the natale recital

"Buon natale... tutti voi!" I will never be able to describe the energetic cacaphony that accompanied these lyrics. Belted-out by a teeming mass of seven-year-olds during their school Christmas recital, it was as if we were all engulfed in a swirling jumble of sugar & spice and... caffeine. And all other stimulants known to man. At one point the singing became screaming - pure and simple - and I don't know if they ever went back.

What's truly amazing about this experience is the universality of "The Christmas Recital." Our Italian friends took us to their Italian son's recital in an Italian school in Italy and it was still held in an auditorium that doubled as a gymnasium. Fathers still stood in every available space pointing their cameras at the stage. And the directors of the production - in this case a group of energetic nuns and one very harried lay person - still seemed far more concerned about the specifics of the performance than the children. We might as well have been in middle America.

As for the children... the distracted and/or slow-footed among them missed their cues and ran onstage several beats behind, and the invisible wall between the stage and the audience gave way as kids vigorously waved to family members in the crowd. And the singing itself was deliciously, if not always, off-key.

While the biggest difference was the language, the excellent thing about the kids' off-key holiday warbling is that we understood everything they said. Italian children, in general, are much easier to understand than their adult brethren. Maybe it's the high voices that annunciate each and every syllable. Or it could be the outrageously simple sentence construction. No matter - when children are talking (or singing) we feel like masters of the Italian language.

There were a few cultural differences including several characters that don't usually show up in American holiday recitals. One was Beffana, the witch who brings good children presents on January 6. And another was the giant dancing panettone - the traditional Milan Christmas cake - portrayed by a kid wearing a large painted cardboard box and tights.

Not surprisingly, after the show everyone headed downstairs to a giant open space overrun by screaming kids. Adults stood around eating giant slabs of panettone and pan d'oro while children gulped down platefuls of potato chips and giant glasses of Coca Cola. The nuns flitted around the room, calmly greeting children who by now were absolutely overrun by sugar and caffeine.

Each child, though, did pause at some point to give their family a large golden angel made of spray-painted pasta. We were ecstatic to see that in the country that has elevated pasta to an art form, the beloved shells, tubes and wheels are still used by elementary school kids to make stuff for their moms.

As we left the school that evening the hallways were quiet. Ballerina costumes hung outside empty classrooms, their tutus deflated and limp. A large and lonely panettone box sat on the floor, its child actor long gone. And the nuns busied themselves with sweeping up.

But now we know. A Christmas recital is a Christmas recital the world over. There will always be a basketball net visible from the stage. And a child waving when she should be singing. And a bunch of pasta glued together and spray-painted gold.

Even in Milan.

Buon natale e buone feste.

willkommen to bolzano

We don't speak German but the people of Bolzano think we do. They ask us questions we can't answer. They say things we don't understand. And all the while they serve strange and wonderful foods that don't belong in Italy at all.

But accepted principles of geography say Bolzano sits squarely in Italy. So when people speak to us in German, and we go ahead and respond in Italian, we feel only half bad about our brutta figura. We don't intend an affront to the language of our hosts, it's just that the only phrase we know in German is that unfortunate combination of words in which a US president identified himself as a doughnut.



Bolzano is in the very north of Italy, surrounded by mountains and saturated with the flavors and traditions of neighboring Austria. The buildings, people, and foods of Bolzano are distant relatives of the cities that we've visited in southern Italy. In fact, describing the north and south of Italy as "distant relatives" could be stretching it. Bolzano is the nephew of Bari in the way your Dad's good friend from work can be your Uncle. Those kinds of relatives.

This unique mix of Italian traditions with those of its neighbors to the north render Bolzano a very festive place for a Christmas market. Who doesn't find drinking mulled wine and eating plates of steaming polenta with gorgonzola - surrounded by a dramatic crown of mountains - an incredibly festive experience? You might as well start singing "On the First Day of Christmas..." as soon as you step off the train.



When every bakery is filled with heaping mounds of sugar-glazed gingerbread and the streets are teeming with giant pretzels you feel like you've been transported to another place. A place where hearty people eat sauerkraut and giant dumplings and don't put on stilettos to swing by the grocery store.

But the secret of Christmas time in Bolzano is no secret: our train from Milan was packed solid and people had resorted to sitting in the corridors. After three+ hours on the train we all streamed off and invaded the city with our holiday joy, not stopping until we'd personally amassed several new Christmas ornaments, at least one mug of hot chocolate, and a paper bag full of cookies that - meno male - taste the way cookies are supposed to taste.



Saturday was crisp & cold, and Bolzano - with its twinkling Christmas lights and decorations - was the perfect fairytale town. It was almost as if Santa was going to come zooming over the mountains on his sleigh and make a grand entrance smack in the middle of the Christmas market. At least it seemed that way to me. Then again, a little mulled wine in the afternoon makes anything seem possible...

since we're in the neighborhood

Venice has spoiled us. It has taken us into its thin crooked pathways and dumped us out into its cramped piazzas. It has then shoved us - stumbling - back into tiny paths and towards the next open space.

We've been the rat squeezing through the python and have always used a fluttering gut sense to navigate the tight corridors of this city. And it's been incredible. Our one true secret to Venice is staying, for the most part, away from everybody else.

It's impossible to escape tourism and tourists in Venice - and who are we kidding, we're tourists with a capital "T." And the Venice of postcards and guidebooks, the Venice that captures the imagination of popular touristic culture, might be found out front of St. Mark's. That's certainly the place where you can find yourself covered in pigeons, and easily pay €25 for a bellini - but that's not the Venice we've come to see.



Our sights, rather, are set on other places. Like Campo Santa Margherita and its central tree casting veins of shadow on the cobblestones. It's there that we follow poodles chasing poodles: a brown one chasing a black one chasing a grey one. You've never seen poodles so happy to be alive.

Olivia, too, was molto felice. Not only did she have the chance to chase a pigeon out of a café but the 4 month old cocker spaniel also had a pretty good vantage for the morning's brioche crumbs sprinkled on the floor. We had our cappucci next to Olivia's owner (who we'd already met outside) and then walked out to the Christmas market to drink mulled wine. Surrounded by all that water you can't help but keep drinking.

Unfortunately, eating in Venice is sometimes less ideal. The restaurants are not known as the finest in Italy, as they usually rely on a more tolerant touristic palate rather than the demands of local clientele. While this may or may not have influenced our decision not to eat dinner the night we arrived (we, instead, stayed in our room and enjoying the glories of a rare splurge on a rather nice hotel located on a rather grand canal) we do know of a place where the food is indeed fit for the locals that fill the bar.



It's the same place we go every time. We stand along the water, our plate of stuzzichetti set on the canal wall and our bright orange spritzes - with hunks of fragrant lemon hide - giving us yet another drink in this town threaded with liquid. We eat hunks of bread topped with miraculous things. Cloud-light ricotta with gobs of squash puree; tuna crisscrossed by thin wisps of leek. There are far too many combinations to choose from.

Another love of ours are 50 cent traghetto rides across the grand canal. For less than the cost of a caffe you get a gondola ride replete with drama and boat rocking. Not only does your gondola have to cross Venice's main throughway and its many threads of nautical traffic but you also have to enter and exit the gondola without falling out. The gondoliers make it look easy but I've never felt more uncoordinated than when trying to gracefully extricate myself from an undulating gondola.



We took care in the mirror shop, too, having a pretty good idea of what a shop full of mirrors can do to your luck if you're not careful. And these were special mirrors - convex and able to capture the entire room with their fish eye optics. We were surrounded by tens of images of ourselves, and of the mirrors, and of the couple who arrived there before us and wouldn't stop chatting with the owner. But we'd had an eye on these mirrors since several visits past and weren't to be easily dissuaded. We waited our turn, no mirrors were broken, and we made it out with one new mirror and only the bad luck with which we'd entered.

Weaving through Venice on our way back to the train station we walked into a one-man marionette performance that had quickly captured the attention of a piazza's worth of kids and adults. We also happened to find a very fine cup of hot chocolate. Not only was the hot chocolate capped with a decadent mass of whipped cream but we had a small pastry filled with zabaglione on the side. Cold weather warrants such things.



Some people want something else from Venice. They want pigeons instead of poodles. Gondola rides for thirty minutes instead of three. Guided tours instead of hypnotic wanderings. But for us, Venice will always be that strange combination of random elements along random paths. And if it wasn't, then we wouldn't love Venice the way we do.

padova knows how to eat

Before last Friday, Padova still sat on our Northern Italy to-do list. So to take advantage of the long weekend (Friday, December 7th was a holiday in Milan), and to cross one more great place off our list, we took the train to Padova.

A day trip for us generally consists of arriving in a city and then spending most of the morning and afternoon wandering around eating. We'll occasionally poke our heads into churches and wander through museums, but after a year and a half of churches and museums and eating, we've found that one of the three activities most consistently holds our attention: the eating.

In addition to many other positive attributes, Padova is an excellent place to eat. Our day started with the standard brioche and cappuccino but quickly escalated into something far grander when we entered a miraculous 120-year old bakery piled high with the most delicious creations. We left with several chocolate and raisin buns but also a generous slice of marron glaces cheesecake. The cheesecake didn't make it but a few steps away from its former home before we stopped in our tracks and ate it all. The ricotta was light and the marron glaces (candied chestnuts) created a syrupy top that was rich, sugary, and wonderful.



The bakery is only one shop in an excellent covered market that boasts nearly a square block of fine food vendors. There are traditional stalls that run down the center of the market, and bricks & mortar shops along the edges. The never-ending supply of cheese, meat, seafood, sweets, bread and wine is beyond luxurious and warrants at least an hour to explore. And that's only if you're riding your bicycle past the shops at high speeds -- which, as is the norm in Italy, some people were actually doing.



In this covered market we found what we would now nominate as the best salami shop in Italy and on different occasions throughout the day purchased thinly sliced sheets of goose salami (aka heaven), wild boar prosciutto, and deer prosciutto. We ate every single slice, but not before stopping in a bar/café in the market for a glass of lightly fizzy moscato.



We had our lunch (cured meats, bread, various sweets) in the courtyard of the basilica that holds the relics of Saint Anthony. Not only did that mean we were within a stone's throw of Saint Anthony's miraculously preserved tongue but we also shared the courtyard with a storm of ravenous pigeons and a group of young nuns. Half of the nuns hated pigeons and shooed them away while the other half loved pigeons and kept luring them back with food, resulting in a consistent ebb and flow of pigeon activity. Lunch was a bizarre pleasure thanks to the Sisters.

In addition to the relics of Saint Anthony, Padova is also host to one of the most famous sets of frescos in the world. Completed by Giotto in 1303 these frescoes pre-date the work of Michelangelo and Da Vinci and initiated the soft style and perspective for which both of these artists are known. The frescoes fill the Scrovegni Chapel and not only feature seductive depictions of the vices but also a giant blue devil eating humans as they pass down into the opposite of heaven.

And not to be outdone by the hermetically-sealed entry system of the Last Supper in Milan, the Scrovegni Chapel has also installed a "state of the art" entry system to preserve the frescoes. While it feels more like an "automatic door" than "space age technology," if its installation means that people can continue to see the frescos I'm all for it.

Padova is also home to one of the oldest universities in the world. Established in 1221, Padova University gives the city a youthful kick in the pants and tries to keep the townspeople guessing. Last weekend the trees near several University buildings were papered-over with comic drawings of recent grads depicting both the highest - and lowest - moments of their teenage existences. There was also a lot of fanfare as graduating students were pelted with paint, eggs, and all manners of liquids by friends and relatives.



After zooming through the art museum connected to the Scrovegni Chapel we headed back to the city center to give one last go at food consumption. Luckily, we ran into one of the Padovan traditions that we'd read about but hadn't yet seen. A seafood vendor in the piazza was selling boiled fresh octopus. They were disgusting and gorgeous - slippery tentacled lumps of purple that came out of the pot steaming hot and were promptly sliced up by the vendor, then covered in green sauce and oil.

We might not have dug in so heartily had a couple already standing at the vendor not been eating a plate full of the stuff with big smiles on their faces. We couldn't resist. They hung around as we dug into our own plate of octopus and were very happy to see us enjoy it. The woman of the couple insisted that we eat every last bite (including the inner workings) while the man admitted that he was from Milan and had never tried this dish before today. In the end we "Milanese" agreed it was most excellent.



After eating every last tentacle we headed to the train station where we actually delayed a train from leaving the station by hitting the "Open Door" button at the very last second - we were that close to missing the train entirely. Once on the train, we settled in for our half hour ride to Venice. Because when you're that close to a city you love you can't go home without first swinging by.

a milano thanksgiving

It happened over dinner at our friends' house last month. They were asking us about Thanksgiving - they're Italian - and we were gushing about how it's just like you see in the movies. A giant turkey. Pumpkin pie. All the family around. And that's when we decided we had to have a "finta" Thanksgiving, a fake Thanksgiving, to show them what it's like.

We were lucky that we had the chance to do some American shopping on our trip home for Thanksgiving. On the return flight to Milan we must have dragged back an entire suitcase devoted to Thanksgiving mandatories: a can of jellied cranberries, two boxes of Stove Top, Durkee onions, jars of gravy, canned pumpkin... There's nothing like a suitcase full of food unavailable in Italy to remind you that Thanksgiving only happens in America.

The turkey, however, wasn't something we could bring back from the States. And so Stefano had to find one here.

You can find truffles and panettone and Parmagiano Reggiano and a million kinds of wine, but Italy is not the place you want to be when it's time to find a turkey. Why? Because they don't come easy and they don't come cheap.

Stefano special-ordered a fresh turkey from the butcher (there's no such thing as Butterball here) and when we picked it up at the butcher shop the guy basically held it up by one leg, random feathers fluttering onto the counter, and asked if it was ok. It was heavier than we'd ordered and at 7.90 euro/kilo that makes a difference. But it was also the only one they had. Which meant that it was fine.



As we walked home with this giant, soft bird body it looked like Stefano was carrying around a swaddled child. At 14 pounds it was a respectable Thanksgiving turkey by American standards. But apparently, by Italian standards, a 14-lb-anything is gigantic. So large and hulking, in fact, that there was no hope of fitting it in our oven.

So on the day of fake Thanksgiving, Stefano spent a fair amount of time shuttling between the kitchen of our friend (and neighbor) with her gloriously gigantic American oven and our apartment with its petite Easy Bake version. Big thanks to our friend and her oven because without them our dramatic golden bird would have been more McNugget sized.

Our oven focused on the green bean casserole and the mac and cheese. But before you get the idea that our oven was configured to bake both of these at the same time I should say that we had to jerry-rig an additional oven shelf with a cooling rack. As in, we laid a cooling rack across the baking pan of mac and cheese, and balanced the green bean casserole on top of it. Because our oven only comes with one shelf. That's why Stefano had to bake each of his two homemade pumpkin pies one at a time.



Everyone enjoyed the meal and we were happy to see the Italians and Americans alike going back for seconds. We kept our Stove Top secret when complimented on the deliciousness of our stuffing, and Stefano was pleased when one of the guests said the pumpkin pie was one of the best he'd ever had. In fact, the entire meal was beyond excellent, and thanks go to Stefano for a great meal and for the patience to make it in an Italian kitchen.

And let me add one more thanks - for the mounds of leftovers that kept us fed for a week. There's nothing like a fridge full of leftover turkey and stuffing to make a house feel like home.