THE PIZZA MAN

Wednesday at 11 am, Fernando and I headed down the ridge to the little frazione of Agropoli, Madonna dell’Carmine. We were going to see Giovanni the Pizza Man. Giovanni had agreed to show us the secrets of making good pizza dough. And good pizza dough, friends, is the secret of making good pizza.

There was a bit of a problem, though. It seems that Giovanni was out buying ingredients and would be back ASAP. In the meantime Fernando took me to his favorite local paneficio, bread bakery. Madonna dell’Carmine is Fernando’s town, and Italians are obsessed with good bread, so his recommendation carried considerable weight. And then there was the name of the place: Il Pane di Nonna Rosa, Granny Rosa’s Bread. How could it not be good? The bakery is operated by Raia Ciro and family, who were kind enough to let us take a look around in the work room. Pride of place went to a huge forno a legno, a wood-fired oven. But not just any oven. This one, Raia told us, belonged to his grandfather, a baker in Ercolano, some 80 miles north on the Bay of Naples. When the Ciros decided to open a bakery in Agropoli they had this old beauty laboriously hauled south and ensconced in its new home. Traditions are important here, and Raia told me he was the fifth generation of bakers in his family. And a handsome ragazzo, Raia’s son, obviously took every bit as much pride in the tradition as he showed me around the workshop.

The family treasure is supplemented by another huge oven, but this one burns little reconstituted wooden pellets sold in 20 kilo bags. More eco-friendly, so I am told. And doubtless also cheaper. Wood is expensive in Italy. But Ettore showed me the cupboard where oak logs are kept for the star of the show.

We bought several styles of bread and headed down the street to U’ Cirillo, where Giovanni was just starting the day’s dough making. Giovanni is Giovanni Cirillo, and he too is proud of his family’s tradition. Giovanni explained that his grandfather founded a famous pizzeria up in the Centro of Agropoli, very close to Dave’s mother church, La Chiesa delle Pizze Squisite, otherwise known as the Ristorante-Pizzeria Barbanera. Giovanni’s nonno’s place is called U’ Sghizz, and I’ve noticed that strange dialect name a half dozen times but have never tried it. Giovanni’s own place is relatively small, a walk-in arrangement with a wraparound counter behind which the action takes place, and off to the side a seating area which looks to be large enough for about 20 people. Giovanni has been in this location for eight years. Behind the counter Giovanni and his wife Ciccia, who is a talented pizzaiola in her own right, keep an array of toppings at the ready. Dominating the work area is, you guessed it, a forno a legno, this one a rectangular affair about 6’ X 10’, with a gable ‘roof’ on it topped with ceramic roof tiles, the front decorated with red ceramic tiles so that the whole thing looks something like a little red schoolhouse from the 1800s.

Giovanni had a large stand mixer on casters so it could be rolled around the floor. It was equipped with a corkscrew dough hook, much like some of those expensive stand mixers you can buy in the states, only much larger. In it was a loose ‘sponge’ with lumps of dough in it, to which Giovanni added a bit of olive oil and salt. I asked what the leaven was and Giovanni quickly corrected me; no lievito (yeast) here but crescito, a starter from the previous day’s workings. Commercial yeast, according to Giovanni, has a chemical preservative in it that he doesn’t like.

When the mixer had broken up the lumps of dough from the starter sufficiently, Giovanni took a 25 k bag of Antonio Amata 00 flour and poured about 15 pounds of it into the mixer. Flour marked ‘00’ here is what we would call ‘all-purpose’ flour, but it is actually somewhere between all-purpose and bread flour, the latter made from winter or durum wheat, having a stronger protein structure and therefore better for breads. Giovanni let the mixer do its thing for about five minutes, eying the pasto (dough) carefully from time to time till he saw what he wanted, then took a plastic pitcher and poured in about two liters of water. After the mixer had thoroughly mixed in the water, more flour again, more mixing, more water, and a final load of flour. By this time Giovanni had used about two-thirds of his 25 k, so about 40 pound of flour. I asked him what exactly he was looking for and he simply nodded toward the dough. Not a surprise, of course, but the whole process is completely empirical; Giovanni has done this so many thousands of times that he just ‘knows’ when it’s right. I, on the other hand, noticed that the dough by now had taken on a smooth, consistent texture which the dough hook was looping into beautiful spirals, and was just beginning to pull away from the hook in the center of the mass.

The secret to leavened bread is fermentation, as I’ve explained in a previous blog, fermentation which produces carbon dioxide gas. But unless there is something to trap the gas and make the dough inflate, you’ll have a very flat, dense product. Wheat flour contains two proteins, glutenin and gliadin, which, when mixed with water and physically manipulated, form a protein matrix which we call gluten, and gluten makes the dough elastic. A really good dough can be stretched till you can literally read a newspaper through it.

By now Giovanni was eyeballing the dough even more intently, and he took first one handful, then two more handfuls of flour and sprinkled them onto the surface of the pasto. And suddenly, for reasons only Giovanni knew in the room, the dough was ready. The mixer went off, Giovanni brought out a bottle of vinegar, sprinkled a bit on one of the marble work counters, and vigorously scrubbed the counter with a cloth. Good, organic sanitizer! Taking what can only be described as a large putty knife (I’d be willing to bet it came straight from a local hardware store), Giovanni cut into the mass of dough, took chunks of it which he placed on the counter and, with the fingertips of both hands, pushed the dough into a roughly rectangular mass about three inches thick and about 2’ by 4’ in area. This, Giovanni declared, is the panetonne, the ‘big bread’. The last bits of dough Giovanni scraped from the hook and sides of the mixer, quickly kneaded into a ball about 4” in diameter, dropped into the bottom of the bowl with a satisfied ‘plop’ and declared simply, “Crescito.” This was the starter for the next day’s pizzas, so Giovanni covered the bowl of the mixer with a large kitchen towel and pushed the mixer under the counter so the little yeast cells could multiply.

Then something happened which I’m still not sure I believe. Giovanni had scraped any remaining bits of dough from a series of white, stacking, plastic proofing trays, about 18” X 24” X 4” and he placed one on the counter down from the panetonne. He quickly ‘pinched off’ a mass of dough and, working so quickly that my little camera could not catch the action, pulled the edges of the dough over into the center of the mass from all sides to form a ‘skin’ on the outside, pinched off the place where the bits of skin met between his the knuckle of his index finger and thumb, placed this orb on the counter beneath his palm and, curling his fingers and thumb gently over it, rotated his hand to work the dough into a perfect orb which he placed on the proofing tray. And repeated the procedure. Again and again. It could not have taken more than 15 seconds to create each dough. He neatly placed them in seried ranks in the tray, three abreast and four down.

But I was puzzled. No weighing! I guess you just get whatever size pizza luck sends your way. As if reading my thoughts, Giovanni declared with authority, “Trecento grammi.” Three hundred grams. Seeing the slightest hesitation on my part, Giovanni brought out a scale from the back, placed it on the counter, formed a dough and plopped it into the the tray of the scale. Three hundred grams on the nose! I could not believe my eyes; we went through eight little orbs of goodness and Giovanni nailed it every single time! I don’t mean got close; there wasn’t so much as a two-gram difference in any of the doughs! So of course Giovanni had to prove a point making making old Dave try his hand, while Fernando chortled in the background. I sweated with concentration, eyeballing Giovanni’s little doughs with intense concentration, and finally, the perfect dough! Plop! Two hundred forty-seven grams; the Americano goes down to ignominious defeat. I cannot imagine the sort of ‘muscle memory’ that allows this young man to do this, but I saw him, so you make your own decision. Giovanni explained that our panetonne would make between 48 and 50 pizzas, enough for one night’s service.

As it happens, we had met and ordered pizza from Giovanni the night before, so I can tell you the rest of the process. You order your pizza at the counter and stand while it is made on the spot. Giovanni and Ciccia spring into action, Giovanni grabbing a now-risen dough from a proofing tray, plopping it on the counter, working it into a rough circle, then stretching and rotating, stretching and rotating, until he has a dough about 14” in diameter. The whole process takes well less than a minute. Meantime Ciccia has the toppings for the first pizza at the ready and while Giovanni forms another dough she spreads them on, moves aside the metal door from the throat of the oven, takes a long pala (pizza peel) and deftly flicks, flicks, flicks the formed pizza into the center, spins and deposits it on the opposite side of the oven from the brightly glowing embers of the oak, giving an assertive tug backward to clear the pizza from the peel. By this time Giovanni has formed another dough and Ciccia repeats the process with news toppings, aided by Giovanni. And into the forno it goes!

But don’t sit down! My first experience with Italian pizza was back in Perugia many years ago where I was foolish enough to ask the pizzaiolo what my ‘number’ was. He laughed uproariously and said simply, “Aspetta!” (“Wait!) And three minutes later, out popped our pizzas. A forno a legno generates 300° C; that's almost 600° F. Plus the direct heat of the brick floor. Can we talk about ‘fast food’? And I’m happy to report that the pizzas prepared by Giovanni and Ciccia were every bit as incredibile as the people who created them.

GOING SOUTH

Friday was our day to complete our jobs as tour sponsors and travel southward to see our friends in Agropoli. Considering all the glitches we might have encountered, it was about as pleasant as it could be. And the end result was everything we had hoped and more.

The day started early. Very early. The flight back to Munich and then to the states for the group left at 7am, so we were up and out of the hotel in Florence by 4:30. We said some sad goodbyes to our wonderful guide Oshri and boarded a local commercial bus to take us to Vespucci, Florence’s airport, located surprisingly close to the city. No sooner had we entered the terminal to check in than a fire alarm sounded and we were all herded into the lot in front. I don’t mind saying, my mind was racing with all the possibilities for delay, missed flights, etc., but it was a false alarm, quickly resolved, and we re-entered and were helped by a friendly young lady to check in and receive boarding passes. Sandra and David Abashian had generously offered to shepherd our group through the Munich and Charlotte airports, so we said our farewells to our friends before they headed to security and boarding. Sandy and I grabbed a quick caffe and capucino at the airport Autogrill and found seats in the terminal to endure a long wait.

A very long wait, as it happens. We had reserved a car through AAA with Hertz Italia, whose Florence office did not open until 9:30 am. Every other agency, even some no-name from Sicily, of all places, was open by 8:30 at the latest, but dear old Hertz stayed defiantly shuttered. It seems it was a holiday, the Feast of St. John, in Florence, and Hertz was keeping holiday hours. This was a religious holiday, mind you, not a state holiday, but apparently the good people at Hertz are all devoted Catholics.

Finally the office opened, and since I was third in line, I anticipated a quick release from purgatory. Nope, more penance to be done. The two Hertz reps managed to serve one customer every (drum roll, please) 25 minutes. So after almost an hour I made my way to the window. But, give the devil his due, since we had a confirmation number the paper work was all done and the young lady had me finished in less than 10 minutes.

Sandy had given me her smartphone which had the confirmation number and other documentation and had left our luggage briefly to ask if she should begin rolling it out. But since the cars were in a lot some distance away, I told her to stay put and I’d drive up to the terminal. Big mistake. Vespucci is under extensive renovation and enlargement and accessing the right lanes is a nightmare, so, predictably, knucklehead took the wrong turn, wound up on the access road to the A-3 autostrada, limited access you understand, and was halfway to Sesto Fiorentina before I could turn around. No problem, let’s try again. But if you’ve never experienced Italian signage, you have no idea what total confusion is. I missed my turn twice, wound up on yet another interstate, going, you guessed it, the wrong way, asked directions three times, and was finally so confused I was contemplating life as an illegal immigrant.

My primary worry was that Sandy would wonder what in the world had happened to me and be frantic. No problem, just call, right? Oy, I had her cell phone. Since she had the computer, I finally called two friends back in the states and asked them to message her on FB. One slight problem. In my addled state I had managed to convince myself that the States were six hours ahead of Italy, not the other way around. Barb and Audrey, if you happen to read this, mea culpa! Mea maxima culpa! A phone call at 4:50 am from an idiot in Italy is no way to start your day.

And as it happened, Sandy is now so used to Italian, shall we say, ‘efficiency’, that she was only now beginning to become concerned and was leaving the terminal to look for me at the very moment I pulled the car into a no parking zone, as close to the terminal as I could get without searching for that darned access lane again. We loaded the car, a cute little silver Lancia Upsilon whom we haved named Rocco, and we were off.

Driving in Italy. I don’t necessarily recommend it if your nerves are shot. But it’s not that much worse than driving I-40 in the Triangle during rush hour. Only rush hour lasts pretty much all day. And extends from one end of Italy to the other. At least the part that we drove, which was Florence to Agropoli, from the thigh of the boot to a hickey on the lower shin. I just try to sit in the right lane, middle lane if there are three, find the speed most of the maniacs seem to be driving, and pray to St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes. But what about the speed limit? Basically, there is none on the autostradas, except in construction zones or on mountain passes. Cars drive up on you doing 90, 100, 110 mph, macho males dart from one lane to another with reckless abandon—it’s a circus.

But you can’t beat the scenery...if you dare take your eyes off the road. Italy is a gorgeous country from one end to the other, and we traversed some of the most beautiful areas of all: Tuscany, Umbria, Lazio, Campagna. Mountains to left and right, another picturesque hilltown every ten miles or so, the green Tiber meandering back and forth below. It really is a treat just to ogle the scenery. And despite the frolics of all the drivers, we made excellent time. Understand, we had gotten about two hours of sleep and Dave was gased up on high-octane Italian espresso. One hit in Florence. One outside Rome. Another 20 miles or so before Napoli. Sandy worried that I would nod off. Not a chance.

Fortunately, the last leg of the trip was far easier than I had anticipated. I dreaded driving through Napoli traffic late on a Friday afternoon. But, whereas before we had always taken the coastal route, this time the interstate took us around the eastern side of towering Vesuvius, through a series of tunnels at the tail end of the Monti Lattari, the mountains that define the Sorrentine peninsula, and suddenly, there we were on the Bay of Salerno! No real traffic at all! Not home free yet. Salerno is plastered up against the side of a mountain, the port far below, and the coast road undulates around one mountain buttress after another. Two hundred feet straight down, you see the Bay, if you dare look. I’m telling you, guys, there are several miles where the cliffs are so steep that the southbound lane has to be built a good 40 feet above the northbound in order to eke out the 18 feet of width required to build two narrow lanes. But, again, I was delighted that the A-3 now takes you an inland route, away from traffic and those vertiginous curves, and we were past Salerno so quickly that we worried we had merged wrong. But there were the exits for San Mango, who, I must suppose, is the patron saint of tropical fruit, so we knew we were on the right road. And zipping along!

More good news: At Battipaglia, one takes the exit to state highway 18, but the junction has been under construction for years, and the temporary access is a nightmare. Coming from the south, for example, you must merge to the right across two lanes one-quarter way around a roundabout, then merge to the left across two lanes on the access ramp. And I had no expectation that the new ramps would be completed, considering that They-who-must-not-be-named have been siphoning off money from the project for years and allowing only minimal progress. But, mirabile dictu! the ramp was completed, it was actually quite stylish, and it worked like a charm.

We had the usual hair-raising frivolity on the two-lane highway south of Battipaglia, but by now we were seeing places we have come to know and love, and nothing could quell our growing excitement. There the Greek ruins of Paestum, drowsing in the distance, there the beautiful towns of Capaccio and Trentinara, clinging to the western slopes of austere Monte Soprano. And , look! There the colossal statue of St. Francis, blessing us from the ridge above the villa! And soon, oh so soon, there it is! The Bay of Agropoli, its cerulean waters smiling under the sinking sun in the west. And there, Bell’Agropoli, its lower reaches embracing the sinuous curve of the Bay, the upper city, dominated by Il Castello, perched like a gem on the Rocca which gives the little town its name, “High City”.

A fortuitous call from Fernando. “Where are you?” We are on the access road to Santa Maria del’ Carmine, the frazione where Fernando lives. “Do you need directions?” Surely Fernando is joking; every minute detail of this beautiful place is etched on my memory forever. Now we’re taking the diversorio under the train tracks and around the rump of a hill and we’re on the Via Fuonti, the county road which the villa overlooks. We turn the little Lancia up the Via Ludovico Ariosto, put it in second gear, and climb up, up, up the ridge, around a curve and up, up, even more, almost to the crest, where the road is so steep I must shift to first gear and gun the little motor just to keep it from stalling. And there, just as we left it, the Villa Astone.

We drive the little Lancia up the steep driveway, slam it in park, jump out...and there are all our dear friends gathered to greet us with handshakes, the wonderful Italian kiss-kiss, right cheek-left cheek, and more hugs, accompanied by excited shouts of “How are you?” “Come stai?” "It’s so good to see you!” “Uguale! (Just the same!)” We make the rounds, greeting in turn Fabio, his wonderful parents Filomena and Rolando, gentle Fernando, and Katiuscia, impossibly, more beautiful than ever and just as excited to hug Sandy. Fabio and Katia are in the uniforms of the local police, having taken off from work briefly just to be there to greet us. More excited shouts and conversation, only a fraction of which is understood consciously, but it doesn’t make the slightest difference because it’s the love expressed that’s important. Exchange of gifts and oohs and ahs. And Sandy and I look at each other and know that we are truly back in our second home.

A brief riposo and a scrub, a change of clothes, and Fernando is back to pick us and Fabio up to take us and Katiuscia to Barbanera for the world’s best pizza and more excited conversation. We park in the lot of Il Castello and wind through the narrow streets by now so familiar, stop briefly in the Church of Saints Peter and Paul to pay our respects to the patron saints of the town and allow Fabio and Fernando to examine two Roman artefacts in the rubble of a renovation, which doubtless they are the only two in the town to notice. Up past the medieval portal on the corso and we stop in the little piazza to gaze below at the twinkling lights of the harbor and its boats, just as pretty as we remember. And before we go for dinner, I duck into the beautiful little church of Maria Stella Maris, Mary Star of the Sea. I am not a conventionally pious man, although I still haven’t given up on solidifying my fragile faith. But I have to kneel for a moment and say a silent prayer to Maria and everything else divine in the universe for keeping us safe and leading us back, beyond all expectation, to this magical place.

HILL TOWNS

Wednesday we explored two distinctly different but equally stunning hill towns, Cortona and Sienna, neither of which we had ever seen, although we have seen a number of others and have been charmed by them. Nor were we the least disappointed by these jewels.

Cortona will be familiar to many of you as the town which first charmed Frances Mayes and led her to the fateful decision to buy a beautiful but decrepit villa in its outskirts and, along with her husband, invest three years and hundreds of hours of backbreaking work to resuscitate it. Obviously the investment paid off royally, not only in a whole new lifestyle for these displaced academics but in a whole series of books which have introduced many Americans to the delights of Tuscany. If you’ve been living under a rock and never sampled them, do yourself a favor. Mayes is a skilled and perceptive journalist and writer who pens just the kind of highbrow fluff that I love to escape to after hours of slogging through student papers or some ponderous academic tome.

Cortona defines one of two prototypical hilltown we visited this trip, one built along the side of a mountain ridge, where the fortress is placed at some high knob and then the rest of the town cascades in a spreading delta down a series of terraces and zigzag lanes to create a sort of long, skinny isosceles triangle. Assisi is another. Cortona, due mostly to the political dominance and consistent neglect of its neighbor, Florence, has perfectly preserved its Medieval persona. It’s simply amazing: tier after tier of brownstone buildings, set at odd angles along narrow, cobbled lanes. Seen from above, it is a sea of terra cotta roof tiles, weathered to a beautiful gray by the ravages of time and the little lichens that love to settle down and colonize Italian tiles. Here and there a taller building and a campanile mark one of the churches of the town.

The bus was parked in a lower lot outside the town and we huffed and puffed up a steep viale into the main piazza. After a brief introduction from Oshri, Sandy, Carol, several students and I strolled down to the western gate of the town for an eye-popping view over the valley below and beyond. Overhead literally thousands of swallows swooped and dove in a twittering chorus. We were amazed at the sheer number of these birds, a hoard which reminded one of the students, Kelsey, of the movie, “The Birds”. But there was nothing sinister here, as we soon discovered. Looking back toward the town, I noticed hundreds of holes drilled into the stone walls of the buildings, about four inches in diameter and so regularly spaced and dimensioned that there could be no doubt they were man-made. From one I noticed a tiny head appear and a swallow took flight. These were nesting holes! Our little friends were out having a morning feast—the time was bit after nine—on the local zanzari, mosquitoes. In the distance we saw the western end of Lago Trasimeno, one of central Italy’s largest lakes and the historic site of Hannibal’s devastating defeat of a Roman army in which the Romans suffered some 15,000 losses through sheer tactical stupidity. Trasimeno, which we explored on our first trip to Perugia, is swampy in many of the reaches of its western end, perfect breeding ground for the little malaria carriers. Cortonesi and swallows have been living in a happy symbiotic relationship for over 500 years.

Retracing our route, we took another road, this time up, up, up and around the western perimeter of the town, the vistas of the town’s rooftops and of the valley below growing more dramatic every time we stopped for Shutterbug to click some more. After several switchbacks we came to the remains of the fortessa at the top of the town, now little more than the stumps of two large ramparts. Another switchback took us out of the town, through a beautiful pine grove and, suddenly, into a large piazza which faced the Chiesa di Santa Margherita della Penanzia. Wow! The church was no monster by the standards of a Florence or Sienna, but in tiny Cortona, which can scarcely house more than 5,000 souls, pretty darned impressive. A Romanesque marble-inlaid facade. Inside, a classic Gothic interior with a nave and side aisles and a corss-vaulted ceiling. Renaissance paintings and frescoes on the walls and a glittering high altar.

By now I’ve seen this disparity between town and church enough to suspect the presence of a pilgrimage site centered around some especially popular relic. Big, expensive churches are often the product of a wealthy community, but we forget that often they are also the producers of that wealth, a focus for a thriving tourist trade, so to speak. And there beyond the high altar was a gorgeous silver casket with glass panels, which contained the mummified remains of St. Margaret herself. St. Margaret had lived in the convent located behind the existing church and there she served the poor for many years and died and was sainted soon thereafter.

I mean no disrespect, but I’ve often wondered exactly what the tour books mean when they refer to the ‘uncorrupted’ bodies of saints, protected as they are thought to be by their divine aura. But in several cases, including this one and a sainted pope we had seen three days before at St. Peter’s, the body has shriveled to a leathery covering and head and extremities are little more than covered skeletons. And the whole skin has taken on the most unsettling shade of moldery green! Geez, how much more ‘corrupted’ can you be than a green, skeletal mummy? But I’ve no doubt the blessed saint fully deserved her sanctification for her benefits to the poor, both before and after her death. Strolling through the central part of the town later we saw a charity hospital established in her honor, so she does her good work still.

Once we had descended by a series of zigzag lanes to the central piazza, we ambled along the corso (main drag), peeking into shops, admiring the rustic charm of the church of San Francesco, and made our way to the eastern extremity of the town where we enjoyed the oozing luxury of great gelato in a small belvedere park which provided more spectacular vistas in yet another direction.

The short bus ride to Sienna provided time to rest the weary feet, recharge our batteries, and ooh and aah together over beautiful Cortona. Sienna defines a second prototype hilltown, one built at the apex of a mountain, providing maximum protection for its Medieval citizens and a dramatic approach from twenty miles away for us modern gawkers. The apex of Sienna’s mountain is actually defined by three knobs and Oshri explained that after centuries of bloody internecine fighting, followed by more of brutal papal suppression, the liberated citizenry had had all the orneriness beaten out of them and were now famous for their serene, congenial demeanor. After the citizens had ousted the papal forces they decided to build the political hub of the new polity in the crotch in the middle of these three knobs, which had previously encouraged, in a sense, three mutually jealous polities. And all the street are cleverly arranged to bring the populace, by simple gravity flow, to the new focus of the town, a huge piazza, an irregular hexagon, before the Palazzo, the center of Republican government.

This square is now one of the most famous in all Italy because it is the site of Il Palio, an annual horse race among representatives of the town’s districts. As you can imagine, located as it is amidst three hills, the square has a sort of undulating topography, with a sort of perimeter street in front of the surrounding buildings and a large ‘bowl’ in the middle. During Il Palio the perimeter street is filled with several inches of sand, barriers constructed on both sides, and thousands of spectators crowd into the bowl to watch horses and jockeys, decked out in lavish Medieval garb, run three times around the square. Three circuits of the square, a minute and a half of sheer terror, danger, exhilaration, death, injury, tragedy, mayhem, glory, and despair. Followed by a solid week of hard-core carousing. There’s just nothing else like it in all Italy. On our first visit over we had planned to visit Sienna during the week of Il Palio but couldn’t find a hotel room anywhere within a thirty-mile radius.

The other jewel in Sienna’s crown is her Duomo, or mother church. For centuries Sienna competed for political and military dominance of Tuscany with her powerful neighbor to the northeast, Florence, and one way to show your municipal machismo, I suppose, is in building the biggest and most elaborately decorated church. “See, God likes us better, nanny, nanny, pooh pooh!” No doubt about it, it’s a gem, a huge Romanesque basilica with facade and side walls in local white and black marble, the facade decked with an incredible array of pedimental sculpture and a gorgeous rose window. And the interior is equally elaborate. The pavement is completely covered in marble, much of it in the technique of opus sectile, what we call intarsio, that is, pattern of cut marble of varying shades to create patterned marble ‘mosaics’. At regular intervals across the pavement, marble reliefs of sibyls, philosophers, scientists, a “Who’s Who” of the ancient and Renaissance world. Everywhere around the walls of the nave and side aisles masterpieces of Renaissance painting and sculpture. A soaring vaulted ceiling, another huge rose window in the apse of the nave, an incredible altar and high altar. The whole thing is so over-the-top it takes your breath away.

For me the highlight of the visit was a brief stroll through the Piccolomini Library, located in a bay of the western side aisle. Here were displayed around the perimeter of the room huge, lavishly decorated antiphonaria and graduales, the ‘hymnals’ of antiphonal music. Think of the psalter at church, only the priest sings the verse and then the choir sings the response. The pages of the books were easily two feet wide and three tall, the musical staffs (treble only) a good six inches tall, with the notes marked with squares instead of our familiar little ovals. And the decoration! Wow! Each page that was displayed had a miniature masterpieces, most about 6” X 8”. To my uneducated eye the works of Giovanni de Verona were the most gorgeous thing in this indisputably gorgeous church: exquisitely rendered ink drawings of biblical scenes were painted with brilliant hues and the borders embossed and then gilded to create a sort of parchment bas relief. And since the gold used was pure 22K, it is every bit as brilliant now as the day it went onto the page.

But perhaps the most spectacular thing about this church is the part you don’t see. Oshri explained that the church as it exists today was originally designed as merely the transept of the proposed basilica! Had the original nave been completed perpendicular to the existing church, the church created thereby would easily have eclipsed the later St. Peter’s in size and therefore would have been the largest Christian church in the world. But after centuries of struggle and suffering, Florence under the Medicis finally established undisputed dominance of the region and Sienna began slowly to retract. Fortunately for us, of course, since, once again, its Medieval character is now almost perfectly preserved.

The third prototype hilltown is one we did not visit this time around, that is, a town built on an escarpment, what our neighbors in Arizona call a mesa, with a complete circuit of sheer cliffs, often 200 feet high or more. Such towns were literally impregnable and often nigh impossible to access even in peacetime. You can imagine the sheer determination it takes to build narrow access roads up the side of sheer cliffs, switching back and forth to create a zigzag course up the mountain. Today the most practical way to reach such towns is by funicular, the little cantilevered trams that you see in many places in Italy such as Capri and Orvietto. Their cousins in America are ski trams. Orvietto is in fact an example of this type hilltown we’ve been fortunate to visit. Something about that mesa just jutting out vertically from the stump of a mountain is breathtaking. On our way south in the car this time we passed another which may be even more dramatic: little Orte, some thirty miles north of Rome. Orvietto has a large tourist trade because of its locale and its huge duomo (pilgrim site again), and little Orte has no such basilica. But if Orte has no tourist industry, I can guarantee it’s only because the Ortans prefer their tranquilita´ to the temptations of filthy lucre.

ARRIVIDERCI, ROMA!

Rome is frustrating. Only two and a half days in Rome is almost criminally so. There’s just so much to see and experience. As in New York, you could easily spend a year in this incredible city and barely scratch the surface. But that’s one of the real pleasures of travel as well. I have students ask me on a regular basis if I get tired of doing these tours and seeing so many of the same sites. No way! I always see a thousand new things, not to speak of a hundred old things in a different way, sometimes subtly different, sometimes radically so.

This trip to Mater Roma has been no different in any of those respects. We arrived at Fiumicino, Rome’s main airport, around 11:30 on Friday (Italy is six hours ahead of us in the summer), collected our bags, met our friend and guide Oshri, had time for a potty break and a trip to the ATMs, boarded our bus and made our way from Ostia to our comfortable hotel, the Cardinal St. Peter, on the lower slopes of the Janiculo, the ancient Janiculum Hill, about a mile west of St. Peter's. When I’m in Rome I love to stay in the central district, within walking distance of ancient sites such as the Fora , the Colosseum, the Pantheon, etc. But of course, just as in Manhattan, you pay for that proximity, either in cash or in comfort. Personally I’m OK with staying in an affordable rat hole if I can walk to the center of ancient world. But our modern hotel made a great transition to Italian travel for us American travelers, spoiled as we all are by our creature comforts.

Friday afternoon was under the expert care of Oshri, who took us to some of the most famous piazze (squares) in Rome, such as that of the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain, etc. A special treat was my first visit ever to the Basilica of San Clemente, a perfect example of the complexity of this city. The ‘modern’ church is a beautiful, twelfth-century, classic basilica with nave, side aisles, apse decorated with a brilliant mosaic that is easily sixty feet high. But the real charm of this church lies beneath. Winding down a flight of stairs you reach a level some thirty feet below where you see...the Basilica of San Clemente! Only this one is a product of the fourth century CE. Think about the significance of that fact, remembering that Rome openly tolerated Christianity only in 313 BE after Constantine issued the Edict of Milan. Thus, this is one of the first, if not the first, officially recognized church in Christianity, built by none other than Constantine himself.

And he did it right. Like its later iteration, the church was a huge basilica with classic nave, side aisles, apse— in short, the classic form, right from the get-go. I should explain that the Romans invented the basilica form, but the Roman basilica was basically a courthouse. So how did a secular building become the prototype for the canonical Christian church? We’re not exactly sure, but here’s the theory that makes most sense to me.

If you look at the plan or footprint of a basilica, it’s basically a huge rectangle. Within the rectangle , along the longer sides, are two rows of columns or pillars that mark out the side aisles, The larger rectangular area left over in the middle is the nave, usually built significantly higher than side aisles to provide room for clerestory windows But as early as the first century CE, Romans began modifying the plan by adding an apse (think of a cylinder with half a globe stacked on top) at the far end, and from time either an apse or a rectangular ell on either sides to create a transept. Thus if you were a bird flying over, you’d see the shape of a cross. But there’s more. Beginning in the second century, a dome and cupola were sometimes added at the intersection of the cross’s axes, and a huge statue of the emperor, by then worshiped as a god, was placed in the apse at the end of the nave. Now look at your basilica in three dimensions; we have created north-south and east-west axes, so to speak, as well as a vertical axis through the cupola, through the intersection of the horizontal axes, and ultimately into the underworld. We have constructed a three-dimensional axis, what the Romans called an axis mundi, an ‘axis of the universe’ a place where the powers of heaven and hell communicate with the horizontal plane of the temporal world. Big mojo, to put it more simply. And what happens at that exact spot in the Catholic mass? Why, the consecration of the host on the altar, of course, the place where the bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. And what goes into the apse where the pagan emperor-god’s once stood? The most sacred of Christian icons, the crucifix. In other words, the Roman basilica is an ideal architectural form for the Christian church, and here in San Clemente may well be where it all began.

Fortunately for us, the basilica burned in the ninth century and, in typical Italian fashion, the builders of the new Medieval church leveled the walls to thirty feet or so, walled up the side aisles, created barrel vaults and cross vaults on these, and built the new church upon this foundation.

But there’s more. You descend yet another stairway some twenty feet or so and there you are on a classical Roman street, beautifully made from herringbone-pattern bricks, with houses on either side which you can explore. And as you make your way toward the area of the western apse of the church above, there you find almost perfectly preserved a Mithraeum, a shrine to the popular mystery god Mithras, conqueror of mortality and ensurer of resurrection and eternal life. In such shrines the initiates were baptized, not in water but in blood, in this case the blood of a bull positioned on an upper level over a grate in the ceiling. Imagine this fearsome ritual: the initiand kneels in the center of the shrine before the altar of the god and recites his vows. Above him, as the priest of Mithras recites the liturgy, one officiand stuns the bull with a mallet and another deftly lifts his head before he falls and draws a knife across his jugular. And out gush literally gallons of blood, blood which falls through the grate beneath and cascades over the initiand below. “Are you washed in the blood of the....bull?” If you’re interested, the HBO series “Rome” has an incredible recreation of the ritual which will leave you shocked but awestruck.

Well, it cannot possibly be a mere coincidence that arguably the first official Christian basilica in the Roman world was built precisely here. Mithras was perhaps the most popular of the many pagan gods who represented immortality to the pagan Romans, and the early Christians, by placing the crucifix of their new church above this shrine, sent a not-so-subtle message that the new guy on the block was now in charge. And when the church burned, they wanted to make sure that old dude stayed defeated and in Hell. Amazing.

I confess, the rest of our tour of Rome was a bit anticlimactic for me, though it was great fun. Saturday morning was what I affectionately call “The Day of Popery” (my Catholic friends will understand I'm just kidding). Vatican Museums, an incredible place which I find incredibly frustrating because there is a standard tourist itinerary which shows you some real eye-poppers such as the Laocoon, the Apollo Belvedere, the Rafael rooms, and many more, but leads you right past a priceless but inaccessible trove of classical art. Then there is the Sistine Chapel. I won’t insult your intelligence by trying to explain how magnificent this room is. But the atmosphere here created by the hoards of tourists practically guarantees that what should a deeply moving spiritual experience has more the effect of a circus side show. On the day we were there the room was so jammed it was frankly dangerous, and the guards who usually make some pretense of maintaining a respectful silence just gave up and let the mob shout and flash away with their cameras.

Fortunately the tour ended with a visit to the basilica of St. Peter, always awe-inspiring. The problem here is one of scale. The building is simply so huge that one has difficulty grasping how huge it really is. For example, the baldacchino (altar canopy) of the church, an incredible work of art designed by Bernini. The first time I saw it I thought to myself, “Gee, that thing must be fifty feet tall!” In reality it is 92 feet tall, as tall as a ten-story building. The church from the pavement to the lantern of the cupola is 423 feet tall, as tall as a forty-five story building! Simply amazing.

But not entirely original. The original architect of the church, Bramante, had thought to place a scaled-down version of the Roman Pantheon atop eight massive pillars within a Maltese cross. In other words, one of the classic Byzantine forms. But when Michelangelo received the commission to redesign the church upon Bramante’s death, he decided Bramante’s plan was not audacious enough. And so he decided to set the eight pillars within the Basilica of Maxentius, figuratively speaking, the biggest basilica in the classical world. Thus did St. Peter’s become the biggest Christian church in the Western empire.

Sunday was our day for the tour of classical Rome, but that will have to wait for another blog, I fear. Our bus is entering Umbria and the scenery, always stunning, is quickly becoming irresistible.

COME BACK TO SORRENTO

Sitting at a desk overlooking our balcony, which in turn overlooks the beautiful Bay of Naples. From our balcony we have about a 120° view, and everywhere the view is stunning. On the far western horizon twinkle the lights of Capo Miseno, ancient Misenum, the port from which Pliny the Younger observed the fearsome eruption of Vesuvius, some twenty miles away, in 79 CE. Stretched out along the northern peninsula of the bay opposite us are other glittering jewels: Cuma, site of the famous Sybil at the entrance to the underworld, Posilippo, Erculano, and the queen of the Bay herself, Napoli, with her glittering lights cascading down the lower reaches of the sleeping giant. And there on the northeastern horizon, silhouetted against the sky, is the towering bulk of Vesuvio himself. Closer at hand: Pompeii, Torre Annunziato, Castellamare, and then along the Sorrentine peninsula, seemingly pasted up against the precipitous cliffs of the Monti Lattari, “Milky Mountains”, the lights of Seiano,Vico Equense, Valle della Luna, “Valley of the Moon”, Meta, and the lower suburbs of Sorrento herself. Pure magic.

If I seem to be waxing poetic here, I’ll have to ask forgiveness; I’m under the influence of the Siren Parthenope, the beautiful seductress who governs these cliffs in myth, lures sailors to destruction (and writers to purple prose) by her seductive song, and ultimately gave her name to the seductive little town. I can catch a glimpse of her statue sitting on the terrazza diagonally from the balcony.

Our hotel, the Hotel Europa Palace, is quite simply one of the nicest we’ve ever been lucky enough to stay in. It’s perched on an absolutely sheer cliff, 250’ above the sea, with a spectacular view of the Bay. Below us a small harbor shelters fishing boats, yachts, and the small hydroplanes which ferry tourists and locals to many of the islands which define the western rim of the gulf. Hey, it’s one of those places which practically compels a hick like me to sit out on the huge terazza with the love of my life and a glass of wine, prop my feet up, stare out at all that spectacular scenery, scratch my chin and say,”Weeeeeeell, wonder what the po’ folk are doin’ today?” It’s as close as Dave and Sandy will ever come to living like plutocrats. But, trust me, it’s close enough. And more.

It’s been a wonderful trip so far. First of all we had a trip over that was probably the most trouble-free we’ve ever had. I’m almost scared to brag about it for fear of jinxing the return flights: planes departed on time, connections were made with a little time to spare to grab a bite and shake the dew from our lily pad, luggage showed up in Rome in a reasonably timely fashion and without damage!

The one small problem we encountered was transferring in Munich. This was our first trip through this airport, and I’ll bet my friend Ed will attest that it has a pretty weird configuration. It’s basically a high-rise terminal, built on three levels in a long, straight series of gates, with boarding ramps that sometimes descend as much as two stories. But even at that there’s really not enough boarding space for all the flights in and out, so many departing travelers have to be bused from the terminal to planes on the tarmac, and gate numbers change with alarming speed. Our boarding passes directed us to gate 16 where an agent of Lufthansa spun us around and sent us off to find gate 65. You can do the math there, that’s quite a haul. And you can probably predict what happened when we arrived: back to gate 8, only four gates down from where we’d been at the far other end of a very long terminal. No extra charge for the impromptu tour of the lovely Munich terminal. But that’s a quibble in the scheme of things; the rest of the trip was as pleasant as 12 hours of air travel can be.

And then there are our traveling companions, a pure delight. First, we have one of the nicest, most congenial groups of students and adults we’ve ever had. These folks are so punctual, alert and organized I almost feel like we should ask them to shepherd us along. Plus they’re just darned nice, a delight to be around, to talk to. And, God love ‘em, they’re hearty eaters, something that warms ole Dave’s heart. And makes weary travelers a lot less cranky.

Then there are our local guides. Our head honcho, by earnest request, is a wonderful young man named Oshri who’s simply the most knowledgeable, charming and engaging tour director we’ve had in our many trips with students. We’ve made enough tours with this company that I suppose our request carries some weight. And he’s so good looking that Sandy is shamelessly atwitter around him. And, truth to tell, I have such a man-crush on him that I don’t much mind. Our local guide in Rome was a displaced Austrian named Heidi whom we also love for her combination of intelligence and spunk. And our guide tomorrow in Pompeii will be Massimo, again, our preference by far.

Most important from a purely personal perspective is the fact that we are traveling with a dear friend of over forty years named Carol. Carol is a master gardener, of both the kitchen and horticultural variety, as well as a talented artist and decorator. It’s such a pleasure to experience again through her keen eye all these incredible sights. And though I won’t intrude on Carol’s privacy by yabbering on here, I’ll let it suffice to say that I’m also honoring a promise I made two years ago which I consider nothing less than a sacred trust.

I’m nodding here, and we have a busy day tomorrow what with Pompeii, Capri and Sorrento all three, so I’ll catch you up on some of our fun in ‘Bella Roma’ a bit later. I have an appointment with a cozy bed and some delightfully cool Sorrentine night air, filled with the scents of jasmine, oleander and the salty waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea.

HOW TO WRITE A BOOK

Our last adventure in Italy was memorable for any number of reasons, not the least of which was a number of archaeological and/or culinary adventures. Two separate trips to Pompeii where we had the luxury of taking our time. The group tours are great but hurried, plus teenagers have a hard time concentrating on archaeology for more than about three hours, especially in brutal heat. Three trips to Paestum, one for the archaeological remains, two others for leisurely tours of the fantastic museum, accompanied by the two best docents in all of southern Italy in the persons of Fabio and Fernando. Plus trips to other sites too numerous to mention. And then there were my favorites, the ‘and/or’s’, modern analogs of ancient food processes: artisinal breadmaking with wood-fired ovens, three different cheesemaking operations , winemaking (oh God, the lab work was brutal!). Well, you get the picture.

This trip will have its share of such frivolity, unquestionably. I’m particularly eager to see Herculaneum, the archaeological twin of Pompeii which is so much less frequently visited but is equally important for reasons to be discussed later. But the primary goal this trip is to do some hard-core writing on a book on Roman wine. I’m well aware there are those brilliant minds who crank out works of staggering genius in remarkable bouts of sheer inspiration. I, unfortunately, am not that guy. I’m a plodder. First off, much as it pains me to say it, I just don’t have the genius to be inspired. Secondly, I discovered years ago that plodding is my most effective modus operandi, as we say in the Latin trade. No false modesty here, God blessed me with a good if not great intellect. But in a doctoral program in classical philology at one of the country’s premier public ivies, you quickly discover that you’re stacked up against some brilliant intellects and that you just ain’t one of them. But if you’re lucky like me you also discover that brilliance is no substitute for dogged persistence and an indefatigable work ethic. I entered Carolina in a year when some 420 candidates applied to the grad program in my area, 16 were accepted, 8 of us showed up...and every one of the geniuses busted out. One lasted exactly two weeks, one experienced a delusional phase and had to be hospitalized in the psych ward and ultimately had to drop out to save his sanity, one (perhaps the most brilliant) discovered he preferred investing his time at a local watering hole to slogging through Latin and Greek and eventually followed his wife to an academic appointment at Notre Dame where he worked for years as a lowly instructor and never, to my knowledge, finished even the formal classwork for his degree. You get the picture.

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the whole doctoral process is the number of candidates who do complete all their coursework, all those brutal comprehensive tests you are subjected to (we had one we called the ‘Trivial Pursuit Exam’ where you could be asked about any element of classical culture from the 16th century BCE to the 8th CE, including works of classical authors whose works are no longer extant but are only mentioned by other authors or by authors who mention other authors), design and have approved a proposal for a doctoral dissertation...and then don’t complete their degree. They’re what are called ABDs, ‘All But Dissertation’, and, incredibly, some 60 % of all ABDs in American universities never complete their degrees! Actually, only two of the seven in my program completed the degree, and we were the two least brilliant but most sedulous people in the program. The other three who remained enrolled simply floundered.

Fortunately, I’m also not that guy. I never dared say it to my classmates, but I actually enjoyed the dissertation process. I suspected long before I came to Carolina that I would. I could almost say that I knew it as a senior in high school. Some of you remember that awful rite of passage, the senior research paper, complete with those horrendous hand-typed footnotes with all the arcane rules of punctuation and without the blessings of a word processor. You really haven’t lived until you type, on an old-fashioned typewriter, a whole page of text, reach the last line, and discover a typo that can’t be corrected with White-Out, and have to type the whole bloody thing again. What fun! But, you know, I chose a really interesting topic, I thoroughly enjoyed doing the research and writing processes, and aced that puppy.

But a ten-page research paper is not the same as a two hundred-page dissertation. One of the reasons so many ABDs lose it is because departmental faculty basically congratulate you on an interesting proposal and then say, effectively, “Now, go write a book! And good luck with that!” No pointers on how you go about that, mind you, just a pat on the back and, scoot! you’re out the door and on your own. Under those circumstances, you can imagine that being a plodder is a real blessing; all we plodders know to do is just write one page at a time. Right up front I decided if I could fill three pages of manuscript on a 13” legal pad per day, then I’d have done OK. And that’s what I did. Every day. Sitting on the deck of our little house in Parkwood, just as I’m sitting on my deck right now.

Fortunately, I received some priceless advice during the course of my program which had absolutely nothing to do with academics, at least not directly. One came compliments of Professor Kenneth Reckford, a brilliant and perennially popular teacher as well as one of the most prolific writers in a department filled with prolific scholars. We had these seminars our first year of grad school where each of the senior professors would do his little schtick and give some words of advice. I remember Professor Reckford’s little gem as if it were yesterday: “Sometimes the most productive thing in the world you can do is...nothing.” Professor Reckford encouraged us all to take time out to have a life, to enjoy our family and friends, to regain perspective, to let the batteries recharge. As if I needed that message reinforced, Sandy and I later made a trip to the local kiddie museum here in Durham and as we made our way through an old caboose which had been retired to the grounds so the kiddies could run amok inside, there we found, sitting in the cupola with his grandson, none other than Professor Reckford, enthusiastically pulling on a cord and making “Woo-woo!” noises with reckless abandon.

I discovered early on in the dissertation process that I could only effectively write for about 3 hours a day, and that early in the morning, and so I made it a rule to start promptly at 8:30 a.m., write till 11:00 and then quit, before I became weary of the process and while my mind was still buzzing with the day’s thoughts. Then I could spend the rest of the day researching bib and doing the hours of legwork in the library that all good research requires, even in this time of computer access and powerful search engines. A full day was about six hours, and then I was free to noodle, enjoy my beautiful daughter, go for a bike ride, and still have time to cook for the weary Sandy back from school. Hey, who wouldn’t enjoy a six-hour worday? And, wouldn’t you know, nine months and 250 pages later, though still only half way through the proposed project, my advisors said, “Enough, that’s a creditable piece of work, let’s publish it and get you out the door!” I was the first one through the program by a year.

That was right in line with the second priceless bit of advice I got, this time courtesy of a television interview with the famous film director Stanley Kubrick, who said, “A feature length film is never really completed, it’s just finished.” Kubrick was talking about one of his most famous films, I’ve forgotten which, and he revealed that the crew had ultimately shot 42 miles of footage. Yep, you read that right, 42 miles. That’s about 80 hours of footage before editing. Imagine turning that into a three-hour feature. And yet Kubrick couldn’t shake the unsettling feeling that the work was incomplete, but the producers finally called a halt. And the final cut went on to garner several Academy Award nominations.

It’s the same with a book, I fear. There is literally an unlimited amount of scholarship that impinges in one way or another on your topic. Scholarly leads spread out like a huge web in all directions, one strand leading to another, which in turn leads you off in a different direction, so that at times you wind up off in some scholarly cul-de-sac wondering how in the world you wound up in a place so far from home. The last book took no less than eight years from conception to birth, and no one knows better than I how inadequate it still is in so many ways. But we do the best we can and move on. My mentor at Chapel Hill used to say that if you can’t be brilliant, you can at least make a good list. The book on food was anything but brilliant, but I’m dead sure it is solid scholarship and will be useful to other minds that are brilliant. The current effort is now aborning for four years and I’ve pretty much called it on the research. Friends ask how close I am to finishing and I never quite know how to answer. Three of a projected seven chapters are written, two are thoroughly proofed and camera-ready, one unwritten is virgin territory for me and will be a challenge to write, and two are such familiar territory from the previous book that they’ll practically write themselves. So how ‘completed’ is that? Forty percent? Sixty? I’ll leave it to you to decide.

When I was in the intial stages of writing the previous opus and was asked by a student how long I anticipated the whole project taking, I gave him a figure which turned out to be wildly optimistic but which struck him as a virtual eternity. “Do you realize how old you’ll be in five years when you finish it?” he asked incredulously. To which I could only reply, “Yeah, and do you know how old I’ll be in five years if I don’t finish it? The same age!”

How long till I finish this one? More importantly, will I finish the darned thing before I shuffle off this mortal coil? Don’t know. But I’m gonna just keep plodding along and see what happens. And if there’s a more heavenly place on earth than Agropoli to do my plodding, I can’t imagine where it is.