Toscana - In brodo di giuggole

There’s a fruit tree that has grown in Toscana for hundreds of years known as the guigiole (jujolay). The fruit is about the size of a cherry, looks like a crabapple, and when it’s ripe, taste like applesauce with cinnamon. There’s an old tuscan expression, that when life is really, really good, you are living in the “il brodo di guiggiole” (the broth of the guiggiole).
We spent a week with our close friends, the Cinelli family, in Lastra A Signa, about 12 km west of Florence. Outside of their beautiful 15th century tuscan villa are a few very old guiggole trees. All I can say about our week was that we were in “il brodo di guiggole”.
The week flew by. We did get into Florence a few times (it’s an easy 10 minute drive from the Villa Cinelli),  and Fabrizio and I played a few rounds of golf, but mostly, like all good Tuscans, we sat around the large family table with friends and family and ate. There was the Pizza party; Fabrizio Cinelli makes really delicious pizza. There was the tuscan steak, the porcini mushrooms, the pasta, soups, crustini, gelato, fresh fish, salads, pastries and of course the wine. We opened different tuscan wines every night.

An aside: The Ipercoop is a large warehouse style cooperative that sells everything from food to furniture; TVs to tires, clothing to camping gear. In many ways, it’s like Costco, but at the Ipercoop, you can buy smaller quantities and the variety is a lot larger. Their wine selection is amazing. We were buying 1998 Banfi, Brunello di Montalcino for about $19/bottle. But the most amazing find was the Banfi, Col di Sasso, a cabernet sauvignon/sangiovese blend for less than $5 a bottle. We’ve been enjoying the 2003 vintage. This is a big California style cabernet and spicy overtones of the sangiovese. I don’t know if it has hit the US yet, but this is a great wine, equally as good as a lot of $30/bottles.  Search it out and buy it.  Lots of it….

The Tuscan table is much more than a meal. This is the time when everyone gets to be a family. Problems and family issues are worked out, everyone pitches in and either prepares the meal or cleans it up, and no matter how busy they are, there is always enough time to prepare an incredible lunch or dinner.  Paola Cinelli was able to put together a 3-4 course meal in less than an hour. In Italy it works. In America, if a family is lucky, they’ll have a sit down meal together maybe one a day, in many cases, it’s once a week. But in Toscana, it’s twice a day. When it’s just the family, the TV is ever present and the conversation slips in an out of an Italian reality show, football match or dubbed version of a two year old American TV show. When there are guests, the TV is still invited to the party, but more as a background environment, in the same way an American family would play music.
Since we were the newest members of the family, we were constantly treated to family anecdotes, old photos albums and great stories.
 In planning this trip through Italy, we thought about visiting Naples, but our Tuscan family convinced us not to go, saying it was ugly and very dangerous. The Florentine and Napolitani have never really had a very cordial relationship. Remember, Italy has only been a unified country for around 130 years, and city pride, language dialects, upper class snobbery and of course football, all have added to the love/hate relationship that Italians have with Italy. The Romani hate the Milanese, the Florentine hate the Napolitani, the Napolitani and the Siciliani hate everyone. The Italian license plates have a 2 letter code telling what city they hail from. And if a car with FI on the license plate (for Florence) decides to drive to Naples, they should be carrying a lot of car insurance.
We were told that our temporary French plates were also a beacon to all the thieves of Naples (and from what we’ve heard, there are a lot of them). And so, heeding the warnings of our friends, we changed our plans. At one dinner, we recounted our initial Naples plans to our friends Mario and Vonda, who immediately agreed with Poala and Fabrizio. Mario said the thievery in the south was literally unbelievable and to prove a point, he told us the following story about a close friend of his.
The friend was traveling with his family in the south of Italy. When an Italian travels with their family, it means husband, wife, children, mother, father, mother-in-law, father-in-law and occasionally brothers, sisters and their families. The small family holiday can easily get up to 15-20 people.
The family was in Campania when the father died. It was an unfortunate event, but even worse was when they found out how much it would cost to ship the body back up to Tuscany.  Instead, they decided to bring Papa back home themselves. They wrapped the body in plastic, tied him securely to the top of the car and drove north, figuring they could make it back to Toscana in less than 8 hours. When they got to Naples, they decided to stop off at a rest stop and have a bite to eat and so they left Papa strapped to the top of the car and went into the restaurant. When they returned to the car, it was gone; stolen, Papa and all.
Now the police did eventually find the car, and Papa was still tied to the top, but the story remains and the lesson is, don’t go to Napoli.

La Marche
From Florence, go to Perugia, follow the direction to Assisi, then follow the direction to Spoleto. At Spoleto, turn left…. Eventually you’ll be in the south of Le Marche, near the town of Ascoli Piceno. We crossed the Sibillia Mountains, where the Romans believed the prophetic Sybil lived. We passed nearby the Gran Sasso Mountain (big rock) where Benito Mussolini was kidnapped and taken to in 1943 by an ad-hoc government who favored the Allies. We left the autostrada and traveled for hours over an incredibly winding road we referred to as the auto-ileum after it's resemblance to a large intestine. We were a lovely shade of green when we finally made it down the mountain and into Ascoli Piceno.
We booked a room at the Borgo Storico Segretti Panichi, once a 13th century fortress with a lookout from the Sibillia mountains to the Adriatic sea. In 1742, it was turned into a country residence. This is a beautiful Palazzo and hotel and we are the only guests.
The Borgo Storico Segretti Panichi is owned by the Principessa Giulia Panichi Pignatelli Aragona Cortes, a local socialite junior league type with a passion for expanding the world interest in her native Le Marche. Her gardens are so renown, busloads of tourists pay 5€ a head to have a peek.
Principessa Giulia has set up a most complete cultural tourist facility (or finishing school) in the region, with cooking classes, music appreciation classes, Italian language classes, art history, and applied art. Stephania Pignatelli, the daughter of the Principessa, teaches applied art with classes like “Dream and the color Blue” or “Life force and the color Red”. Can you see me smiling??. But as I said, we were the only guests at the hotel and so we never saw any school activites.
Our accommodations are in the newer building. Actually the building is very old, but the renovation was just completed 2 years ago. This a ±650 sq ft suite with a living room, kitchenette, bedroom and an enormous bathroom, even by American standards. The furniture is a top quality, solid wood 19th century reproduction, the chairs, sofas and bed are covered in silk, the bathroom is marble; floors and wall to ceiling.  We were told that the cousin of the Queen of England recently stayed in this suite. It’s not only most impressive, it’s very affordable. However, we are way down south in Le Marche.

Urbino
Many years ago, on my first visit to the Uffizi gallery in Florence, I was fascinated by the Piero della Francesco portraits of the Duke Federico da Montefeltro and his wife Battista Sforza. The brutally broken nose of the Duke has forever immortalized him into Italian history. We’ve been told he broke it in battle, he broke it in a fist fight, and recently, we were told that he actually had the top of his nose cut out so that his helmet would fit better. Now there’s a good story.
Although Urbino goes back to the 12th century, maybe even older, the city we see now is the kingdom of Federico da Montefeltro (http://www.le-marche.com/Marche/html/montefel.htm). Like many 15th century fortress villages, it’s perched on top of a mountain peak with a splendid view of other mountain peaks or invading armies. As far as I know, 15th, 16th or 17th century Urbino was never attacked, although we did read that Napoleon stole some of Ducale treasures in the 18th century and the Nazis blew up some of the fortress walls towards the end of World War II. The town today has retained almost all of it’s 15th century charm.

The streets are barely wide enough for a motorcycle to navigate, but large enough for 2 gelato shops on every corner, The main attraction is still the Ducale Palace that Federico built in the mid 1400’s. This 3 story, twin turreted Palace is an inspired building, and well integrated into this perfect Renaissance town. Although Federico originally claimed his notoriety as a great soldier for hire, he was also a patron of art and culture, and Urbino flourished as a center of high culture. Some of the original art of the Montefeltri family still lives in the Palace; portraits of Federico wearing his armor with the baby Guidobaldo bouncing on his knee; scenes of the Communion of the Apostles with Duke Federico and his son Guidobaldo looking on from the side, and busts and reliefs of the Duke, complete with the famous broken nose. The Montefeltri line may be gone, but their love of higher education is kept alive through the University that has taken over many of the 15th century buildings. We got lost on the way there and picked up a hitch hiker, who turned out to be a student at the University, studying classical languages. It made perfect sense.
By the way, I still don’t know the real story of how Federico broke his nose.

Ascoli Piceno
Where Urbino, in the north of Le Marche has tight twisting roads and rolling hills similar toTuscany and Umbria, the southern Marche is a wide valley sloping down off the Sibillia Mountain range out to the Adriatic. It doesn’t even look like the same country, less the same region. The southern Marche is farm country and zona industriale.
Ascoli P has it is known in these parts is one of those small cities where you have to drive through the catastrophe of late 20th century architecture before you can find the jewel. In this case, we also had the (dis)advantage of driving through the zona comerciale or strip malls. But once we got to the center, we found what we were looking for.
Mostly of what we see in the cento historico was built in the 14th century. The most beautiful part is the Piazza del Popolo (Plaza of the People). It’s one of the most beautiful squares in Europe. In August, they still have a majestic jousting match, known as La Quintana in the Piazza del Popolo, similar to the Palio held in Siena.  Also in the square is the Caffé Melitti, one of the 150 oldest cafes in the world. The interior is done in a beaux arts style, very strange next to the Renaissance architecture, and the coffee is so strong, you can actually chew it.