I arrive in Torino on Thursday afternoon, grab the luggage and rent a car, and head down to Barolo. As I head south from the city, the clear weather over the alps (great views from the airplane) becomes overcast and hazy. From Alba on the haze is so thick I can’t make out the hills from the main road. I get to my apartment, unpack and repack for the next 10 days, clean up a bit, refamiliarize myself with the space … good to be back. I have an indifferent meal and a few good glasses of wine at the only open restaurant I can find (La Salita) and head to bed.
Friday morning – I awake to white. It started snowing in the night and there are 15 cm fresh snow on the ground. I hustle to get out before the steep roads become impassable. The town of Barolo, usually an easy 10-minute drive, is now a hair-raising 25-minute sliding odyssey. But I make it! I stop at the Sandrone Winery to say hello and head for Verona.
Verona is one of my favorite places to relax – it’s a great place to breathe deeply, let the last few months of work slip away and just enjoy the Italian way of living in a city – lots of time outside. I’ve written about Verona in other posts; the passeggiata is still a delight, even when it’s near-freezing.
I take Saturday to hop the train to Venice – I’ve wanted to see Giorgone’s La Tempesta again. Though I have this painting pretty well memorized, there are times when the pull of the object; the desire for proximity, as it were, becomes too strong to resist. On the train, though, I read that La Tempesta has skipped town – for an exhibit in Giorgone’s hometown Castelfranco Veneto, north of Venice. Oh Well. There are far worse things than to have a free day in Venice.
I make the hike for the Church of John and Paul – Giovanni e Paolo – one of the loveliest early Gothic churches in Northern Italy. While architects and builders in France never interrupted the vertical flow of space by using support beams across the arches and space, in Italy they thought nothing of doing this. Inside Giovanni e Paolo, I think of being in an enormous tinker-toy assemblage, a Lincoln Logs church, as it were. This time of year, it is relatively deserted and I can enjoy it in peace.
From here, to the Scuola San Giorgio degli Schiavoni for the lovely St George cycle by Carpaccio. I love this artist for the sly, offhand humor that appears in many of his paintings. In the “St George and the Dragon” painting, the half-eaten and decaying bodies of earlier knights litter the foreground of the picture. Of course all of these are little memento mori on the fragility of life, but I can’t help thinking that he had an absolute ball rendering these corpses, with scorpions and snakes slithering around, and vultures picking at a body in the middle distance. I like to think of Carpaccio, executing yet another commission, really looking forward to this painting. This work is a spiritual forefather to all the slasher movie special-effects, getting the gore just right.
Lunch at Da Remigio, and entirely serviceable little osteria nearby. It is getting harder and harder to find really good food in Venice – the lagoon’s fresh fish are dying from overfishing and pollution, and most of the customers are tourists, so a lot of “fresh fish” in Venice is actually farm raised, frozen and shipped from Asia. Sad, really. My favorite place in Venice, Alle Testiere, was full for lunch that day. With only 10 tables, that’s not hard. I still dream of the razor clams I had here 4 years ago. Memory and appetite can be a devastating combination.
After lunch, I wandered – I saw the Ca’ d'Oro on the Grand Canal with its magnificent Mantegna, window shopped, had a coffee or two. Venice is a great place to be aimless. The city lends itself to slowing down, observing, breathing at the same rate it does. It rewards with glimpses of the unexpected and sublime – the way light reflects off water and stained glass at San Marco, a group of kids playing soccer in a piazza, only to see the ball go flying into the canal that is the left side of the field, or an old couple, walking together, saying hello to friends, oblivious to the push and pull of the tourists hurrying to Piazza San Marco.
Funny how English has become a universal language, but understanding still eludes us. A sign in a Venice shop.
As I am leaving Venice, the elevated walkways are being set up – a particularly high tide is expected that evening. The alta acqua has become more commonplace in the last 10 years in the winter and though I have never yet experienced it firsthand, I am glad to be catching the train back to Verona and not mucking through ankle-high water in the lobby of a hotel. As I make my way to the station, the water in the Canals has risen to an inch or two under the street level, in some cases beginning to come over the curbs. 25 more minutes and the streets will be flooded.
Sunday, I take the train to Milan to meet my father, Edward, who is participating on the trip for the first time. His flight touches down at 9.30 and we agree to meet in front of the main train station at about 10.40 when my train from Verona arrives. He seems none worse for the wear of the transatlantic flight and we chat and enjoy a coffee on the hour’s train ride back to Verona. For the first time since arriving, it is a clear and sunny day – really gorgeous. Mark’s connection through Frankfurt arrived late and so he won’t be in until early evening. We get Edward’s luggage to his room, we have a bite in the Piazza Erbe (never complete without the Veronese Spritz!) and then tour around a bit.
Over lunch, my father tells me of the last time he was in Verona: 1960. He came with his parents; he’d just finished his undergraduate program at Yale and it was an opportunity to enjoy the art and culture of Europe with his father, a great connoisseur of both wine and art. We tried to find some of the places he’d visited – the only one he was sure of turned out to be San Zeno, the magnificent Romanesque cathedral. We grab a pair of the hotel’s bicycles for the trek out there. Those of you who know me well know that I will drive a day out of my way for a good Romanesque church – and Verona’s Romanesque churches are amazing. We visit the Duomo, Sant’Anastasia and San Lorenzo. All incredible. We also make the obligatory stop at the house of Juliet, just off the Piazza Erbe, where it is considered good luck to grab her breast. It is great fun to connect with my dad this way, laughing as we pedal our bikes across cobblestones, each bump making itself felt.
We meet up with Aurelio and his family, a friend from when he lived in NYC. Aurelio is an architect and family friend who used to live in New York and, interestingly, introduced my sister to her husband. He and his family moved back to Verona a few years ago and wee meet them back at Piazza Erbe for the obligatory spritz. Aurelio calls his sister and arranges for us to meet his dad at their family’s cantina after our appointments on Monday.
Mark arrives at 7ish, we have a Spritz on the piazza, then off to dinner at La Bottega del Vino, a truly great traditional restaurant. The Risotto all’Amarone is divine, the Tortelli della Casa even more so, the grilled lamb chops with arugula pesto amazing. All through, my old friend Mario, the sommelier, and the one responsible for the management of the 5,000 selection list, keeps us happy with great bottles from the cellar.
2008 Pieropan, Soave “Calvarino”
All minerals and ripe pears on the nose. Insanely refreshing and with notes of flowers and citrus. In the mouth, very pure fruit of pear and apple, with good length and fabulous acid structure. Lovely. 3.0-nb
1985 Masi, Amarone
All dried cherries, dried plums and hints of earth, tobacco and leather in the nose. Very complex and intriguing perfumes that are not easy to separate but very east to enjoy. On the palate, the dried fruit is well-balanced with the good acid and tannins – there are no sharp edges in this wine after 25 years. Though everything is quite nice, I feel that the base wine probably never had enough “oomph” in it to make a truly memorable ager – this is pleasant, delicious and somehow a bit one-dimensional. Lovely length and finish, though. 3.5-nb
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