i migliori di milano : amici

Living in Milan has been an incredible experience and leaving is very difficult. Stefano, who's already back in the States, was hit with a sad longing for Italy nearly as soon as he'd left. It's hard to leave behind the adventure of a new culture, the sights we chased after, and the foods we so happily consumed.

But the item that will leave a far more tangible fissure in our well-traveled hearts is the people whom we've met. It's surprising how close you can get to strangers in two years. If you're lucky you can go from nothing to sharing dinners with their families.

And we've been very lucky.



One of our best friends in Milan took me out to dinner with his family the other night. There was more raw seafood at this one meal than I have eaten in two full years in this country, perhaps in my entire life. And I may have previously seen the things we were eating swimming around an aquarium tank but I have never before seen some of them on a dinner table.

But I ate it all and our friend was an excellent guide who knew everything about what we were eating. For each little undersea creature he would explain how to best remove it from its sometimes sharp and spiny shell and then how to eat it.



At one point we were eating these very large, very strange, praying mantis + shrimp kind of things. And I couldn't remember the name of this creature. They kept telling me and it kept just disappearing from my brain. Mind you, the entire dinner was in Italian, and my wine glass kept miraculously refilling, so my language skills were probably not at their finest - but I just couldn't understand what these things were.

The next thing I know my cell phone is ringing with a text message: "Si chiamano canocchie o cicale di mare." Our friend, sitting next to me, had sent me a text message to remind me what these weird crustaceans are called. It's goofy to say but I wish I could keep that text message forever. Not only does it tell me what those darn things are called but it also tells me I have a friend.



We ate giant shrimp that had been cooked and then put in an ice bath to cool them down quickly - digging around with a big spoon to find them laying under all of that pebbled ghiaccio. There was a plate of teeny tiny snails and pointy sticks to take them out of their teeny tiny shells. And we had burrata - that decadent combination of cheese wrapped in cheese. And olives and fried things and always more raw things. And don't forget the bread to drag through the sea urchins.



In the end we took a photo in front of the display with all of the seafood on ice. The lobsters behind us were languidly waving their antennae and we put our arms over each others' shoulders for the camera. It was dark in the restaurant but I love that photo. It reminds me what I loved most about Italy.

il migliore di milano : take-out / portare via

Italian take-out is just that. It's Italian food put in little aluminum containers that are given to you so steaming hot that if you don't keep shifting the hand with which you hold them, you risk a searing set of risotto burns.

The bad news is that there aren't many other options for take-out cuisine. But the good news is that once you realize your previous tradition of Friday night Thai food is a thing of the past, you quickly see that your current options will obliterate all memories of the passionate love affair you once had with spring rolls.

Any excuse you can think of - I don't have time to cook; I don't have time to grocery shop; My neighbor's children are practicing the piano and the recorder at the exact same time - is a good excuse to get food from Gambarotta.

This place is excellently normal. There's nothing fancy or luxurious about it but Gambarotta is always full of Italians. Tutti gli italiani eat there: families, young couples, old couples, people alone talking on their cell phones. On weekends it's hard to get a table.



The reason is the food. It's what you expect of dinner at someone's house - that authenticity, that sense of legitimacy that comes from a real meal. It's like rolling up to a relative's house for dinner except that instead of eating there you can take the food back to your house and no one will think that you're rude.

I love the puntarelle with acciughe. Puntarelle are a vegetable that I didn't know existed until I came to Italy. They're crispy shoots that are a sort of cross between celery and fennel, and they go incredibly well with anchovies.

And their bruschettona -- it's so good that certain unnamed family members shamelessly ordered it with three consecutive meals. It's a giant slice of bread piled with tomatoes, basil, olive oil, buffalo mozzarella, and thin stripes of mild anchovies. I dare you to come up with a better bruschetta than this - it can't be done.



The orecchiette with cima di rapa are savory and rich. The ear-shaped pasta snuggles up to the sauteed cima di rapa and there's this delayed kick that comes from what must be red pepper flakes.

If you order these three things you will be ecstatic. And I imagine that if you order anything else off the menu, you'll also be pretty darn happy. The problem is that I keep ordering the same things over and over. It's kind of like what I used to do with Thai food except that now my memories of spring rolls are fading into the distance.

But I can sure tell you about the bruschettona...

Gambarotta, Via Moscova 50, Milano

san valentino

I spent Valentine's Day with the movers. Sure, they were nice guys. And yah, they packed our things with tender loving care. But no matter how delicately another man treats your antique bookcase, it's not quite the same as being with your husband.

The day's real saving grace was the friend who stepped up to the plate and was my co-captain during three days of moving. I had the Italian skills and she had the eye for detail. Her suggestion of "Do you think you might want them to put another layer of padding there?" turned into my Italian version of "Please put some more padding there." This went on for three days and we were a glorious team.

But - and here's where this friend shows her true range of abilities - she was also playing for another team. A sneakier and far more romantic team that had been plotting its next move since early January. And when she left the apartment on February 14 for an Italian language lesson, I suspected nothing.

When she came back and I opened the door to a lush bouquet of beautiful flowers, I was beyond surprised. They were for me from Stefano - and those two had planned the whole thing before he left in January. (She even used part of her Italian lesson to fine tune her flower-buying vocabulary.)

The flowers threw a golden glow on an apartment full of cardboard boxes. And the thought behind the flowers - well, that about cracked my heart in two.

I may have spent the day with the movers, but my heart was in Washington, DC.

dumplings + butter

One of the best things about going to Trento is the ride there. If you take an early morning train, your ride will start in darkness. Eventually the sky begins to glow pink, and the mountains crack across the horizon. There are tall, snow-blanketed peaks in the distance and emerald fields of grass running along the train tracks. Barren trees and turned-dirt and farmhouses in varying stages of disrepair come and go along the way.

Italy is beautiful and moody in the morning, especially in the north where the mountains are king. The orange and pink sky eventually becomes green, and then blue, and then the mist along the ground starts to burn off. The sun, when it comes, is a shaking blast of tangerine and its light bounces off the metal surfaces of the train.

My parents sleep. Italy passes. And the mountains we're riding past are so very far from the flatness of Illinois. By the time we get to Brescia the mystery has turned into morning and everyone is awake.

Part of the pleasure of our ride was certainly due to the scenery but another large chunk can be credited to the ladies with whom we shared our train car. These two Italian women, both well into their lives, each had something about them that made our ride more than just a ride.



One of the ladies channeled her sadness over the recent loss of her husband into a guided tour of what hides in the mountains... She would grip our arm with one warm hand and point with the other - look over there! (There's a small church set in the rock that she and her husband had once visited.) Could we see it? Right there on the cliff. (They took a car and then a bus to reach it.) And then over there, on the other side of the train, could we see the memorial to the fallen soldiers...

And the other woman, the older of the two, was so delightfully vivace. All clad in fur and orange with a solid set of Persols keeping the sun out of her eyes. She had lifted her own suitcase high and strong into the luggage rack without a second breath and had won my admiration early on by stating that the train car was cold - my dear - because it had been sitting in the train yard all night. No more. No less. A beautifully matter-of-fact response from a culture that usually likes a bit more narration with its answers.

When the older woman asked if I'd graduated and I told her that I was already working, she pronounced me "in gamba" and said that she too had been a working woman who traveled the globe for her career. I couldn't have pictured her doing anything else.

We all got off the train in Trento and double-kissed goodbye in the station. Each of the women was being picked-up by some conglomeration of relatives and we had sight-seeing to do. But the sights were already there. As soon as you get off the train you can see that Trento is ringed by mountains.



At the center of town, alongside the Piazza Duomo with its wide open space and Neptune fountain, stands a very handsome Duomo. Inside is a dramatic marble baldacchino modeled on Bernini's larger and more famous work in Rome's St. Peter's. Two long and eerie flights of stone steps crawl along the sides of the church leading up to the rafters from where, I'd imagine, the views of the mountains are incredible.

More than a few buildings in town are fronted with crumbling frescos. And apparently there's a wonderful chunk of the old Roman city that you can visit called "Tridentum." However, we wouldn't be able to confirm its existence because, as often happens in Italy, Tridentum was closed during our visit.



The food is a force to be reckoned with and seems to have drawn its strength and heart from nearby Austria. In fact, until 1919, and the end of World War 1, Trento was Austrian territory. So here there are no timid pastries and no namby-pamby lunches. There are donuts, sweet breads, and cakes, and incredible meals drowned in butter and draped in cheese. Have the dumplings, the polenta, and the gorgonzola - and then make an afternoon of walking along the river trying to repair the damage.

At the end of our day we piled back into the train for our three-hour ride home. There were no interesting strangers to meet and for most of the ride back to Milan I was the only one awake. But that's ok, the mountains kept me company.