decoration. A crucifix stood in a window near the back. Some markers on the portico outside the church were carved with the family name of the proprietor. This was apparently his family's ancestral chapel.

As we walked back down to the boat, we came across a bocce court, and Sr. B took some time to explain the basics of the game to Bob. They even rolled a few balls. I gather that it's a little like outdoor bowling.

Finally we motored back across the lake (where Sr. B at last pointed in the direction of George Clooney's estate), and everyone went home for an afternoon rest. But we met again for dinner. This time Sra. B came too, and we went to a mountain-style restaurant. Sr. B explained that there were two distinct regional cuisines, one lake and fishing-oriented, and the other mountain and game-oriented. (I kept forgetting that we were only two miles from Switzerland!) At any rate, the mountain restaurant was much more upscale than the lake one. We also enjoyed meeting Sra. B, and although she spoke exactly two words of English the entire evening (repeated verbatim and without comprehension from something Vera said), we found that we understood enough Italian that we felt she was part of the conversation. She reminded me just a little bit of Zsa Zsa Gabor, with slightly disheveled (in a cute way) red hair.

The next day was Sunday, and I took a walk through Argegno, not exactly knowing where I was going. Down by the water, I found a large church that was not meeting for the summer. Instead it had a sign directing people up the hill to the church with the bells that played songs. But as the sanctuary itself was open, I sat down. There I found a psalter in Italian (two different translations) and read psalms for a long time. It worked well to sort of whisper them aloud. Since they were all familiar to me in English, I had no trouble reading them.

I haven't been to the Riviera, but I would imagine Lake Como is sort of the Italian equivalent. It's where well-to-do Milanese go to spend the weekend. While having breakfast by the water, Bob and I decided that Argegno must be the part of Lake Como where young families who couldn't quite afford the fancier towns went, because there were babies everywhere! But we decided that for all its glamour, we liked Castelnuovo better, because it really felt like someone's home.

During our lunch in Careno, Sr. B told us about his friend Bruce from Miami. "He is a good friend, Bruce!" he would laugh as he told stories. Bruce liked big hotels and cigars from Havana. Once the Bs went to visit him in Miami. But one thing puzzled him: "Bruce lives a 'click' life. He stays in his house, with air conditioning. He goes to his car, with air conditioning. He goes to the pool. He washes the dishes, click. He turns on the TV, click. Everything is a button."

Perhaps it was trying to explain what he meant in limited English that made him stick to concrete descriptions, but whether he knew it or not, he had vividly captured one of the main differences between Italy and the United States. Whereas Italians prefer beauty of all sorts at the expense of efficiency or even comfort, Americans tend to prefer the opposite. Not always, but often. Sr. B was, wittingly or unwittingly, describing dependence on technology and luxury of a particularly American type.

Not that I'd want to turn off my air conditioner in Miami, either! But Sr. B did show us a lovely alternative to a life that goes click.