News from Nowhere

Our friendly neighbourhood Italophile showed me the book she was reading, Matthew Fort's Eating up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa ('Eating up', because he travels up from the south to the north: cute, eh?). I asked to borrow it because I have good recollections of Matthew Fort's writings for the Guardian. I also have slightly less good ones: I thought it was a pity they had moved him from restaurant reviews, at which he was excellent, to writing about cooking, which he did less well. Unless it was the other way about...

The book contains some of each, plus a certain amount of travel writing and some portraits of artisan food procucers, and having read it all, I still don't know which mode I preferred. As a book, it reads like a series of - well, not exactly newspaper articles, but magazine features. Published in 2004, it doesn't quite feel like a blog, and the monochrome photographs give it a retro feel (they are sometimes striking and atmospheric, sometimes too small for me to make out in less than optimum light (your eyesight may vary).

I didn't feel any desire to try any of the recipes, which are heavy on the 'this is how you use this local product' (and occasionally 'this is how you make this local product', particularly sausages). Occasionally the landscape descriptions made me want to see more of Italy. But the one passage I wanted to hang on to is purely factual:

The most basic pizza of all is pizza bianca, which may be lubricated with olive oil and flavoured with garlic. Slightly more sophisticated and no less ancient, is pizza marinara, so called because sailors - marinai - could take the ingredients with them to sea. The ingredients for the topping were just tomato puree, garlic, olive oil and oregano. Had pizzaioli stuck to such inspired simplicity, all might have been fine, but they didn't. In 1889 Queen Margherita of Savoy paid a visit to the city, and the pizza Margherita, which combines tomato, mozzarella and basil leaves in imitation of the colours of the Italian flag, was invented in her honour and that has become the archetypal pizza, and the standard by which pizzas may be judged - and that is the problem.

I had assumed that pizza marinara would involve fish, and I had not known the origin of the pizza Margherita. Margherita was queen of Italy by marriage to Umberto I, apparently...

This time last year, we were just home from our holiday in (mostly) France; in the intervening year we have spent a couple of weeks in the west of Scotland, and - and that's it. Not our usual allocation of holiday, and people still ask us about our travels as if they expected more of us, but there you go. We've been otherwise occupied.

I continue to study the Guardian's the Travel supplements. I've been feeling a bit self-conscious about this, but right now I'm feeling vindicated, since I've just booked a cottage on Lindisfarne for next midsummer - on the basis of the Guardian's recommendation of cosy cottages for Christmas.

Otherwise, it's mostly Italy. In order of publication:

A curious piece in the 'why I love a place I know' series by a doctor working in the Barolo wine country, who appears to be living about a century ago - not because he reaches his patients on horseback through the vineyards, but this is surely a voice from the past: "Farmers have always worshipped barolo, the king of wines, like a god with healing powers. In the past, rich noble families from Turin came for 'wine-therapy' to cure anaemia and treat low blood pressure. I prescribe four glasses of barolo a day to pregnant women: it works miracles, giving them the energy to face labour and delivery. We have a saying: 'Wine makes good, healthy blood.'" Italy is another country; they do things differently there. (He recommends B & B in an organic flour mill).

I don't suppose I would really construct a trip to Italy around a (food) festival, but here's the link just in case - it's the chestnut festivals that particularly appeal, and they list two: Sagra della Castagna, Soriano nel Cimino, Lazio, which looks very grand and cultural, and the Fiera nazionale del Marrone which looks altogether more food focussed. Their website is a bit sluggish, so here, have some chestnut porn:



This reminded me of staying somewhere in France, on a walking holiday, a week or two too early for the chestnut festival - but where? I thought it would be easy to search out, but it seems that everywhere in France has its chestnut festival: was it Quarrŕ-les-Tombes? or somewhere, anywhere in the Ardèche?

I really would like to visit Friuli (capital: Trieste), so these suggestions might actually be of use.

(My earlier posts with links for Italy, including wine tourism in Collio and the wetlands of the Veneto, which must be in the same sort of area.)

- much impact on the accummulated pile of newspapers (just as one wheelie bin per fortnight makes very little impact on the jungle that is my garden). Nonetheless:

1. Other holiday cottages are also available. I don't suppose I'll ever rent one of these fabulous modernist houses on Cape Cod - unless I could persuade all my New England friends to come and share it with me! Nor do know why The Guardian feels the need to dress the article up with a come-on headline about Mad Men...



2. Italy seems to be flavour of the month at The Guardian, and I can see why. How about Puglia, down in the heel of Italy's boot, where you can stay in one of the stone beehive 'trulli'? Or Ravenna, and up the coast to Venice, and then maybe beyond to Trieste? Well, maybe one day...



3. Then there's London: Iain Sinclair walks the Ginger Line so we don't have to. At book length I find Sinclair unreadable, but half a page seems the right length for his blend of bile and lyricism: "The arches beneath the elevated tracks, oil pits dealing in MOT certificates, mysterious lock-ups and rehearsal spaces for bands without names, were being rapidly upgraded to fish farms offering meditational aids to keep money-market buccaneers on an even keel, Japanese restaurants and artisan bakeries operated by downsizing hedge-fund managers. The word 'artisan' signalled the change in demographic."



4. Who is Henry Jeffries, and how has he persuaded The Guardian to give him a weekly column which is effectively an advertisement for his (forthcoming, self-published - via Unbound) book? It is, admittedly, tucked away in the increasingly pointless cookery supplement, but it appears under the title of the book, and is invariably followed by a plug for the book. To add insult to injury, it is often informative and always entertaining, even though is is usually about drinks in which I have no real interest. Here, for example, is what it has to say about vodka: he recommends Vestal Vodka from Poland, saying "Most of their vodkas are not only vintage (made from a single potato harvest), but also from a single variety of spud." Varietal vodkas - who knew?



5. Today's news is full of the outcome of the Greek referendum. The problem seems to be that Greece may have taken the first step to leaving the euro while remaining in Europe, and this is a bad thing. The UK, of course, declines to enter the euro, while remaining in Europe, and this is a good thing. No doubt it's entirely different.

I enjoyed the first series of The Trip: Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon drive around the Lake District, being entertaining, admiring the scenery and eating at good restaurants, what's not to like? Well, plenty, of course. As Steve Coogan says in this interview: "I get a bit fed up when I hear actors saying, 'Get a load of me, being myself and laughing at myself. Aren't I cool and post-modern in my self-deprecation?'" Not to mention that said actors are not only in receipt of a very desirable freebie but being paid for it. Nonetheless, it worked - the series was funny and entertaining and the right degree of melancholy - and the scenery was terrific.

We are currently watching the new series The Trip to Italy. Again, I was uncertain - could they do it again, would I find Italy less appealing than the Lakes, or more enviable as a freebie? Again, it works. The pair have mellowed, but this doesn't destroy the humour (since I find the humour of discomfort distinctly uncomfortable, this may just be my opinion - but that's all I have) and once again, the scenery is stunning.

As it happens, the Guardian travel section had just devoted an issue to Italy, and I had already bookmarked an article on the Cinque Terre - somewhere that has long been on our list of places to visit without quite reaching the top of that list. The paths that had been destroyed by storms have now been reopened, it seems: I wonder whether my knees are up to the challenge of those hills? Two more articles offer Giorgio Locatelli's recommendations in Sicily and a piece about the wetlands of the Veneto (not, I think, the area we didn't really succeed in visiting, but north towards Trieste).

I seem to have hung on to an earlier article about Rene Redzepi's Copenhagen, too.

And since I'm gathering the travel recommendations here, lil_shepherd has been to Glasgow and has some great photos of the Riverside Museum - have I posted about that before? I remember reading about it in the Guardian. Over on FB mevennen recommended somewhere to stay in Glasgow - so it all comes together.

This is all in the misty distances of the future: but we are off to Fife next week.

Well, there's a disappointment. An interesting article in last week's travel supplement, about wine tourism in the Collio region of Italy - not a disappointment in itself, I'm intrigued by this area in the far north east of Italy, up by the Slovenian border (and by Slovenia itself, if it comes to that). But the invitation to read about other European wine routes online, that could have opened up so many possibilities... Instead of which, they offer us Valpolicella, Champagne, Alsace - nothing wrong with these, but it's not exactly a wide spectrum, is it, two pieces on northern Italy and two on eastern France? It's probably worth keeping the link, since they promise an ongoing series.

Another week, another kind of road: this week it was the Alaska Highway. Not much impressed with the article, but the road sounds stunning.

Perversely, these dreams of travel come as I am almost immobilised by a bad back day: as I do intermittently, and there's nothing for it but to take painkillers, avoid sudden actions and the twisting and reaching movements which are particularly painful, and wait for it to clear up. I'm hoping to swim in the morning...