Back Home in Dragodena

Walking in the Fall Colours

Fog Flowing over the Hill

They’re not Russian, they’re not brothers and they don’t fly—they are the Flying Karamazov Brothers!  Paul, the troupe’s founder and leader, has been my father’s friend since they attended high school together 40 years ago.  Paul (when he isn’t in New York, Madrid, or England) is the friend who lives in the house in Dragodena, where we stayed with my grandparents three weeks ago.  After visiting the Amalfi Coast, we hopped a train back to rural Emilia-Romagna to visit Paul, or as they call him in Italy, “Pol”. 

We had intended to only stay with Paul for a couple days, but the relaxed mood in a rural Italy covered in autumn colours ensnared us.  For all of us, the last week in Dragodena was a time when we relaxed and caught up on our writing (in theory anyway).  When we were in Dragodena three weeks ago, the days were warm and sunny.  But this time, there was a brisk wind and the nights were very cold.  The sun still shone, but not consistently.  Each morning the hills were cloaked in a thick fog.  One day, we collected chestnuts in a torrential downpour.  Each day my mum and I walked into Tole, so I got to experience the fall/winter transition intimately.  The leaves were gold and red, the fields were plowed a second time, and smoke rose from every chimney.  

Italian Teletubbies

In my eternal quest to procrastinate, I spent much of each day helping Paul to repaint the stalls inside the old barn.  The paint we used had the same consistency of pudding and promised to cover up mold, rot, uneven plaster, and also to add a structural element to old walls.  By the time we left, the gray, peeling, moldy walls were a gleaming white.  It looked like an entirely new room. 

Me up on a Ladder

October 26^th was a particularly special day for us—it was my mother’s 53^rd birthday!  Emilia-Romagna is the chestnut center of Italy, so with that in mind, I chose to make a chestnut-flour birthday cake.  I had found a recipe online, but our friends in Tole told us the proper method: use ⅔ chestnut flour and ⅓ regular flour.  To that I added chocolate, sugar, eggs, and grated orange rind in arbitrary proportions.  The result tasted so good (surprisingly), I made a similar cake again the next day. 

Happy Birthday!

The day after my mum’s birthday, we went out for a celebratory belated birthday dinner at a local agrotourismo (like a rural hotel, but focused on local agriculture).  We had a magnificent meal—one of the best in Italy—that included three types of pasta (for instance, gorgonzola gnocchi) and a variety of roasted vegetables and a melted Parmesan porcini sauce.  After dinner, my father and I played our usual mix of violin duets: Mozart, Bach, assorted Irish fiddle tunes, and blues.  I enjoyed the atmosphere of the agrotourismo so much that I am strongly considering going back to work there in January.  If I were to do that, I would probably do a mix of waitressing, cleaning the rooms, and looking after the animals.  

We have spent our whole time in Italy trying to learn Italian cooking.  There are some rules that can never be broken, like the blasphemy of eating Parmesan on fish pasta.  There are other rules that can be bent, like which spices to put in Bruschetta (but not how you pronounce Bru-sketta).  The trick is knowing how much to bend the rules.  We have also learned that the way to make friends is to ask for their method of preparation of a certain dish.  Then you have a friend and a secret method for the perfect artichokes—if you can understand the Italian of course. 

My mum is a champion of the “authentic” Italian recipes that we learned this way.  After an intense discussion about garlic and bread, I would be very surprised at how much she seemed to actually understand.  Then my mum told me that she couldn’t understand the specifics either, but she couldn’t tell that to the enthusiastic Italians.  Regardless of the specific recipes, the meals she made were fantastic.  My mum made some of the best meals of the trip in the kitchen in Dragodena using the fresh ingredients we had just bought in Tole.