As the gossamer slice of prosciutto di Parma melted on my tongue, my senses of taste and smell transported me. I was no longer in a crush of gabbing food folks in the uber-hip Santos Party House in lower Manhattan. I was soaring above the fertile gentle landscape of the Italian province of Parma. [...]
Simple Italy » Simple Italy: Italian Food, Culture, Lifestyle and Travel
What were the 1 Percent of quattrocento Florence doing with their gold florins? Buying exquisite works of art by Botticelli, Beato Angelico, and the Della Robbias. The current, and timely, exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence through January 2012 shows how the modern banking system developed in parallel with the most important artistic flowering [...]
Simple Italy » Simple Italy: Italian Food, Culture, Lifestyle and Travel
As la pizza is to i napoletani, la piadina is to i romagnoli. In Romagna, the part of the Emilia-Romagna region on the Adriatic coast east of Bologna, the flat bread piadina is ubiquitous. It’s ancient and like so many other good foods was born of cucina povera. It consists of flour, strutto (lard), [...]
Simple Italy » Simple Italy: Italian Food, Culture, Lifestyle and Travel
Even if something isn’t a secret, don’t you feel brilliant when you discover it for yourself? As far as I’m concerned, my current musical obsession Malika Ayane is all mine. Passing time in Fiumicino Airport in Rome recently, I drifted into Feltrinelli. Since I had zilch carry-on space, buying an Italian book really wasn’t a [...]
Simple Italy » Simple Italy: Italian Food, Culture, Lifestyle and Travel
Flexibility makes yoga poses so much easier. It also makes travel so much more fun. If Lisa B. hadn’t bent the rules that day on our way to Malpensa Airport, I might never have experienced C-Colzani Caffè. And that, i mie amici, would have been a major loss to my aspiring Inner Italian lifestyle. C-Colzani [...]
Simple Italy » Simple Italy: Italian Food, Culture, Lifestyle and Travel
As cultural tourists, who among us isn’t dazzled by the Tuscan sun? We see ourselves feasting beneath its rays: Platters laden with antipasti, pasta, bistecca all fiorentina, Sangiovese wine, and sweets . . . la dolce vita. But Tuscans in their 70s, 80s, and 90s tell a story of a different table. These old kitchen [...]
Simple Italy » Simple Italy: Italian Food, Culture, Lifestyle and Travel
Photos make fine souvenirs but you can’t have them for dinner. From now on, when I want to recall my visit to Monza last June, I can reminisce over a plate of steaming risotto alla monzese (Monza Style Risotto) like the one I sampled there. The recipe comes courtesy of Guidarte guide and architect Laura Radaelli [...]
Simple Italy » Simple Italy: Italian Food, Culture, Lifestyle and Travel
Chef Sara Jenkins, of NYC’s Porchetta and Porsena, writes in Atlantic magazine that Italian cooking has too often been shoved in the back seat behind haute French cuisine and even nouvelle Spanish. She works to change that perception and hits upon two essential points. First, there is no such thing as Italian cuisine. There are [...]
Simple Italy » Simple Italy: Italian Food, Culture, Lifestyle and Travel
As an admirer of Academy-Award nominated director Sofia Coppola, I wish her tanti auguri on her marriage to Phoenix front man Thomas Mars. The fairy tale ceremony was held on Saturday at the Coppola family estate in Bernalda, in the arch of the Italian heel, in the region of Basilicata. The New York Daily [...]
Simple Italy » Simple Italy: Italian Food, Culture, Lifestyle and Travel
Lovely Lisa, the neighborhood queen of zucchini and tomato cultivation, has diversified this season. She’s growing cantaloupes and I think she’s on to something. One plant is bearing enough sweet, juicy orbs to supply an entire block of freeloading friends. I picked two cantaloupes and let them to ripen for several days in a cardboard [...]
Simple Italy » Simple Italy: Italian Food, Culture, Lifestyle and Travel