Reinventing Italy

The Italy that Americans forget

Lately I’ve taken to reading excerpts from people’s trips to Italy. Wine country, the cities, the fashionable resorts, the restaurants, the countryside. And one thing has stood out from some of those missives. It is the unique position we all have, the singular perspective of Italy from our own point of view, and how it affects how we see and interpret Italy to others. This is no simple thing, for there are as many Italy’s as there are people experiencing it. But what makes some of those dispatches noteworthy are the way they not only envelop the teller of tales and their particular cosmogony, but how it brings others into their whirlpool in a way in which the Italy they have created is fully believable and not just a hopeful fabrication that they’ve hoisted once again upon the rest of us.

In other words, that they have given to us an Italy we can share in and not just revel at their prowess in getting there and throwing everything into the kitchen sink of detail in order to regale and influence us, to magnify their place in the pantheon of Italianita, and make it seem they are more important than the story they are trying to tell. This is no easy thing, for it requires self-confidence, for sure. But it also requires stopping the world and letting their intimacy with place take over and be the over-riding influence over one’s perceptions. So much for being invisible, to an extent, yes, but also being open to the cuckoo call in the glen, the gurgle of the stream below the window of one’s hotel, the absolute quiet of the moment, which is always there behind the incessant rattling of the monkey-brain.

Prosecco: What it is and what it isn’t

Of the epiphanies I had at Vinitaly this year, one of them was over Prosecco. Watching the Prosecco phenomenon over the last 25 years has been one for the books. As I have written before, somewhere in this blog, one of my first encounters with Prosecco was to find a pallet of the stuff in the corner of a warehouse, wondering what the heck it was. What it was at the time, was more frizzante (although the product was so old, it had been “stilled”) than what we now know Prosecco to be. But enough of the rear-view mirror stuff, let’s dive in.

Just who are the Italians making wine for?

Alois Lageder

For a wine producing country that makes approximately 25% of the world’s wine, Italy is in a unique position. In 50 years, the market for Italian wine has become globally dispersed in a manner that other wine producing nations envy. Forget about Italian Prime Minister Renzi’s claim of “Our wine is better than French wine.” Italy’s worldwide distribution appears to be a model of diversity.

Franciacorta's "little" problem

“I just don’t get Franciacorta,” the tall lady muttered to her friend at a recent reception. Her friend was pouring all manner of cool wines from Germany, Austria and France. Grower Champagnes chilled in iced trays, alongside Franciacorta. I wondered why she said that, but I was in full-introvert mode, and was in no shape to investigate her motives.

The nail I hang my purpose on

Driving back to the airport in a fog. After a week with my compadres it’s time to go back home. Leave Italy. Again.

I have this thing I do when I am getting ready to leave Italy. I get nostalgic. Must be something I inherited from my immigrant grandfather. I look at the ledges of windows in a bathroom and imagine all the people who will come in and use this space when I am gone. Or looking down a walkway in a town, when on Saturday night, in the summer, people will walk, arm in arm, doing their little passegiata through their time on earth. I won’t be there, but Italy will be just fine.

A week in Friuli, one place, Colli Orientali, how valuable is that for one to get an idea of this Italianita? Who really knows? Traveling with folks who have such a command of the language, who confirm to me that I have no idea what the Italians are talking about, it has been like a forty year walk along the Italian landscape as a deaf man. I know nothing. Thank God I took my camera with me all those times.

So, what? Nothing. Just that I will continue to walk in my own way and see, if not hear, what it is that Italy is now.

An Antonioni Set in a Noir Ortona

Excuse me while I go a little deep into the Italian heart of darkness with this one. I’m sure most of you all are tired of the panoply of apparel, Pecorino and pasta porn these past few days.

The further south I go, the deeper a sense of crisis has been surfacing. Last night, during a stopover in Ortona, I started noticing some tribal rumblings. Youth hanging out on the streets, nothing to do but have foreplay and fiddle with drugs. I saw it in Genova 20 years ago and in Sicily 40 years ago. This is like being stuck in an Antonioni movie written by Pasolini.

Even a business encounter seemed edgy and clipped. I am not new to this area. But once again, I am the outsider. Now, what is going on in Italy?

Maybe it’s the earthquake. Maybe it’s the volcano. Maybe it’s Greece. Maybe it’s Berlusconi. But something is stirring. The Lega Nord signs in Ortona seem ominously similar to the movement that spawned a Mussolini. Except this time the object isn’t to unite but to divide. And after that for whom to conquer?

It felt like someone was waiting for the hammer to fall or the bomb to drop. And the youth, i vitelloni, in the countryside, hanging out amidst the wild thrushes as we zipped past them on dark little provincial roads. I swear I stepped back into the 1970’s. Something strange has gripped this area.

In a restaurant by the sea, nearly empty. It was a Monday, ok, alright. But the young server, her method so deliberate, such a high level of care for the food and the wine. She was veiled behind a wall of shyness, or was there a sprinkle of fear in there as well.

Walking on a beach in the darkness waiting for the sun, the sea, the summer breeze. But in this moment it was the scene of a potential transgression. Odd, how there seemed to be this vein of apprehension.

“When America was America, anything, everything was possible.” A European and an American sitting at a table talking about the world that is supplanting their dominance with the rising sun from The East. We are being reduced to serving Asia and simultaneously being slaves to their cheap products because we have trained ourselves that the cheapest is the best.

Meanwhile the server pours us a sparkling Pecorino, then a Cococciolo, an indigenous white, while the bounty of the sea below us is being served up on little plates under incandescent lights. People my age, who have lived under this regimen, this “Italianita”, seem reticent to change. “America is the change place.” Still they look to America to send their Nina’s their Pinta’s and their Santa Maria’s loaded up with the bounty of the lands, no?

Back on the beach at midnight, walking slowly, I came across a bottle that had washed up on shore. It was a wine bottle that had been scrubbed soft by the sand over the years. What promise did that bottle have for the people involved with the making of it and the wine inside? What dreams did the people have? Did they work to spend a holiday on this beach in August? Did they labor to buy a little home on the cliff, only to leave it as an entitlement to some thankless niece or son?

Three young boys running towards me, the sea slapping to my side, a dog barking at a passing train and above a fighter jet races by, patrolling the coast. Antonioni would love this.

written and photographed by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy

Paralyzed in Paradise

El sueño del Día de los Muertos

“Italy is falling apart from within and they cannot even see it.” I dreamt that I awoke in my bed at 4:00 AM, as the parrots outside were screeching from the bitter wind and cold that was driving them insane. At 8:30 there would be a meeting I had to be at, and the month was finishing up disappointingly. “There is too much wine. It is too expensive. It has too much wood and Merlot and Syrah in it. And every time another email from Cinderella wine shows up in the inbox there’s another Super Tuscan for $20 that the wineries had been asking $80-90-100, a year ago.” I kept hearing these voices from the waking-working moments, from wine lovers, wine buyers, people who once cared. But the Italians had already turned their backs on their advocates in pursuit of an unsustainable life style. Newer cars, larger wrist watches, pointier shoes, and these incessant barriqued wines. They were killing their country.

Before I awoke I started by finding every last barrel salesman and sending them on a trip around the sun. Then I dug up the scientists and the agronomists and the consultants and took away their Porsche Cayennes and their GPS and put them all on a severe ego-restriction diet. And then I tracked down everyone that had had their winery designed by an architect from Spain or Japan or Norway and made them watch films by Ettore Scola and Buster Keaton and Orson Welles until their eyes bled.

Then I turned all of the power down in Italy in the winter, so that when it got cold they had to hold bonfires with the barriques until all the small, tightly grained monsters of their vinous vanity were gone from the face of Italy.

I then collared every P.R. firm who used the words “employing modern techniques with respect to tradition” and sequestered them all in the wineries that had been designed by those architects from Spain or Japan or Norway and made them sit there eating zibibbo raisins and yoghurt from Greece until the diet leeched out all the poison from the lies they had been telling all these years.

If Italy was redeemable perhaps they could have reclaimed their wines. As it was, we witnessed the curtains closing on a period when they let greatness slip from their grasp. The Italian culture was clouded with their sense of self importance, their self-possessed narcissism. And it killed the natural wine culture that had thrived in Italy for aeons.

Italy, you blew it up. The world no longer could endure your barrel-tormented dramas and your international wines stripped of their Italianita and sacrificed on the altar of short term commercial success. La commedia è finita.


And then the alarm rang out in the early morning fog of autumn.

written by Alfonso Cevola limited rights reserved On the Wine Trail in Italy