Chianti Region and Roma, prima volta!

Friday, September 26 – Culture of Food in Italy class field trip:

My food class made its way over to the beautiful Chianti region, where the famous wine originated. I thought of my dad often during this trip, because I could feel how exhilarating this area would be to him as I looked out the window of the bus to see rows and rows of vineyards combing the tumbling hills, the neat rows contradicting the scattered, absent-minded groupings of fields they grow in. It looks as if a toddler had been given the task of creating these hills, and then, left unsupervised, had taken a giant hair pick and scratched it wherever his three-year-old fancy struck. There were the ever-abounding thinner, darker green rows which are the grape vines, and then the lighter, thicker rows that were the color of mint-blue – these were the olive trees. Almost all of the grapes had been harvested already, except for one variety of red grapes (San Giovanese, possibly?), but the olive trees are still weighed down by their harvest, as they don’t get picked until the end of October. My professor kept telling us that if the ancient people who had first lived here could see their land today, they wouldn’t recognize it at all, because in their day, there had been many diverse crops covering the area, but now specialized farming has taken over, and it’s only grapes and olives that you will see driving around the Chianti region, and much of Italy in general.

Spatterings of villages cling to the hills, villages so old that the buildings seem to grow out of the land themselves. They cling to the hills like barnacles stubbornly cling to an aged, jagged rock on the shore. One of these villages was the azienda that we went to for the first leg of our field trip. The azienda was named La Fucina di Poggio Antico, or “The Forge of Ancient Hill,” the name echoing the antiquity of the surround terrain. This azienda was all organic, and the community that worked the land was connected by one thing: they all had been “called” there by God. Lucio, our guide, told us that he had had stomach cancer some 30 years ago, and after he survived, and it went in remission, he felt called by God to give back to the earth, and so he came to this community’s azienda and has been there ever since. They were also all vegetarians, and the animals they had, (cows, goats, cavallini, or “little horses”, i.e. ponies, chickens) were all used for their by-products and manure for the natural fertilization that is necessary for organic practices. I have a picture here of some of their cows – they had all different breeds of cows, because they didn’t believe that one breed was better than the other, just like not one race of people is better than another. They also believed that animals, because they were so much stronger, absorbed all our negative energy through their horns. Ahem. So, it was a bit bizarre, but even though my philosophies didn’t exactly coincide with the community’s, I was still able to appreciate the tranquility of the respectful relationship these people had with their animals and the earth. We got to taste various types of cheese, both from goat milk and cow milk, and some of their apple and grape juice that they made there on the farm. I also bought a jar of pear preserves from this special type of enormous pears that they grow on the farm, which I hope to enjoy when my family comes! :)

After leaving the azienda, we made our way to Strada in Chianti, a little town where we ate a delicious meal at Ristorante Palledina. Our meal included the famous Florentine steak, probably the most raw and most delicious steak I have ever had the pleasure to eat, and the region’s characteristic meat, chicken, more specifically, rooster. The rooster was cooked with all the parts of the body (instead of just the meat as we would do at home), and it was in one of the most flavorful sauces to accompany pasta ever! I feel as though I keep saying “it was the best meal ever” but these dinners really do keep topping the next, each new flavor becoming my new obsession, trying to pick its elements apart to discover the secret to Italian cooking . . . mmmm, how I love food!

Saturday, September 27 – Roma con i miei amici!

My usual posse of Lauren, Carly, and Angie and I decided to take a last minute day-trip to Rome, as Lauren had to go for a class, and we wanted to see some of the sights so we wouldn’t have to cram them all into the one night, two days that we will be there in November. We ended up seeing the Vatican museums, including the Sistine Chapel, saw the exterior of the Basilica (the line was so long that we would’ve missed our bus if we had gone inside), and the Piazza del Popolo, or the Pope’s Piazza. The Vatican museums had an overwhelming amount of paintings – by the end of the Sistine Chapel I couldn’t really take anything else in – visual overload! I did, however, get an illegal picture of the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel – shhh! I got the famous Creation of Adam painting in it, too! I was taken aback by Raphael’s famous painting of all the philosophers – I had studied that in my Intro to Visual Art class freshman year of college, and couldn’t believe I was seeing it!

Despite all the wonderful history and breath-taking art that covers all of Roma, I’m content with my decision to study abroad in Perugia instead. Perugia is so much cleaner! And it’s also not tourist-driven, and it has a more intimate feel, being a much smaller city.

The bus ride back from Rome was where I felt most inspired, however. I know all this art is fabulous, but essentially, all art derives from nature, from people, from other art. My writing follows this as well, and is inspired more by landscapes and nature than city skylines, despite my love of the city. I think this must just be a product of where I grew up, and where I feel most at home. It’s an amazing thing to get a feeling of homesickness, or rather, not even homesickness, but a feeling of love for a home in a place that’s oceans away from your actual home. I watched these home-love-inducing scenes pass my window as the light darkened, and night snuck stealthily across the land. The mountains by Roma are deeply beautiful – they are always a dark, fuzzy blue, like time has taken a sponge and scrubbed away the vibrant, jagged points of youth, and patiently smoothed over the round tops, and covered it instead with a wise blue that echoes across the distance. Their calm beauty reverberates in a comforting way. Their dark blue just waits for night to come when again they can blend in with the sky and go to sleep on the quiet earth.