Bassano del Grappa, passegiata, and the Alpini

This is the Veneto, our home province. Directly above the word, "above,"  and half-way up the province, is Bassano del Grappa. Paderno is 7 kilometers to its east, so Bassano is our local big city. We've ended up there regularly lately, and are very fond of this town.

Bassano street scene.

In Piazza Liberale, the lower of two main piazze.

Bassano is home to a macrobiotic food store where we can pick up organic dried beans, grains, great olive oil, tamari, and even more obscure stuff like miso (Patrick, you're containing your enthusiasm quite nicely). As noted in the previous posting, there's also at least one really good gelateria, but there are also handy places like a book store with English books, a department store with the whole bottom floor given over to yarn for knitting, and a little corner store with bulk spices and teas.

This place is called, "Specialita di Gamba," which is, it turns out, another idiom. 'Gamba' means 'leg.'  If someone is 'di gamba' at what they do, they are accomplished at it. If someone is 'di gamba,' they are clever. I cannot speculate about the Italians and body parts relative to their idioms, but I am encountering what appears to be a trend. At any rate, the mother, father, and son, the latter two of whom are pictured, run this clever seasonal specialty shop in Bassano and make all of the goods they sell. Which are; canned, olive-oil packed garlic and shallots and little onions, garlic paste, pepperoncini paste, garlic/pepperoncini/olive oil paste, and an anchovie/garlic/caper paste. Now, those of you who got our e-mails last time we were here may recall a remark about the blandness of local cuisine. We have to -sorry - eat our words. The pepperoncini pastes are hot. And folks add it to their spaghetti noodles and eat that as their sauce. Our apologies to all of Northeastern Italy. We misrepresented your spicey-quotient egregiously.

Above and beyond the shopping, however, Bassano is where it's at. The center of town is an old walled city perched high on a hill, overlooking the River Brenta. Every street is picturesque, the central piazzas are large and lend themselves to big markets, and the big markets happen often. People like us drive from surrounding villages and rural areas, park their cars at the base of the hill, ascend the stairs to the top, and head out to see and be seen. Every day. And especially on Sunday.

A pedestrian-only bridge over the Brenta. A lot of people watching happens here.

A view from the bridge, back toward the oldest part of the city, showing some of the old wall.

Either these two just got married or they were models for a photo shoot, but they got a hand as they walked the bridge. Their photographer shot several angles from along the bridge, and both the couple and the setting were gorgeous.

There is an age-old practice in Italy known as the passegiata, which literally means, 'stroll.' But the event itself is far beyond a simple perambulation. Folks dress up for it, take their spouse's arm, wash the kids' faces, and go check out the newest in fashion on the street. Bassano is the local spot for good passegiatta.

Folks heading to passegiatta. I especially like the older couple on the right. They're styling.

Bassano is also home for special markets, like last weekend's Organic Agriculture Market, and was the host city this year for the annual gathering of the Alpini.

Kids watching a puppeteer at the Organic Ag fair.

More of same audience, astutely combining gelato with their puppet-watching.

The Alpini are legendary here in the Dolomites. Apparently they are a branch of the Italian military, according to my Italian teacher. She didn't know if one is assigned into Alpini units or if one requests that service. At any rate, they are trained in mountain warfare. With a line of colossal Alps along one's northern border, and the rest of the nation dangling into the Mediterranean, both mountain fighters and marines become kind of critical. The Alpini were instrumental in both World Wars and were very active in this particular region. There is a huge monument to them on the pinnacle of Monte Grappa, and the mountains around here are riddled with tunnels and caves they used in defense of Italia.

Alpini are arranged by the regions in which they serve, and labeled according to nearby cities. They convene to whoop it up yearly, and whoop they do. There is a lot of beer consumed in the process, and there were apparently contests and a parade. Local groups cluster, wearing matching shirts. Every one of them wears the Tyrollean style felt hat with a feather and various medals and pins. It sure looked like they were having fun.

As a side note, for adult males to be seen in a city - especially on a Sunday - wearing jeans is really unusual. However, it seems to be almost required for the complete Alpini outfit.

Gelato quest!

Four years ago, we established the lovely routine of going to the Hotel San Giacomo in downtown Paderno del Grappa for a nightly post-dinner gelato. We looked forward to resuming this tradition upon our return.

Hotel San Giacomo, just off via San Giacomo and the main roundabout of Paderno.Lower level houses a bar with gelateria.

There were gelaterias in London, but Mike was adamant –save it for Italy! So, we abstained.

Our first night here, we strolled to Hotel San Giacomo for our inaugural gelato.  Something was deeply wrong. The gelato display was no longer an elegant extension of the bar, it was a chintzy-looking plastic cart plugged into the opposite wall. The gelatos themselves looked shiny and somehow “off.” We ordered and ate, but our fears were confirmed: this was no longer good gelato. Drastic measures were required – this was Paderno del Grappa’s one and only gelateria! How were we to have our daily dose?

The next nearest village is Crespano del Grappa, one kilometer away. It is home to at least two gelaterias, both of which we had sampled last time, and both were good.  We really wanted a place we could walk to, as this is the new joy of our apartment’s location – we can walk to everything in the course of our day. The walk to Crespano is a tad challenging for an evening jaunt, though, as there is a portion of the only road to the center of town that has no sidewalk, is narrow, and along which the cars can and do speed. Light fades shortly after 7:30: evening walking becomes perilous. We didn’t want to die for our gelato, really.

We set out for Crespano one evening, leaving early and wearing light colors. It was  fairly nice weather, and all went according to plan. The gelato was great! We have a new, favorite destination:

This is the adornment over the doorway of the Gelateria Artigianale, "Peccati di Gola." I looked up 'peccato' and 'gola' in my pocket I/E, E/I dictionary, and got 'sin' and 'throat'. "Sins of the throat?" I asked my Italian teacher, Michela Marin, a local, about the phrase and she almost blushed. She said, "This is something you might not know about." Turns out, there are many enumerated sins, if Catholic. One of them is indeed the sin of the throat, translated into English as "gluttony." But how does that translate into a gelateria? In Italian, this completely idiomatic  phrase means much more. She said that one uses it lightly, even saying, "I would like a sin of the throat," and one would mean that one intends to indulge one's sweet tooth, and one is usually referring to going to get a gelato. Plus, as an added tweak, this particular den of iniquity is located just across the street from the local church square: "In your face, Mother Church! I'm gonna sin with my throat!" Naughty gelateria, naughty!

Two shots from the gelateria in Bassano del Grappa. This place, and many others, list their ingredients for every flavor out for folks to peruse. Most ingredients in such places are very good quality.

Since that evening, we have walked to Crespano a couple more times. However, time and weather have conspired against us to make the late-evening walk even more dangerous. Now we drive. So much for the health aspect of the event. 

And, since we're driving anyway, we have broadened the quest and cast further afield, adding gelaterias in nearby large city, Bassano del Grappa (remember the locale name-tie to the over-looming local peak?) and smaller Castelcucco (I don't have a clue what this name refers to, but it sounds suspiciously wacky). Both have their advantages. Bassano's has a great selection of fruit gelati, and even two flavors of rice milk based gelato (!!), while Castelcucco's has a vast selection and sit-down space inside, a definite plus for the up-coming cooler weather. Yes, we will remain stalwart and continue to eat gelato even in the late fall and early winter. We are dedicated.

"Illy" gelateria in Castelcucco.

[Kevin Johnsrude, add these to your flavor collection and make a mental note to try them out: Noccioloso (my new fave) and Bacio (a close contender, name meaning 'kiss'). The first is like chocolate swirl, but the vanilla portion is fortified with hazlenuts ala Nutella, and the chocolate swirl is a fudgey thing. Yowzers. Bacio is chocolate base with whole, roasted hazlenuts sprinkled throughout. You think you don't like hazlenuts? Keep that judgment in check until you've sampled these. Buonissimo!]

Dining Out/ Pizza!

So, you want food, eh? Funny thing, I'd already started on this posting. We must be in sync, though worlds apart. Or, you could all be part Italian.

You may have noticed the predominance of food and beverage serving establishments in little Paderno. This is the Italian way. There are eateries that serve only lunch, only gelato, or only coffee and tea and their necessities. There are many names to distinguish the various establishments: un ristorante, una pizzeria, un caffe, un bar, uno snack bar, un fast food (guess what they serve), una gelateria, una trattoria or una paninoteca. In order as named, these would be a formal restaurant, a pizza place, a cafe, a 'bar' - but not as we know them, as anyone can go in, over 16 can drink, other foods and usually a lot of coffee also happen, and they often have outside seating (or standing around) - a snack bar/ cafe, fast-food joint, ice cream parlor (more soon!), a Mom-n-Pop homestyle restaurant, and a sandwich shop.

Street scene in Bassano del Grappa with cafes.

Any of these can show up almost anywhere .They can be on mountain tops, along quiet rural roads, on back alleys, or on main drags. If they are there, people will go to them, and they will be packed for their designated eating times. Then they close for the entire afternoon, for all of Monday (common), for Monday and Tuesday, or for Wednesday (also common).Some open only for lunches, and have no existence at dinner time, some the reverse. If they open for dinner as early as 6:00 pm, we are lucky, but most open for dinner at 7, 7:30, 7:45.

It was with great excitement that we first heard that there was a pizzeria in San Zenone d'Ezzelini, a near-by village, with gluten-free pizza. We had to contain the excitement, however, until we checked to see if these pizze (plural form) were also egg-free, to fit our version of vegetarianism. So, two weeks ago we stopped by and quizzed the Signore who runs the place in our broken Italian and his non-existent English. He was pretty sure we were good to go, so we stopped by later to find out and then eat if......

The guy said that they opened “a sei,” at six, a minor miracle in and of itself. So as to not push with our eagerness, we arrived at 6:20. The lights were off, there was no movement, but the door was open.  We walked in, the guy was reading the paper. He seemed happy to see us, though, and turned on all the restaurant lights, told us, “Si, niente uova!”  (yes, no eggs!),  guided us to a table and handed us the gluten-free pizza menu. You can see that we were indeed the only customers: 

 The pizze were ready quite quickly:

Granted, their presentation is unorthodox to our perception, but the inner 4-year-old who doesn’t like things to touch stands in deep awe and appreciation of this pizza. We ordered the “verdure” (vegetable) pizza whose ingredients were listed as pomodoro, melanzone, pepperoni, cipole, zucchini e verdure cotto (tomato – which turned out to be represented by the sauce- eggplant, peppers – many a college student here has to learn the hard way that a pepperoni pizza here is vegetarian – onions,  zucchini, and chopped greens. This is exactly what we got. Each vegetable was nicely cordoned off to its respective quadrant, no mixing.

You might think that this an extremely large pizza, and it sure looked like a lot to us when it arrived. The crust is Napolitano style, however, and this means that it is incredibly thin. So even though one is eating something the size of a hubcap, it is indeed an individual portion. We do usually save a couple slices, though, to continue the enjoyment on the next day.

This restaurant has an impressive set of wood-fired ovens: a few for the pizze and a separate one for their “meat bar” which is what we call the grilling area. There, customers can belly up to the bar, point out the cut of meat they want and watch the chef grill it in front of them. Patrick, you’re drooling, and see, you didn’t even need a photo. This public style of grilling to order is common also in the agritourismo restaurants – restaurants that operate on the premises of small, local farms. The government of Italy has created incentives for farmers to be able to generate more income by having these kinds of establishments on their farms and they have proven to be quite popular and successful.The restaurants are required to raise a high percentage of the food that they serve in order to qualify for this status.

We have eaten at the Pizzeria d'Ezzelini now three times in the past two weeks, and last time took along 5 friends from the CIMBA faculty. The restaurant owner knows us and grabs the gluten-free menu when we arrive. Twice of the three times we were the only customers until maybe 7 pm, when families with little children start to arrive. We have to wonder if our maturity is in question since we eat so early... When the 7 of us ate last time, we lingered until 9 pm, and the place was just starting to fill up and get lively.

As an entertainment for customers, there is a video loop running up by the cash register, showing one of the chefs of the restaurant winning a prize at the World Championship Pizza Competition for "velocita" (speed of pie construction) and some of the other contestants in categories such as largest spun pizza crust, and presentation of final pizza. 

 Life is good! Mangiamo! Let's eat!

Paderno del Grappa

Don't try looking us up on any fold-out map of Italy. Chances are good that you won't find Paderno del Grappa, regardless of how accurate or current your map is. Google Earth would get you there, for sure. But Paderno is like thousands of other minute communities throughout Italy that are simply too small to register. The "comune" (com-oon-eh) di Paderno consists of two main crossroads, one of which locates the campus where the school happens, the other gets you to the "municipio" or town hall and church, just past our apartment and 600 meters past the first. A post office is another half kilometer up the hill, and there are two bars, two tabacci stores (not just cigarettes, oh no! - snacks, notebooks, magazines, various important foodstuffs like bread and nutella, bottled water, lots of bottled water, and candy bars. Think a tiny 7-11 without the Slurpee machine.), a cafe, a bank, three restaurants, a lighting store (go figure, but there's also a fabrication shop for this brand in Paderno, so apparently there also had to be an outlet: Aldo Bernardi.), a farmacia (a lot like a small pharmacy, but with very little in-store inventory, and also sells vitamins, herbs, and homeopathics) and a women's clothing and gift shop.

Many of the buildings are older and the area is totally lovely and picturesque. Our apartment is within easy walking distance of the campus, so we trek back and forth multiple times a day.

This is our daily walk from the apartment to the school. On the right are a couple of soccer fields, property of the Istituto
Filippin, our host campus. On the left is an abandoned elementary school, a 'farmacia', and Alpina, a local cafe/pastry shop/ hangout.

This is our apartment building. The lower front houses a salon/spa. Our rooms are in the back, caladryl-colored section, second floor, closest to the front building.

This is the view from the little deck you can see in the previous photo. That plain that stretches out beyond the foreground vegetation goes all the way to Venice, and on a clear day we pretend we can see the lagoon.

This is part of the view from the other side of the apartment. Notice the proximity of the local church bell-tower. We sure do. Every hour - starting every day at 7 am - on the hour, with casual reminders at the half-hour. Sundays, the stops come out and somebody swings from the bell-rope for 5-10 minutes at the beginning and end of each Mass. Mercifully, the hourly tolling stops at 10 pm. Think about the integrally interwoven aspect of the Church into daily life. It is omnipresent.

This is the remainder of the view out that same side: lovely Monte Grappa. Many of the local burgs have 'del Grappa' tagged onto the end of their name, as in Paderno del Grappa, referencing this beauty. Not the beverage. Though it is indeed from this region, and there is a museum dedicated to it in Bassano del Grappa. More on many of these topics soon.

The school: The campus here is actually part of a private Catholic high school run by the Filippin order - Istituto Filippin. Some of the high school is dedicated to boarding Italian students, and a separate dormitory houses the US students. This term. Usually the enrollment is on the order of 100-150 in the fall, but this year it is very reduced, only 74 or so. There are also spring and summer terms, more popular and populous, sometimes as many as 250 students. In flusher terms, the US students overflow into the Istituto's dorms.

From via San Giacomo, one turns right, here, into the Istituto grounds. I'll include some photos of those soon. Promise.

The US school is run by a consortium of around 30 US business colleges in universities across the country - U of Oregon, Oregon State U, Purdue, Virginia, North Carolina, Kansas, Iowa, etc. Iowa is currently the U that runs the administrative component stateside.The students and the faculty come from any of the 30 contributing campuses.

This year, the U of Oregon has the largest enrollment, due, I'm sure, to Mike's influence. No, really! Some of them actually like his teaching so much that they jump at the chance to take another course from him. You see, back at the U of O, Mike teaches every business major student their Marketing 311 course. Unless they mess up and take it in the summer- a total rookie error. But here, he teaches that course and one called Consumer Behavior, so those who took him before can indeed take him again, and do.

Getting there

The trip:

First we stopped in Illinois to see my dad for his 89th birthday, and were met by Molly's sister, Katy, brother George, and brother Tom and his twins, Adrian and Owen. (Photos may be forthcoming.)We were missing Herb, Yda and the bros' SOs, but it is so great when we can get together in any configuration. At the end of the four day visit, we flew to London for four days there.

As Amy and Jamie had lived there last time we were through, we had both poked around this city a little, but we felt like we had only scratched the surface, and neither of us had a good handle on it. One thing we have learned is that we both get to know a place a lot better if we can walk it. Mike booked a hotel in the West End, near a lot of stuff, and it turned out to be a great location for us. Two days we bought tube passes, but the rest of the time was hoofing.

[I have no intention of showing the usual tourist photos of Big Ben and other lovely sights, though sure enough, I took them. I'll stick with our perspectives on just a few items.]

We walked into the government area a couple of times, stopping by Westminster Abbey for an organ concert, a choir service, and taking in the ambiance. I don't know just Who all these folks were, but they looked like lively sort of gang:

I took this for two reasons: to see if anyone else from St Charles, Illinois thinks that the Methodist Church there is a rip-off of Westminster, and to record the gray skies we were encountering. We were wearing raincoats a couple of days!

Regent's Park was near our hotel, so we hiked it one morning, enjoying the Queen's Garden.

The inscription reads, "This fountain erected by the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association was the gift of Sir Cowasjee Jehangir (Companion of the Star of India), a wealthy Parsee gentleman of Bombay as a token of gratitude to the people of England for the protection enjoyed by him and his Parsee fellow countrymen under the British Rule in India." The next photo shows its placement:

The question naturally arose, relative to the plaque's wording: is this a cattle trough or a drinking fountain? Is it perhaps both? Would you water your cattle here? Me either. So, I drank from it.

Continuing our livestock eye's view of London, we also visited the Royal Horse Grounds. This is a "panorama" shot of the Grounds, which are, appropriately enough, horseshoe shaped.

Covent Garden, home of Eliza Doolittle. Down in a well of a courtyard, this lively group of buskers played fabulously, the cellists dancing along with the rest of them, peg scrolls hooked on shoulders. They played Ravel's Bolero, a hornpipe,and Pachelbel's Canon while we enjoyed their artistry.

View from the Tate Museum towards St Paul's Cathedral over the River Thames on a very new pedestrian bridge.

Courtauld Gallery: So, we dutifully went to the Tate, and saw the Modern stuff there. But the place itself left us cold. Huge, modern and concrete, it was a tad difficult to warm to. Luckily, Katie, Mike's sister, had tipped us off to the Courtauld Gallery on the other side of the Thames, so we also went there. Much more betterer! We liked it a lot. Thanks, Katie!

All of this may sound kind of high-brow. In all honesty, however, our main quest was vegetarian restaurants. We scored several times, our favorite being Vitao, a vegan, completely gluten-free and raw food place run by idealistic and sweet young people who make amazing food. If you're in London, eat there.

And now, on to Italia! Andiamo!