La Marmo, La Mare, La Madre, and More!

Beautiful, gnarly tree in Carrara

The last three days have been such a break neck pace of traveling, getting point to point, and, I'll admit, drinking wine, this is the first (sober) chance that I've had to check in!  "La Marmo" refers to to the marble of Carrara (it's the word for marble in Italian).

This is the marble sculpture the artist was working on when we toured.  It's part of an installation of benches going into Central Park, NYC!!

There are benches carved into the back side of the "eyes".  Beth wasn't tall enough to get herself up to sit in one, but when they  all get into Central Park, she's going to have to go and take a picture to send back to the sculpture.

Beth had to try her hand at the filing and smoothing of the marble.  Now she can say she she carved it!

This is the sign and name of the marble sculpture studio that we toured.

We toured the Nicoli Studio in Carrara.  The sculpture, himself, gave us a tour.  The interesting part was that he spoke nearly no English.  Instead, we had a combined Italian and French conversation about how they go about preparing to do a marble sculpture.  Plaster molds are taken around a model that cast the negative and then plaster "positives" are made from the "negative"). Then they use calipers to create measuring points for reference to make a realistic sculpture.  We were not allowed to take pictures within the sculpting workshop due to copyright infringement and the artists privacy rights.  What we SAW were amazing!  They had the casts made of a woman reclining in a series of positions.  Next to the plaster cast was the marble that they were carving it out of.  There was also an artist in residence that was doing a sculpture of his own to go to his own home.  He was carving out of Portuguese pink marble the torso and bottom of a voluptuous woman.  Yowzer, did she have curves on her!  You could tell that the sculptures loved women with curves because those kinds of figures made the most beautiful sculptures.  And with the style and voracity we've been eating, all us ladies will be perfect models for these sculptures; we're awaiting their call any day...At the end of our tour, the lovely gentlemen sculpture who gave us a tour saw us to the door (as it seems all the lovely Italian men do) and handed me the most beautiful nugget of blue marble, called Lapiz, I've ever seen.  I'm trying to figure out how to have it made into a piece of jewelry.  Suggestions?

After we recovered from swooning at the sculpture studio, we hit the road to the coast to head back up north to Milan.  And so, "La Mare", the sea.  We decided that since we were so close to the sea and it was such a beautiful day, that we had to stop and have a cup of espresso by the sea.  Such a majestic break!!

 

This is the view of the mountains from the sea shore!

Looking out into the sea and the hills around the sea.

Can every coffee break be like this?!?!  We continued on the road, passed up through the mountains again, up through Genoa this time and through the wheat, corn and farm fields on the way back to Milano (that was going to be our meeting point the next morning for the Terra Madre: Slow Food bus pick up).  We were really hoping to find an Agrotourism to stay in over night but the only one that we found had closed!  So, we went the old fashion way and got a hotel room outside of Milan.  We have been eating so much wonderful, rich food, that we decided to keep our meal that night relatively low key.  The only extravagant thing we had was the plate of three kinds of house made goose sausage.  The breast was prepared like a prosciutto and there was two kinds of salami.  One of them was prepared with the liver and THAT one was our favorite!

The next morning was an early one.  We had to head through rush hour traffic around Milan to the airport for our meeting point.  Unfortunately, the dingbat behind the desk gave us incorrect driving instructions (told us to look for the signs for a city that DIDN'T have signs on our route).  Sooooo, we drove through the city center of Milan when what would have been faster would be to skirt the entire outside of the Milan.  Oh well.  A 35-40 minute drive took twice as long.  We still made it to the airport meeting point with plenty of time to drop off the rental car, meet our fourth partner in crime, Ruth, and get the buses to Turino for the opening ceremonies of Terra Madre: Slow Food.

Once we  arrived to the Olympic Stadium, in Turino, we spent LOTS of time standing in lines to check in.  In fact, Beth was spotted by a high school friend of hers!  Her friend walked in the door of a building containing nearly 5,000 other people and she ran into her girlfriend from a land far, far away.

Ann Fitzgerald and Beth

No sweat.  The opening ceremonies began like the Olympic games.  There was the flags of all the nations involved.  The categorized them as five regions of the world and each region was introduced with a song sung by a native person from that land and a traditional song.  Each region also had someone speak in their native tongue as well.  The most amazing image was everyone in the stadium with their headset on hearing and understanding the speaker translated into their own language.  It was like a UN meeting.  Really amazing.  As the camera panned the front row with Carlo Petrinni, you could see people sitting near him like Alice Water.  How lovely, Alice came!!

Then, Carlo spoke.  The moment everyone has been waiting for. Carlo gave a moving speech about the things that are important and how society has lost view of them: the worker, the farmer, the women, and the elderly.  He illustrated that all the things that make a society work for  the better and learn come from these 4 things and that if we worked to get back to these things, we could stop and reverse some of the debilitating damage that has begun.  Quite a moving speech.

At this point in our day, we were all really tired.  We wanted to go home, eat, and sleep.  After an exquisitely long wait for our hotel bus to pull our, we arrived to our hotel, had a mediocre hotel meal (nothing really to even say) and flopped down in our beds.

This morning was a jolt: first, all 90 pounds of Ruth broke the toilet seat cover while she sat for a minute to tie her shoes in the bathroom this morning to run and then we learned mid-dress that the bus that was going to take us to the center at 9:30 was REALLY already here and was going to be leaving in 5-10 minutes.  (Oh, you know, they decided to up the leaving time by and hour and a quarter and why tell anyone?!?)  So, we hustled a breakfast and out the door we went.

On the bus ride to Turino (50 minutes) I discovered through having a choppy conversation with a man that there were a group of Italian singers from Sicily staying at our hotel and were on the bus with us.  I continued my choppy conversations between many of them playing interpreter for the other Americans.
We arrived to Terra Madre.  Inside the main building, they had a fabulous bizarre styled set up where a group from each country was selling traditional items.  I got the most amazing felted wool necklace from a couple from Tajikistan and Ruth bought a beautiful shall from northern India.  Then we headed to the Salon d' Gusto.  Now THAT was amazing and sensory overload.  The Salon d' Gusto is a huge set up of booths for businesses to sample the foods they make and to sell them.  There were sections dedicated to each region of Italy and then they also had sections for all other parts of the world.  We got to see a little Nona making hand rolled pasta that they cooked we then got to eat.

The "Nona" rolling the pasta.  She's only a sprite 85 years old, wouldn't you say?!?

Andah thennah we flippah de pasta!!

Nona filling the pasta with teeny tiny hunks of a pureed filling of potatoes, tomatoes, and cheese.  SOOOO good!!

Such focus...

We decided after our fabulous debauchery in the Salon d' Gusto, that  we should at least attempt to LOOK like we were being studious and attend some presentations.  Actually, we had timed it so that we saw the Salon before it got busy and the classes that we wanted to go to.  So we split up to go to our classes.  I went all the way, to China it seemed like, to the other end of the complex to attend a presentation on ethnic wools of the world.  I entered the room, which was about 9 million degrees, only to have announced that this presentation was only in Italian and there would be no interpretation.  Now,  I can hack out a little Italian when the cards are down and we're lost in the city and want a snack or can't find our car.  What I can't do is sweat it out in a sauna, trying to focus in a language spoken too fast.  So, all the Americans and non-Italian speakers excited Stage Left back to the Salon.  Beth attended a class on food and the senses.  For our next presentation,  Beth, Ruth, and I attended a presentation on Bees and beekeeping which was also a bust.  Instead of focusing on ideas like, "Yes, we have a bee hive collapse problem; here is why I think it's happening; here's some ideas on how to heal the problem."  He gave a rambling 30 minute nothing speech about big corporations and  insecticides.  Needless to say, Beth and I bailed on that one before it was done (we didn't think the answers to world piece were going to be disseminated in the waning minutes.  The man couldn't put a cohesive sentence together in 30 minutes, why start now?  Jeri attended one on Food Systems which had more technical difficulties than accomplishments, so it was difficult to ascertain if it was worth her time either.  Oh well, a rough start to the conference, but we can always shoot for tomorrow.

What we DID know that was going to go better was our dinner this evening,compared to the humdrum from the night before.  We went to the front desk and asked her to recommended a good restaurant in town and call a cab to pick us up.  We got a bottle of wine while we waited and Lucca came to pick us up in good time.  We got in the cab and confirmed with Lucca, our driver, the restaurant.  He said in choppy English, "Yeah, buttah...Thattah place nottah sooah goodah.  Eyahh knowah placeah in theah nextah townah."  We had a good feeling about Lucca and put ourselves in his hands.  He took us to a town over called Rivoli to a restaurant called Ristorante Nazionale.  It is run by an older husband and wife team that makes traditional foods of the Piedmonte region.  Lucca  took good care of us.  The food was comforting, "stick to your ribs", wonderfully made food!!  Jeri had the gnocci in cream sauce for her first course, which I believe, you could pack into the woods for a 4 day journey and live off of it the whole time and never get hungry otherwise.  Ruth got the smoked swordfish with porcini that was magical!  Beth got the warm prawns with rock salad (arugula) and I got the pasta e fagioli.  I couldn't help myself.  I love seeing how other people make their pasta e fagioli.  Everyone's is a tiny different.  This one had fresh, wide pasta with a deep tan colored fagioli in it.  The most wonderful part was the broth.  I couldn't tell if it was made with meat for a base.  The flavor was  deep and the rich texture seemed like it was made with meat or perhaps it was just so rich!  I don't know.  For our main courses, Jeri got a combination of side plates of vegetables: roasted potatoes (phenomenal!), grilled chicory/radicchio (tasty, tasty!) and eggplant that was light and rich all at the same time.  Beth and I got a pasta trio for two: spinach fettucini in a mushroom sauce, agnoletti in cream sauce, and meat filled raviolis.  I voted the meat raviolis as the winner of the trio but Beth loved the agnoletti.  Ruth got the minestrone of all minestrones.  The meal wasn't as fancy as some of the other ones that we've had but the Nona e Papa of this place still get stars for the flavor fullness, hospitality, and overall comfort food quality of the meal.

We weren't done though!  We had to have dessert.  Ruth honed in on the wine and cinnamon poached pear (the size of Texas!), Jeri and Beth got the Zabaglione and English Sauce with biscotti and I got the tiramisu.  The winner was the pear.  You could taste the wine and cinnamon with subtle sweetness but the pear shone through and through with it's taste and texture.  The other desserts were good, but the pear gets the prize.

The Poached Pear to end all Pears

Tomorrow, tomorrow.  Let's see what it brings!