Pavimenti alla Genovese

At the beginning of the 20th century, as cement began to be commonly used as a binding agent, the artisans of Genova developed a flooring technique called Pavimenti alla Genovese.  The flooring surface is prepared by spreading a mixure of crushed brick, or cacciopesto,  sand and cement and then flattened several times with a roller and iron.  Once the base is prepared, a perforated paper drawing of the design is placed over the base and lime is sprinkled over the entire surface.  When the paper is pulled away, an outline of the design remains on the base.  A paste is then spread and cubes of colored marble are laid to form the design.  Finally, a mixure of cement and grit is spread across the surface and rolled again to consolidate the materials.  After drying for 30 days, the flooring is treated with linseed oil and then polished with wax or iron.

Our apartment, which was built in 1909, has Pavimenti alla Genovese floors, but the floors that touch me are those of Via XX Settembre.  Completed in the same year, these walks extend from Piazza de Ferrari eastward towards the Ponte Monumentale.

 

As I walk along these sidewalks, I can't but help imagine my father, who would have been 9 years old when they were laid, walking along them with his parents and brother and sisters.

 

 

 

 

  

  

  

 

 

Adaptations 1

 First let me say that Ollie just blew up my brand new Bialetti cafettiere.  Brand new in that it has, or was, never used.  How does one do that?  This is not hi-tech.  In fact, the Bialetti, which by the way makes the best coffee in the world, is about as low tech as you can get.  But apparently, where there's a will there's a way.

 

In theory, that black thing on the stove is supposed to be attached to the pot, not to mention the black thing on the top which is supposed to be standing up-right.  And the smell...well, I will not describe the smell!

But that's not what I wanted to write about today.  I wanted to write about food.  I think a lot about food.  Not only because I like to eat, but because you have to learn a whole new way of looking at food when you move to a new country.  Familiar products are absent and the ones you think are familiar turn out to be quite different.  Sometimes dramatically so.  Take for example peperoni.  Every American is familiar with peperoni, after all, what's life without the occasional peperoni pizza.  Except in Italy, peperoni are not spicy dried sausages, but fresh peppers, what we'd call in the US red bell peppers.  To make matters worse, there doesn't appear to be a dried sausage similar to peperoni, at least not here in Liguria.   Ok, there's no peperoni, so what!  There are so many amazing sausages, or salumi, as well as fantastic pizza, one gets over their craving for peperoni pizza pretty fast.

The bigger issue comes when you need to use a new basic product.  In this case, flour. There are not many things I miss from home, but sourdough bread, bagels and American style cakes belong to that special category of "damn I wish I had some...!" So, for the next few weeks...or months, I am going to embark upon an adventure of trying to recreate American food products using Italian ingredients.  My first hurdle is going to be flour.  It never occurred to me that other than whole wheat versus white, there would be any significant differences from flour in the US to flour in Italy.  I could not have been more wrong, and on many levels.  American flour is typically hard wheat while Italian typically soft wheat.  American flour is labeled for it's designated use, general purpose, bread, cake etc, but here you can buy 0 or 00, Type 1, Type 2, farina integrale, and farina Manitoba 0 and 00.  0 and 00 are grades of texture, and compared to American flour is seems to be superfine and superfinest.  In a word, you better know what you're doing when you bake with Italian flour because it's not the same thing.

Also, there's no such thing as bleached flour or cake flour such as SoftasSilk.  There is a technique for bleaching flour using a microwave, but it is so labor intensive that until I decide I'm going to start baking wedding cakes for a living, I'll give it a pass.   Not to mention that I no longer own a microwave.

I have for years been a fan of Rose Levy Beranbaum and her book "The Cake Bible".  This is cake baking as a science!  When she published her new book "Rose's Heavenly Cakes"  I immediately purchased it from Amazon.com thinking I was going to return to the US for a quick trip and be able to pick it up, a trip that never happened.  So, not to be deprived, I immediately asked for another copy for Christmas, and gave my first copy to my daughter.  Which brings us back to flour.  The cakes in this extraordinary book use US style bleached cake flour and I really want to bake some of them.   I'll keep you posted on my efforts, but until I perfect the technique, I still have my fallback Italian apple cake with olive oil from Anna del Conte, which is as good as any cake I've ever eaten.

For the recipe for apple cake and other great Italian food from this wonderful writer, see http://www.amazon.co.uk/Amaretto-Apple-Cake-Artichokes-Conte/dp/product-description/0099494167.

Living in Italian

As languages go, Italian is not all that difficult.  I have in my life studied Latin, French and Russian and Italian doesn't even come close to the complications of those languages. No declensions as in Latin and Russian, no new alphabet, and not all that many irregular verbs like French, but damn, it's hard to learn a language when you're not a kid anymore.  For some reason, I cannot remember anything.  It's like my brain fell out on the sidewalk.

For this I blame my father.  There, I've said it.  My father, native Italian and native Italian speaker, who entered in the US at age 37 did not teach his children Italian.  I grew up hearing Italian, so the rhythms and the accent are easy, but what about the words and the sentences.  Why did he think we didn't need to learn the language???  I understand that being Italian was not comfortable in the years following World War II, but it would have been nice to share a little of this beautiful language with us.  It certainly would make my life easier in the here and now.

So, since I'm stuck with my inadequacies,  twice a week I go to an Italian language school to study Italian.  Ollie has private lessons with the school's owner, but my teacher is a charming and smart young Italian woman named Sara, who has two degrees in linguistics and a wonderful command of English.  Not that we're supposed to speak any English in class, but hell, how do you explain pronomi combinati or reflessivo without a couple of words of English.  I am joined in my class by women from Korea, Denmark and on occasion, Germany.  Several weeks into the program here, it occurred to me that every one of them speaks English as well as their native language.  How embarrassing!   How is it, with all of my education, the only language I speak is English.  OK, I speak Italian too, if you consider that faltering, one word at a time, conjugating as I go, no prepositions language, Italian.  I'm confident Italians don't consider it Italian.

Nevertheless, I still live in Italian.  I do my grocery shopping in Italian, pay my bills in Italian, talk to the doctor in Italian, and call the caldaia (heater) repair people in Italian.  And that's where the trouble begins.  I cannot talk on the phone in Italian!  Actually, that's not true, I can talk on the phone in Italian, I just can't understand what the guy on the other end of the phone is saying in Italian.

Since we got our new caldaia, every time the heat comes on, the thing leaks.  And I mean leaks a lot.  Over the course of a couple of hours, it puts out about 2 cups of water.  I'm pretty confident that's not a good thing.  So today, after weeks of putting if off, I called the caldaia people.  I started out quite confident that I could clearly explain what the problem was and that he'd immediately give me an appointment.  I was wrong.  Not about the clear explanation, that part was easy, but as soon as I finished explaining the problem, he started to talk...and talk.  I could feel my eyes glazing over and my brain lurching to a halt.  I had no idea what he's saying.  I still have no idea what he said.  Maybe when he comes to fix the caldaia he'll repeat what he said and then I'll know what he was saying, or not.  Ultimately, I have an appointment to finally get the caldaia fixed.  It's tomorrow morning at 8am...I think.

 

Via Venti Settembre, the main thoroughfare of Genoa

 

Looking up Via XX Settembre towards Piazza de Ferrari

 

Monumentale - Straddling Via XX Settembre, this bridge was built in 1895 and was one of the first cement structures to be built in Italy.  Above is Corso Andrea Podesta', but at street level, it is a monument to the partisans who died freeing Italy from fascism and nazism during WWII.

 

One of the beautiful porticoes along Via XX Settembre.  This was once part of the abbey of St. Columbanus of Bobbio.

Spaghetti Western Night

I believe that one of the most important things an expat can do to help ease their way into a new life in a new country, is to establish new traditions.  Just like at home, having those special days or moments you can look forward to helps get you through the tough times.  Not that we had any traditions.  That is, unless you can consider work a tradition.  Our work, but my work in particular, caused us to work days, nights, and all around the clock.  So, when we finally got home, all we wanted to do was vegetate.  The idea of having dinner guests or a party was anathema.

Nevertheless, I believe in this concept so, last night I decided to act on it.  We have established the tradition of Spaghetti Western Night.  Last night in honor of Sergio Leone, we had our friends Carlo and Sue over for dinner and a movie.  But not just any dinner and a movie... spaghetti and a spaghetti western.

For those of you who have never been exposed to Spaghetti Westerns, a little background.  In the early 1960's, Italian directors began making low budget westerns.  They were typically filmed in Italian in locations in Spain, Sardegna or Abruzzo.  Most of the actors were Italian, although on occasion a washed up Hollywood type would show up on the screen.

The best of these films, were the films of Sergio Leone. Called the "Man with No Name" trilogy and starring that up and comer, the young and gorgeous Clint Eastwood, it was only appropriate that we begin our tradition with my favorite of Leone's films, Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo or "The Good, the Ugly and the Bad", or "The Good, the Bad and The Ugly"...va be' (Whatever!)

To further refine this tradition, it was important to chose the right spaghetti.  It must be a spaghetti that comes from the birthplace of the director.  In this case it must be from Rome, where Sergio Leone was born in 1929.  Thus, our choices are: all'Amatraciana; pancetta, tomatoes and onions, Gricia; pancetta and onions, no tomatoes, con Vongole; clams and garlic...yum, and Carbonara; pancetta, eggs and cheese.  None of these require much prep or complicated cooking, but timing is everything, particularly with the Carbonara, so of course, that's the one I chose. 

As a little aside, Carlo is Italian.  Not Italian like me, first generation Italo-Americana, but Italian Italian. That means that good food is critical to his state of mind.  So I'm a little nervous about cooking Italian food for him.  Especially since I had brooded over this issue, and made a commitment when we first moved here that I would never cook Italian food for Italians.  I just didn't think I could handle the critique.  Then it occurred to me that I don't know how to cook anything but Italian food.  I've been cooking Italian food since I learned how to cook from my Italian Italian father. But I'm already committed so here we go.

As I said, there's nothing difficult about making Carbonara.  Sauteed pancetta, parmigiana reggiana, pecorino, eggs and spaghetti all mixed together.  But that's the problem.  If the pasta is too hot when you mix in the eggs, you get scrambled eggs with your spaghetti.  If the pasta is too cold, you get raw eggs with your spaghetti.  Neither one appetizing, and neither one am I going to serve to Carlo...or anyone else.  So, to be on the safe side, in case I have to dump this mess, I also prepare a kilo of Toscanelli, wonderful little sausages I get from the Mercato Orientale and sauteed cavolo nero with garlic, chili pepper and pinenuts.  I think Sergio would have been happy with this menu.

At around 8:00 pm our guests arrive and an hour and a half later, we sit down to dinner.  I am not good at timing dinner, but at least it wasn't served at 10:30 as I have been know to do.  To my relief and amazement, the Carbonara is perfectly timed, the sausages and cavolo nero perfectly cooked, and everyone appeared to enjoy it, including Carlo.  A job well done, if I do say so myself, and I do.

Finally, I get to sit down and relax and watch a great movie with good friends.  The perfect beginning to a new tradition.  Next time, however, I need to have the Ennio Marricone music playing in the background.

Another Day, Another Office

Just because you retire and move to a foreign country, doesn't mean you're exempt from life's little mundane tasks.  Today's task, and I have a goal of completing once such task per day, was a visit to the Poste Italiane.  Most Americans go to the Post office for stamps, mailing packages, or on occasion to apply for a passport.  The post office in Italy, however, is a whole other animal.  At this post office you can invest money, have a bank account, in fact, a myriad of unusual things, including paying your bills.  My job today was to pay the electric bill.  Me and several hundred other people.

Since this is the central Poste Italiane, the waiting room is quite large, however there are only about 50 chairs, so 150 other people are milling around patiently, or not so patiently, waiting their turn at the 15 or so windows.  There are 5 windows for documents, 1 window for stamps, 3 windows for god knows what and 4 windows for bill paying.  When I arrive there are 100 people ahead of me for those 4 precious bill paying windows.  I am fortunate enough to grab one of the seats and set about one of my favorite pastimes...people watching.

 

The view of the port, La Lanterna and the Maritime Alps from our window

I wish I had the nerve to take surreptitious photographs of people!  There are some fabulous faces here.  Renaissance faces and medieval faces, faces that stepped right out of the paintings of Van Dyke and Rubens whose paintings line the walls of Genoa's churches and museums.  The beautiful, the not so beautiful and the downright ugly.  My favorite face for today was a man, probably in his late 50's, typically Italian in stature with a face that could stop a train.  Nothing fit.  Quite the ugliest person I've seem since I got here.  But, he carried himself with such grace, he clearly doesn't know he's ugly, and I love him for it.

At about this point, I have been sitting in the post office for a little over an hour and there are still 30 people ahead of me.  And, it's getting late.  I don't know what time the post office closes, but Italian offices are not known for their long hours and all of those people who've already been helped and left have been replaced by another 70 people, more, 140 people.  What will happen if the post office closes?  Will we be locked in...will we be locked out?  I don't know.  What do Italians do when they can't pay their electric bill?  Do they riot?  Do they throw chairs like at soccer games?  No, that's the Brits, so probably no chair throwing.  I'm now beginning to regret that I didn't do this at lunchtime.  I know that no self-respecting Italian would waste a perfectly good 3 hour lunch break to pay bills!  This place is empty at lunchtime.  But no, I have to wander in at 4:00 pm when everybody wants to do the same thing.  Finally, after another half hour of anxiety and doubt, my number flashes on the board and I sprint to the window.  (It's important to wear good running shoes to the post office because if you don't move fast, they'll flash to the next number and then you have to fight the little old lady with the cane and the Reeboks to get your turn.)  I quickly pay my bill and leave.  As I walk out the door, I realize that I don't have an answer to my question.  What happens when the Poste Italiane closes?  The answer to this question will have to wait until next month when I return to pay the gas bill.

 

La Borsa Nuova, once home of the Italian Stock Exchange.

The Anagrafe

No day in Italy is complete without a visit to an official office and today that office was the Anagrafe.  Nothing chills the blood of newcomers to Italy more than the prospect of dealing with the bureaucrats, but these visits are a fact of life for all residents of Italy.  Which is why we're going...Ollie needs to become a resident.  The Anagrafe is the Registry Office, and all people who live in Italy must register in the Anagrafe of their city.

Since this is a big deal, I got up early this morning to spend some time with my dictionary to make sure I've got all the appropriate words and I'm beginning to get sweaty palms.  I get along pretty well in Italian except for those moments when I have to deal with unfamiliar terminology...or questions.  If they'd just let me do all the talking, I'd be good to go, but they insist on asking questions!  And Italians talk fast!  It seems that the more you say lentamente, per favore (slowly, please), the faster they speak.  Not out of malice, but just like Americans who talk louder if someone doesn't speak English, they seem to think that getting the sentence over faster will help.

 

This isn't at the Anagrafe, I just like her.

So off we go to the Anagrafe.  As soon as we arrive I immediately grab number 218, and look at the sign.  To my dismay they have just called number 171...sigh.  This is a very small office, and it is packed.  There's not an inch to move around, the noise is deafening, and its hot in here. Now I'm really sweating.  Looking at my notes, hoping I haven't forgotten something, our number is called after about 20 minutes.  Not that they waited on 47 people in 20 minutes, on the contrary.  People walk in take a number, wait 5 minutes then leave to go find a cafe'!

To my complete delight, the woman at the counter speaks English, however, to my complete dismay, my application, the one I filed for myself in November, isn't in the computer.  Finally, after some research, my request is located, and although I am identified as male, at least I don't have to start over again.  If I have to remain male in order to avoid beginning from scratch, so be it.

 

The fountain in Piazza de Ferrari on a gray day.