Leaving Rome and heading north up the west coast is a little like exiting L.A. and heading up Hwy 1. I had never done it before but somewhere after Civitavecchia it started looking familiar on a molecular-memory level.It was Sunday morning and after a little cappuccino in the hotel in Parioli we crept out of Rome, with help from the she-devil Gps. The sky was overcast and there was an early autumn breeze in the air. We were heading to California.
I am newly acquainted with the Tuscan coast, so I wonder why it took me over thirty years to get around to it. Maybe it was my mania for visiting every region in Italy. That is, except for Sardegna. I must go there with my landscape-chef friend Francesco, who as a child looked out from Orosei towards the land we were now driving up.
Sunday was a quiet time on the SS1 and once we passed Montalto di Castro my partner in crime started getting hunger pains. The night before we had gone to a little trattoria and had our second on many Last Suppers, but it was a new day, a little rain was starting to fall and there you have it, time for pranzo.I spied a delivery truck in front of me and saw that he was pulling off into a little roadside place and my inner Gps said “follow that man.”
It was a very humble place, no tourists and a lone Indian inside the entrance peddling exotic jewelry and speaking a strange hybrid of Italian and Hindi.
We took a table opposite a large picture window and watched the rain float, then strike the outer world. But we were safe inside the little lunch room, and thirsty. I asked the waiter for a good local wine and he recommended a fresh white from nearby Pitigliano. It had been years since I had thought about the Bianco from Pitigliano, when I once brought in a 20 foot container of the stuff for a Jewish client who had an Italian café and retail store. He loved the stuff and sold the hell out of it. I remember it was light and dry and crisp and it reminded me of the Trebbiano from Abruzzo that we drank so much of in those days.In those days we didn’t call it the Maremma. It wasn’t yet fashionable to render it so. The wines were cheap and cheerful and under appreciated. Morellino would eventually reach the close out list and we’d all make friends with $4 red from Scansano.
For now, it was Sunday afternoon and the Pitigliano was still cheap and cheerful. The owner had opened the picture window and a cool,fresh salty-rain breeze washed over us. And with a platter of fresh fritto misto from the nearby waters, maybe a little plate of fresh tomatoes and mozzarella, a small dish or two of zucchini and patate, was there a more wonderful way to spend an afternoon anywhere on earth?I just have to say this. A wine like Pitigliano, if it were my local white wine, I would be a very happy man. Yes, my tastes are getting simpler and simpler, and Pitigliano is a perfect wine for the pensioner, the student or the wine lover who just wants refreshment and no barrel chatter. Yes, I would be ignorant, but happy.
After lunch and a café, it was almost like the Indian knew we were thinking about him. He came up to the table and had an array of jewelry, each one with a story. I bought one that my contramico liked. He wanted to sell us two, three, four. He really was a fish out of water, but the water he had landed in was just fine. I mean how could a guy from Mumbai land in the Tuscan coast selling jewelry from God knows where? I’d say he won the lottery of life. He might beg to differ, what do I know?
As we neared Castiglione della Pescaia, our she-devil navigator steered us onto a side road towards La Badiola, where L’Andana was waiting for the fortunate ones who were destined to stay within here pampered walls. It was just like we had seen on the website, except that Alain Ducasse had long left the place to his trusted surrogates.As we checked into the little jewel of a hotel, I got a faint sense that there are many Italy’s. There is the Italy of Rome. There is the Italy of the roadside café and a simple plate of misto fritto and a bottle of Pitigliano. And there is the Italy of the Alto-Borghese. We were grifters upon this refined side of Italy, with linen sheets and one star Michelin restaurants. With home made donuts in the morning, steaming cups of cappuccino and the sweetest melon this side of the Pecos.
Nowhere but Italy - Guess the wine region, become a millionaire
After a sweet little nap and some mindless television, we would press on into the full moon landscape and try our luck in this new world. It had shaped up to be a very special Sunday along the Tuscan coast on the wine trail in Italy.
As we were in Rome, so it is also the same as we are back home. Several days ago, I cold-called a new Italian place in an older part of town. The owner was receptive and friendly. So I handed the info off to a colleague. Yesterday I walked into another account to set up a wine event for women only, and our company order was rolling in. Everyone was out taking lunch, so I checked the order in and, seeing as it was the lunch hour, put up part of the order. Part of that “now go back home and sell some of this stuff” business. Who has time to look for a job? I have more work than I can say grace over. A couple of articles needing to be written, deadlines looming, a panel of tasting notes for another piece, an educational piece I’ll be needing for next Tuesday, and a proposal for a tasting today in Cowtown. Too busy selling this stuff to worry about mergers and acquisitions. Selling, not buying, that’s the game. Getting harder, but not as hard as being on the outside looking in. That’s a bowl of future-tripping.
Anyway the salesman finally shows up to the account with his young acolyte in tow, and they are giddy. Seems the youngun’ has written a proposal for the new Italian place I handed over to his older sidekick. They wanted me to take a look at it. Now mind you, I just went in and talked to a potential customer about an Italian wine list for an Italian-styled restaurant. The youngun' hands me his list, and there’s a Malbec from Argentina on it. I ask him, what the hell is that? I’m sitting looking at a pile of wine for the tasting today and there’s an Aglianico and a Montepulciano, a Monica and a Cannonau. Why Malbec? And then I see the proposal populated with California wine and wonder if we will ever get off this not-so-superstrada of New World wine somnambulism and get back to the Italian wine trail. Yeah, right.
I woke up a few hours later and went to my office. Jet lag was rousing me from my Italian-time afternoon nap and telling me to get busy, lyrics from Dylan’s “Highlands” clamoring in the pre-cappuccino pre-dawn,
Caput Mundi has her silent sentinels stationed in every quarter. In this memory, the most recent of the Roman reminisces, somewhere between the Sistine Chapel and the Colosseum, I eyed a tiny alley with some tables. It was a cool day, and we had miles to go. A few minutes earlier we had stared at and touched a Michelangelo sculpture in an anonymous church, no guards telling us to stand back, no €6 Euro entry fee. Now flatbread and fresh mozzarella called, a spray of arugula and some prosciutto, and that damn carafe of red wine.
Why, when I can have any Italian wine from any list, do I order the red in a carafe? You have a sweater and it fits after so many years. It is broken in. No, it doesn’t go with the Isiaia suit, isn’t meant to. But it is comfortable and familiar. I like to go back to the carafe, especially in Rome; it’s a barometer of the state of Italian wine.
Rome has become a coarser urban setting, more people with their hands out, hands looking for your pockets. On one of the days, there wasn’t a moment when someone didn’t want to interpret (for a price) what I was looking at. As if seeing it for the twelfth time in 27 years didn’t inoculate me from the swirling bats. Always in threes, non ce' due senza tre. We swat them back into their caves and endure the travesty of time and humanity with our limited interpretations of such things. Or am I getting too paradigmatic for you?
Those old faces staring back at me from behind their glass cases take on a resemblance that 30 years ago I wouldn’t have recognized. Now it’s more like staring at my death mask. Rome is filled with death masks, and they are beginning to look more contemporary to me. Maybe it’s just the familiarity of the remembrance after so many visits, like visiting an aunt in Alcamo or a cousin in Cosenza. These cold, stone carvings are like my family now. Or have I become too paronomastic for you?
And then there is that tattoo-dosage of modern reality that tells you as long as there are people on this planet, there will be those who will have to learn it all, not from staring at the ruins of a long gone empire, but by walking in their own flip-flops amidst the gaze of the Capitoline wolf and making their own mistakes, going their own way without the benefit of history. To survive or perish.
Rome, Rome, Rome, always the beginning and the end of so many stories. In the recent events, it was the point where we started the circle and finished it.
The 2008 harvest is underway and in the coming days I’ll be posting notes from what I saw and touched, drank and thought. This year the harvest report centers on Central Italy, with Tuscany and the Maremma on one side and the Marche/Abruzzo on the other, like a teeter-totter between Sangiovese and Montepulciano. Other grapes as well. But we won’t be going off too far into esoterica on this trip, no, this isn’t the time for too much autochthon. This is a time to batten down the hatches and lean out, make it through the present cycle, which is not without its challenges.
Interesting find in a neighborhood that I like to stay in, Parioli. A little spot called La Balestra on the Via Simeto 2/F. Not on anybody’s radar, no reviews, just a great neighborhood spot with good service, clean food, fantastic wine prices. I will post about it later.
One story. On the last day, we were about 40 km from the airport, with traffic no more than an hour. I set the GPS for the quickest route, not the shortest (I had learned that the hard way when we went from Castiglione della Pescaia to Firenze, over every last hilltop town).
Why do we eat out? That was the question I was asking myself today at lunch. I was in a little Italian-styled restaurant where we had convinced the owners to do a progressive wine list. Unfortunately they hired a manager, still wet behind the ears, who thinks he knows better. “The people can’t find the wines they are looking for; we need to make it easy for them.” We were – by arranging the wines in the order of their styles so they wouldn’t have to depend on the constant turn of wait staff and managers who have no real life experience in these matters.
The Italians have been wonderful for all of us. Who would have thought a simple plate of pasta would give so much pleasure day after day, throughout the generations? A little flour, an egg, some water. A little tomato or maybe some porcini. And cheese, my heroin.
Not just the Italians though. One day on a Good Friday in Frankfurt, we happened to walk by their Wall Street, the Börse. Outside, tents had been erected and impromptu wine bars were pouring Riesling and Muller-Thurgau to the businessmen and women. What a grand revelation – the leaders of business for one of the strongest industrial and economic powers, lollygagging outside, talking to each other on the eve of a holiday. Drinking wine, not making money. How civilized, I mused, how very wonderful.
The fabulous city of slow food, 
A picnic in Perigord. A visit to the farmers market and a wine shop or two. A roasted chicken, some potatoes, and green beans. And red wine from Cahor. A light breeze through the trees that were shading and cooling us, and people we just met were strangers no more. Today one of the couples emailed me from New York. They were at Babbo and were wondering about a Traminer on the list. Not some traditional, tired wine list. They had their hands on a list with spunk, with balls. For lovers and fighters, with passion and purpose.
This week I have been immersed in Piedmont. Barolo, Castiglione Falletto, Serralunga, Cuneo, Barbaresco and on. Sorting out some information for the young sales force. This link between humans and the land that makes one wine taste one way and another, over on a hill 2 miles away, taste another way. The Italian wine trail ends today in the Langhe, but starts in the Marche.
There are other occurrences. Italy is rampant with them.
My adult introduction to Italy was August 15, 1971. I had decided on my twentieth birthday in July that I would go to Italy by myself. So I bought a round trip ticket from Los Angeles to Rome for $900.00, a tidy sum then. 
Once I arrived at the Stazione Termini in Rome I decided to look for a place to exchange dollars for lire. Impossible, it was a national holiday, Ferragosto. It was also a Sunday. To make matters worse, Nixon had just devalued the dollar. I walked around the neighborhood of the train station, found a little pensione on the Via Palestro near the university and somehow managed to talk the landlady into letting me have a room.
I was excited and a little bit jet lagged, so I set my gear down and decided on a little nap. Some hours later I awoke to the sounds of an Italian television program in the kitchen. I thought I had slept for days, but it was probably 4 or 5 hours, just enough to keep me from getting on Italian time.
The kind landlady made me a plate of pasta and some vegetables, and offered a glass of red wine. How wonderful it all tasted. Here I was in a strange boarding house in a big city with people I didn’t know, who were treating me like family. It was a moment that really made me see Italy and Italians through a lens that I still sometimes use. We were only 25 years away from the liberation of Italy during World War II; perhaps the landlady took pity on the young American. It wasn’t that much money, I think with half pension it was about 1,500 lire, or $2.50 a day. My room I would have to share if someone else came in. But it never happened that anyone else came to that pensione in August.
Walking around Rome during the day would be my introduction to Italy. And I walked everywhere, with my cameras, photographing everything in black and white, Tri-X film, with my Canon rangefinder cameras. I was living the dream of a young man to be a street photographer, and Rome was my canvas.
From the Villa Borghese to the Fontana di Trevi, the Sistine Chapel to the Baths of Caracalla, there was no backdrop that I wouldn’t shoot in the blistering heat and humidity of Rome in August.
In that time the city was quiet, many people out of town in cooler places. Just a few tourists and the workforce of Rome, who stayed behind to keep the city running. Many shops were closed for the month, but there was enough life in the Eternal City to get a feel for a place that humans have inhabited for thousands and thousands of years.
Even though I don’t get to Rome so often these days, I have an affection for the city that took me in as a young man, without lire and without being able to speak much of the language. I had my Michelin guide, my cameras and my desire to learn about the country of my grandparents. This would not be my last trip to Italy, but rather the beginning of many visits to Italy and to Rome.
