See You in the Piazza

by Frances Mayes

  My pizza is piled with prosciutto, small artichokes, and mâche. Ed’s has anchovies under oil, tomato, oregano, and capers. This is what happens when pizza gets in the hands of a starred chef obsessed with quality ingredients.

  While we’re savoring the strawberry semifreddo dessert, we start listing other delectables that we are eating, or want to eat, in Parma:

  Culatello di Zibello: Only Zibello and seven other towns along the Po—all have foggy, damp weather said to be perfect for curing—can produce culatello legally. The lean hind leg is tied into a pear shape, aged, and treated with wine, pepper, garlic, and salt. Melting-on-your-tongue ham, layers of taste firing off in every direction.

  Parmigiano-Reggiano: Of course, of course. This cow’s-milk cheese has been produced here for nine centuries. After eighteen months of aging, it’s ready. At twenty-four, the cheese becomes more crumbly, sweet but sharp. At thirty months or more, the Parmigiano becomes parallel to a “meditative” wine. Go sit in the corner and eat it by yourself. Dry, more complex, with a new fruity taste, flaky and granular. We bought a hunk and had it packaged sotto voto, shrink wrapped. You can even take a wedge back to the United States this way and parcel out servings over months.

  Salame Feline: Named for a nearby town, which has a museum devoted to this home-favorite salami made from the chuck cut and other parts. By tradition, you slice this at a sixty-degree angle to show the grain.

  Prosciutto di Parma: Loved all over Italy, prosciutto, sliced so thin that you can see through it the shiny tines of your fork, achieves transcendence on home court. Melon isn’t in season, so we taste the transparent pinky slices with a plate of frittata and a bit of quince mostarda on the side. A very old taste, the fruit mostarde are popular all over Emilia-Romagna. Fig is favored, but all kinds of fruits are put up in sweet-sharp syrup. I like the quince, and also the Italian words for quince: mela cotogne.

  Sacrao: Not sauerkraut, but a toothsome cabbage dish to accompany pork. It’s cooked with white vinegar and juniper berries.

  Tortelli: Though it may look like ravioli, cappelletti (little hats), or tortellini (knots shaped like the navel of Venus), tortelli is the name that you usually see on menus in Parma. Especially popular is tortelli con zucca, pasta filled with pumpkin and a smatter of crushed amoretti, and served with butter, sage, and Parmigiano. I don’t care for this sweetish taste but I’m in the minority. My favorite is tortelli d’erbetta, the classic chard and ricotta filling scented with nutmeg, though I wouldn’t turn down tortelli stuffed with potato or mushrooms.

  We have yet to try ragù di strolghino, a pasta sauce made with bits of a particular small salami.

  * * *

  THESE ARE ALL standard fare in Parma. Local chefs are intoxicated with the plentiful biologico (organic) ingredients available and the exceptional quality of produce, grains, and meats. The result—a jazzed-up culinary scene. Chefs take these historic givens, plus the bountiful ingredients of the Po River plain, and perform their experimental riffs. If the nonna who stirred pots of polenta over the fire and the exalted chef of the Farnese rulers could show up tonight, they’d have plenty to talk about with those tossing pasta into boiling water. They might be mystified at every menu’s lengthy claims and disclaimers about the impeccable sourcing of every damn herb or flour or grain of salt used by the chef, and the lack of preservatives or additives. May the residents all live to be a hundred!

  * * *

  AS WE WALK in neighborhoods during the afternoon pause, I fantasize about which house belongs to Wallis and where she buys prosciutto and what grows in the gardens behind the blank façades. I have an abiding interest in how place forms those who live there. I wonder how Parma shaped her, as I wonder the same about my writing. Would I have continued to write poetry if I still lived in San Francisco? Unanswerable: What would she have written if she had stayed at home? Isolation made her an independent thinker. Another day, I might find out more.

  * * *

  MANY EXCELLENT ARTISTS painted here in the Correggio years; unfairly neglected because they painted outside the major art cities, and on their home ground, they were eclipsed by the dazzling top boy. I get a chance to see how good are the other members of the Parma School: Rondani, Anselmi, Gandini, Bedoli, and Del Grano. Even Francesco Mazzola, known in the diminutive as Parmigianino, whose portraits are even more nuanced than those of Correggio, suffered in comparison.

  Parmigianino’s name—the suffix -ino being diminutive—came not from his size but from his amazing precocity. At fourteen he was an accomplished painter. His work is scattered around the world. Not a lot remains in his hometown, but at the renaissance church of Santa Maria della Steccata he left his six wise and foolish virgins, painted on the broad arch in front of the apse. Along the base you see small still-life paintings of books and instruments, revealing the love of details that makes his portraits so exact.

  Santa Maria didn’t work out well. When Parmigianino ran up debts, the priests drove him off the job. He died shortly afterward. The church is dim, and without binoculars, the frescoes are hard to see. A fabulous quest: to fly to all the cities with a Parmigianino—see them all. I would especially like to see the playful Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror in Vienna. He was twenty-one, showing off a virtuoso talent by painting on a curved board the illusions created by a convex mirror.

  * * *

  SAVED FOR LAST: the baptistery. Best ten buildings I’ve ever seen? This is on the list. A pink marble tower, octagonal in shape and sweetly proportioned, four stories with arches rise to one blank story, then Gothic cupolas on top, columns slender as femurs, and four doors in the cardinal directions. “It was built for baptisms, I know,” Ed says, “but doesn’t it look more like something out of a fairy tale?”

  “Yes! A wizard waving a wand could step out on that loggia and cast a spell.”

  At various times of the day, the soapy peaches-and-cream marble turns carmine, and as pink as the inside of a shell, and dusty white and rose. This can’t be real, but is.

  The building is a book. The carved panels on the outside tell all the stories of monsters, dragons, sirens, unicorns. Once inside, I have to sit down. I’ll just say it—I want to cry. The baptistery is open all the way to the top. Rings of porticos, then under an umbrella of ribbed marble struts dividing the dome into sixteen sections, all walls are completely frescoed. I’m inside a kaleidoscope. The seasons, the zodiac, the Bible stories, the symbols, the mysterious alignments with the solstice so that the sun strikes the right place on the right date. There’s the Madonna holding a playful baby who pulls on her scarf. There’s John the Baptist baptizing Jesus.

  And oh, a pleasure of winter travel—we have the place to ourselves for an hour. Antelami, architect back in 1196, thank you.

  As we leave, Ed says, “You had a major attack of Stendhal Syndrome in there?” We realize we’ve not talked at all. We walk over to the Museo Diocesano, where amid the many artworks discovered during excavations in the piazza and duomo, they have an excellent interactive digital display of the baptistery, where you can see the art up close, all the way to the top.

  * * *

  YOU CAN GAUGE the wealth of a town by how many shops you see for fancy baby clothes. Parma’s centro storico, historic center, has many. I stop to admire the tiny camel-hair coats, velvet dresses with lace collars, the little smocked slips, and rabbit-fur hats. I’ve never seen so many shoe and clothing shops anywhere—not ubiquitous brands, but individual stores with well-made classic clothing. Where’s the fantasy and drama of Florence’s stylish shops? I feel in a bit of a time warp. There’s a hat store, its sign in nineteenth-century lettering. Borsolinos and tweed caps for the hunt, women’s cloches in felt.

  Many babies are ferried about in those high carriages instead of collapsible strollers. Their mothers are pretty, with small features and shiny hair. Another bookstore. I’m happy to find two stores specializing in handmade papers.
Old print shops, endless high-end jewelry, and curious shops crowded with medical models, leather-bound books, ship models, and music boxes. Ed, a cyclist, finds out about Italia Veloce—where you can design your own handmade bike. Teatro Regio, the grand opera house, testifies to the active musical culture that thrives here. You see more images of Verdi than of the Madonna.

  We stop for espresso. “We could stay. We haven’t seen everything we wanted to,” I say. We love the cafés, this one with ceiling paintings in blue and gold. Four old men, all dressed from the nearby tweedy shops, sit at a table discussing the world. On the other side of the bar, six women meet. Laughter. Clatter of cups. Someone stepping outside to smoke. The barista, “Are you Americans?” The men take out a pack of cards. It’s not the first time or the last.

  Ed throws back his espresso in a gulp. He’s learned to like ristretto, the essence of coffee. “Want to split one of those puffy things with cream inside?”

  Later, another wine bar, another dinner. We do the unthinkable and return to Angiol d’Or, forsaking the chance to try another new place. But this just seems like our place in Parma.

  * * *

  WE ARE TAKING the train to Cortona. We change in Bologna, again in Florence where we grab panini in time to board the slow mover that stops at every crossroads, towns I can tick off as easily as I anticipated all the do-wa-diddies between Fitzgerald and Macon when I was growing up in Georgia, my mother barreling down the two-lane highway in our blue Oldsmobile.

  If I stepped off the train at any juncture, I’d find an alluring place to explore. Bare winter hills zoom by the window. Stiff wash on a line. Persimmons still hanging like gold lanterns in a bare tree. Isolated castle on a green hill—I know it’s cold inside. What luck to have seen Parma. Now I always can go there in my mind. I flip open a guidebook. What’s next?

  NOTES:

  Shops for handmade papers: Cartaria Parmense Ferramola, Via F. Maestri, 5; and Cartasogno, via N. Sauro, 22.

  Old books and treasures: Credula Postero Antichità Libri e Curiosità: medical models, leather books, dolls, sleds, stuff! Ship models, globes, music boxes, old photos. Via N. Sauro, 16a.

  Italia Veloce: Design your own bicycle. Stradello San Girolamo, 2.

  I’m a long admirer of The Splendid Table: Recipes from Emilia-Romagna, the Heartland of Northern Italian Food by Lynne Rossetto Kasper.

  Camogli—possibly from Ca’ Moglie, meaning houses of wives left at home when fishermen set off from this curve of coast. Gelato and pastry shops line the beach promenade. Behind the street, astonishingly tall buildings rise. Apricot, russet, gold, cream, ocher, these dense seven, even nine, story buildings face the sea, another layer stepping up the hill that ascends abruptly in back. Did they choose bright colors so home could be easily recognized by the men returning from sea? If you threw open the shutters, you could look far out over the water as a schooner cut the horizon, or a leudo, a compact boat with large sails, headed home from what was known as “the cruise of one hundred days,” the length of an anchovy fishing voyage. I imagine a leudo pulled up on the beach, greeted by the wives and children rushing down from the steep hill, as men begin unloading barrels of salted fish.

  If you’ve ever looked at a calendar of amazing photos of Italy, or watched romantic Italian movies, you’ve dreamed of Camogli. This is my third time here. I come back to soak in the blues of the sea, walk the sweet crescent of beach, sit in the sun with a lemonade, and admire the vividly painted houses from which generations of wives watched for signs of their husbands’ return.

  * * *

  AFTER WE CHECK in at Cenobio dei Dogi, surely the most gracious hotel along the coast, Ed takes off on his walk. He has an exercise streak of three hundred and something days. Nothing deters him. I relish the time alone. How often in life can you sit on a balcony overlooking the Gulf of Paradise? The beach, empty in November, a castle and dome in the distance, a clock tower, the stacked buildings painted with trompe-l’oeil fantasies, then above, silky green hills, sky. How many layers of beauty? One fishing boat putting out across the water, a few gulls. Quiet. This much beauty: I feel a quick sting of tears.

  * * *

  AFTER GAZING BLANKLY at the view, I pick up The Rain Came Last and Other Stories, intending to find a calm spot with a view for a little reading. Just right—a bench under a well-tended umbrella pine. Which is better? Looking up into the sculptured branches, then at the smoothness of the sea’s surface, or reading the prose of Niccolò Tucci? The writing is as nuanced and wild as Nabokov’s. I choose all three. Gazing, reading, meditating. After an hour of taking deep breaths of salt-stung air, I shut the book. The stories are transporting, but right now, I want to be here.

  * * *

  BEYOND THE PICTURESQUE Castello della Dragonara, at the quay, I stop under a Madonnina, a shrine to the Madonna, the glass-covered image surrounded by a border of sea shells. I hardly can see Mary for the wavy reflection of Camogli houses, a doubling. I listen to the dings in the riggings of boats in the small harbor—red and blue boats, a man hunched over his nets, a few larger trawlers, lowly rowboats; we are eons away from the early Camogli’s powerful fleets of tall sails. Va bene. Fish still rule. Menus list an excess of fresh squid, and other marvels. The grand celebration of the year takes place every second weekend in May when three tons of fish are cooked in a four-meter-diameter frying pan, blessed by a priest, then fed to all in a free feast.

  * * *

  EVEN NOW IN November, we have lunch outside under an awning. The waiter aims a water pistol at pigeons that encroach on our table. With the burden of a bird phobia, I am often driven to duck and cover. The waiter hates the pigeons. Nothing frightens me more than the chortling scavengers. The waiter has become my deus ex machina. He brings us bountiful salads and lobster and crisp white wine; then he takes aim at a pigeon’s tail feathers.

  * * *

  WHEN YOU ENTER Museo Marinaro, you encounter big glass cases lining what feels like old schoolrooms with wan light. Large cabinets filled with objects display local seafaring history. Ships in bottles, sextants, barometers, log books, accounting portfolios in distinctive penmanship, telescopes, even needles used to mend sails—all the useful accouterments. But the 178 paintings commissioned by proud ship owners grab my attention the most. There are schooners, brigs, paddle steamers, pontoons, and fishing boats. I inspect the ship models made by seamen. (Imagine, in the tall houses, how many other relics remain as family treasures.) Who sailed away, who waited? I would like to have one of the ships in a bottle, crafted by men at sea, the precision giving shape to the days on that three-month anchovy run. A ship in a bottle cannot sink.

  * * *

  THE FORMAL HOTEL dining room, Ristorante Il Doge, must be dreamy in summer, all the windows overlooking the sea and the tables attended by such friendly staff. Off-season travelers, we’re alone except for one other couple seated in a distant corner. I want to wave to them. Three waiters stand by to top off the water glasses and refill the wine. Ed and I have a leisurely dinner of tender gnocchi with pesto and mixed grilled fish as we talk about the Ligurian poet Eugenio Montale. He plucked words directly from the land and seascape: a sun-warmed garden wall, carob tree, flowering myrtle, iridescent scales of a dying fish, medlar fruit, the waters’ somnolent blues. Place will have its way with you.

  I love hotels and happily could stay in this one for a decompression week, strolling their gardens, eating on a terrace with panoramic views, and sunning at the pool. The proverbial dolce far niente. When do we ever achieve that?

  * * *

  THE GREAT ACTIVITY of Camogli is walking. First, around town to admire the faux architectural flourishes painted on the houses, to pause at Revello for a warm slice of tomato focaccia, to look up at windows where women shake out their dust cloths, to photograph the fruit stand’s glowing clementines, tangerines, and oranges wrapped in tissue, to stop into Santa Maria Assunta with its patterned m
arble floor, its frescoed ceiling, and its many crystal chandeliers that sparkle in midair like ships floating on the sea.

  The real walking is up. On an earlier trip, we took the hike to San Rocco for wide views. You can proceed farther to the twelfth-century San Nicolò di Capodimonte, built over a much earlier (345) chapel. You then reach Punta Chiappa for a swim, and onward (about five hours total) all the way to San Fruttuoso and Portofino, where you can hop on a boat to bring you back. In warmer weather, many boats ply this coast, making it easy to explore without driving.

  * * *

  OF THE MANY seafood restaurants along the water, we chose La Rotonda, a curved structure jutting almost into the surf. We are seated right next to the bank of windows. A pile of rocks is meant to stem the tide but still the water comes crashing against the glass. “What’s it like in a storm?” Ed asks the owner. He shakes his head, rolls his eyes, tells us about the fresh catch of the day.

  “Is the Mediterranean rising as quickly as other seas?”

  “Now it is. Yes,” the owner says, “it’s getting pericoloso.” Dangerous. Splat! We’re startled at every other bite of the fritto misto and grilled vegetables. The place is packed with locals celebrating a birthday. The birthday girl, obviously surprised as she came in, didn’t seem too pleased. She is dressed casually and everyone else isn’t. Probably she would have done something with her hair. But soon she’s in the mood, and we feel included.