On this trip, unusually, all but two of our accommodations (the CabInn in Copenhagen and the apartment in Unterseen) included breakfast. Although this was by far the least of these breakfasts, it served its purpose and we didn’t feel a need to supplement it on our own.
We walked down to the Piazza del Duomo and from there followed the Via Roma and its successors to the Ponte Vecchio, the famous “Old Bridge,” covered with jewelry shops. We took a few photos and crossed to the other side of the Arno, then, as per our instructions, we walked upstream past the next bridge to the Piazza Demidoff. This is a small park taking up a small block along the Lungarno. We were supposed to be there at 9:20 for our Accidental Tourist tour, and we arrived ten minutes early. There was no one else there who looked like a tourist, accidental or otherwise, waiting for a tour, and as 9:20 approached, Mary Joy was worried that we were in the wrong place. But as we were sitting on a park bench, discussing this, a man, sixtyish, in casual clothes, came up and asked if we were Michael and Mary Joy.
This was Steve, the guide for our Wine and Cook tour. As we went to his van, he told us that we were the only people on today’s tour. Mary Joy assumed from his accent that he was British, but it turned out that he was originally from North Carolina, but had lived in Italy for the past 39 years.
We drove east, up the Arno a way, and then into the hills above Rufina. This is the area for Chianti Rufina, not actually in the province of Chianti, which is to the south, between Florence and Siena, but still one of the recognized districts for Chianti wine.
We arrived at the Villa of Grignano, built by the noble Florentine Gondi family in the fifteenth century and remodeled in the eighteenth century. It is now owned by a family of industrialists from Milan (shirt manufacturers), who don’t live there or use it much, but keep it up and run the farm, the Fattoria Grignano, more as a hobby than as a business. The farm has not only vines, but olive trees. Steve took us step-by-step through the oil-making process, then step-by-step through the wine-making process. Very interesting. At the moment, the place was very quiet: there was one guy there, washing out some plastic containers. But he told us that that would change in another week, when the white grape harvest would begin. The overwhelming majority of the farm’s, and the area’s, production is of red grapes, for Chianti (made almost entirely from sangiovese grapes) and Super-Tuscan (made with other grapes, such as merlot and cabernet sauvignon) wines, but some white wines are made here. The red grape harvest was still several weeks away.
We did meet one inhabitant of the Fattoria: a kitten just a few days old, living in a cardboard box on the platform where olives would be collected. The olive gatherers still work for a share of the crop, as their ancestors always have, and here was where that was figured out. Steve said that there were other cats on the farm, but since they were neither mad dogs nor Englishmen, age and experience had taught them to find hidden, shady places in which to siesta at this time of day.
Then we had a tasting, first, of the olive oil, with bread, followed by five wines: a white, the standard red, the better red (aged longer, in red oak casks), the “Gran Riserva” (made of grapes grown on a special hillside, with its own soil and microclimate, and aged even longer, in smaller white oak casks) and the “Vin Santo,” a sweet, amber-colored dessert wine, with higher alcohol content. We ended up buying a small bottle of the oil and a bottle of the “Gran Riserva.”
While we were doing our tasting, Steve sang for us very beautifully from a medieval mass. When he had finished, Mary Joy asked if it were by Perotin (who worked in Paris around 1200, as Wikipedia tells me), and he said yes. It turns out that Steve came to Italy to study music. He is a counter-tenor and part of a local ancient music ensemble.
Then we drove back down into the Arno valley and back up into the hills, for the second part of our “Wine and Cook” tour. We drove up an increasingly difficult road, ending up at a house on top of a hill, surrounded by an olive grove. The oldest part of this house had been a medieval tower. We went around and entered the basement, where there was a large table, on which were mounted a number of pasta-making crank machines.
Steve brought in three eggs and some durum wheat pasta flour. We each measured out our flour, then poured it in a little heap on the table. We turned that heap into a ring of flour, with an open space in the middle, and into that space we broke our egg. Then we mixed the flour and egg, kneading the dough until it regained its shape if you pressed your thumb into it.
Next, we divided the dough into two balls. We took one of these balls, flattened it into a disk, and Steve showed us how to run it through the machine, changing the settings, to make it gradually much longer and flatter. Then we get metal rings (like parts of cans), two or three inches in diameter, and use them to cut out round pieces of dough. Steve put together a filling from spinach and ricotta cheese (he chopped the spinach very quickly with a half-moon-shaped knife blade, that he rocked back and forth), and after flouring our dough pieces we used a spoon to drop globs of filling on the middle of each. We shaped each glob into a little ridge across the center, then folded the dough up over it, eliminating any air pocket, and tamped down the edge with our thumb. The last step was to use a special implement or a fork to scallop the edges, and now we had our ravioli!
Now it was the turn of the other half of the dough, which, like the first ball, we ran through the press at increasingly narrow settings, until we had the same sort of long, flat dough sheet as before. This time, however, we cut this dough into five or six shorter lengths. We shifted the crank from the press part of the pasta machine to the cutting part, arranged the setting, and ran through our dough: presto, tagliatelle! Steve saved one piece of dough to run through on the angel-hair setting, and we were done making pasta! He said that fresh pasta such as this would be faster to cook than dry pasta: only about three minutes.
We then went upstairs to meet the mistress of the house, Cristiana. She greeted us warmly and sat us at the table in her kitchen, which, on the one hand, was a pleasant Tuscan farmhouse kitchen, but, on the other hand, had up-to-date appliances. She, in spite of a foot injury, had been busy in that kitchen. She had contemplated making pizza, but had decided against it because of the heat (the kitchen was not air-conditioned). While it does get very hot there during the summer, usually the heat breaks by the middle of August. This year, a drought year in Italy, that hadn’t happened yet (though temperatures were apparently going to cool substantially the day after we were to fly to Holland).
Instead, Cristiana had made an appetizer from Bresaola (a dried, salted beef from the Valtellina, on the Swiss border—we went through there two years ago after our ride on the Bernina Express) and cheese. In addition, she had made a rice salad. With this we drank some red wine. It was all very good.
Now she cooked our pasta. Mary Joy will remember the sauces. All I remember is that they were delicious. Meanwhile Steve put a CD on the sound system. This was the local band that his son belongs to. Steve called its genre “rockabilly,” but there was a lot of western swing and even bluegrass in their sound—I’ll swear that their cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” had a banjo.
Dessert was a homemade sorbet—very good. Cristiana said that her ice cream maker had been much harder to work, because of the heat. We sat and chatted for a while. Both opera fans, they were envious when we told them that the next night we would be hearing Turandot at the Arena in Verona. Cristiana’s husband stopped by for a few minutes. Retired, he is somewhat older than she is. Steve later told us that he had been a racecar driver and scuba diver and instructor.
Now it was time to say goodbye to Cristiana and drive back to Florence, where we said goodbye to Steve at Piazza Demidoff.
It had been a delightful day. This was not a full-scale cooking class, like Mary Joy had taken near Radda in Chianti in 2007, but it was fun nonetheless, and Steve was a terrific guide. Accidental Tourist is a little pricey (though not as pricey as some), but we would still recommend it.
Since we were relatively near the Santa Croce church, which we had missed the last time we were in Florence, we crossed the river and went straight there. In the church are some nice fourteenth-century paintings by Giotto and his workshop, but the principal reason to visit Santa Croce is because of who is buried there. Who isn’t buried there, though he has a very large memorial in the church, is the poet Dante Alighieri. He would be buried there if he had died in his native Florence, but in his later years he was a political exile and died in Ravenna (his actual tomb is one of the sights of Ravenna that we didn’t get to in our evening there). The Florentines, repentant, asked for the great poet’s body, but Ravenna said: “Tough luck. You didn’t want him when he was alive; you’re not going to get him back now that he’s dead.” Florence does supply the oil for the perpetual light at his tomb.
I was surprised to see the tomb of Gioachino Rossini. I’m not sure how that man-of-the-world ended up buried in Florence, since he began life in Pesaro, on the Adriatic coast in Le Marche, and ended it as a Parisian. I forgot to thank him for the music we’d heard accompanying Wilhelm Tell in Interlaken.
Next was Niccolo Machiavelli, like Dante exiled from Florence, but unlike him now back home. He generally has had a bad reputation, even if the princes he wrote for would publicly decry him, while privately following his advice. There aren’t many people who have had their name turned into an adjective: I suppose that to be “machiavellian” is better than to be “sadistic”, just as one would probably rather have been Machiavelli than the Marquis de Sade. Still, it can’t be a good thing if your reputation is such that you’re the evil villain in an episode of the old TV series “Time Tunnel.”
Michelangelo didn’t die in Florence, either (Rome, instead), but at least he asked to be buried here. Across the church from him is Galileo, who at least died in the area. Galileo's problem was that he couldn't die anywhere else, because he was under permanent house arrest, due to his ideas about the earth going around the sun.
I’ll have to say that the only time I felt strongly moved to be at the tomb of a famous person (other than being moved to anger while at the proto-fascist tomb of Napoleon in Paris) took me completely by surprise. On a bus tour of England in 1986, we were visiting Stratford on Avon, where we had toured Shakespeare’s birthplace. On the spur of the moment, I decided to run (there wasn’t much time before the bus left) to the not-nearby church where he was buried. When I got there and saw his tomb, in the floor of the sanctuary, I felt a sort of awe, as if I were in the presence of something that mattered very much. I haven’t felt that way before or since about anyone’s tomb.
Near Santa Croce was a gelateria that Steve had recommended. Vivoli is very different from Grom. It’s more of a tea-room, with gelateria attached almost as an afterthought. But the gelato is just as good.
It was nearing eight o’clock, and Mary Joy had to do some shopping before the street stalls were pulled up for the night. Mary Joy likes purses. She doesn’t go overboard about it. She is not the Imelda Marcos of handbags. But she likes purses. And here she was in the leather capital of Italy.
Early in our relationship, I was in Spain, in Granada, and knowing her liking for purses, I decided to go to the market and buy one for her. The market in Granada was something like the street stalls in Florence, only more concentrated, a dense, tangled den of commerce, something like a souk or bazaar in Morocco.
I found the purse I was looking for: beige, made of Moroccan leather.
“Habla Usted ingles?” I asked the vendor.
“No,” he replied. “Nederlands?”
It still seems a little odd to me that a vendor at a market in Spain, probably a Moroccan, knew how to speak Dutch but not English.
“No. Frances?” I replied, without thinking, since my Spanish was just as good as my French (now it’s a lot better, or, rather, my French is a lot worse, from lack of use).
So we haggled in French, and soon Mary Joy had a new purse.
But that was a long time ago, and that purse was now defunct. Mary Joy focused on a particular purse in one of the street stalls near San Lorenzo, even as they were starting to take the goods into the adjacent shop. I stayed out of the way, and after ten minutes or so, she had another new purse, with more than ten percent knocked off the original asking price.
We left our loot off at the apartment, then went out to see if we could get a table at Coquinarius. We, as well as the couple behind us, were told that there would be a forty-five minute wait. It was nine o’clock, and the other couple apparently decided to try their luck elsewhere. Mary Joy and I discussed the situation then went back to the host, a youngish bearded guy, and said that we would like to be on the list for the next available table. He recognized us from the night before and told us that it would be more like thirty-five minutes, and that he would remember us.
So we went to the Piazza del Duomo, looked at the famous bronze doors of the Baptistery (copies: the originals are safe indoors). And did some people-watching. When we went back to Coquinarius, we soon had a table. Mary Joy had a salad with fish in it, while I had pork loin. Like the night before, all very good. The staff of the restaurant, at least those two nights, was small (four people, as far as I could tell) and young (twenties or thirties).
Afterwards, back to Soggiorno Pezzati and bed.
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