We vow to come back for the truffle with red potato gnocchi, and paccheri alla carbonara. Paccheri, the big tubular pasta, is one of my favorites for ragù. The rolled and stuffed rabbit, rollè di coniglio farcito al tartufo bianco pregiato, sounds fine, too. Anything with the precious white truffle.
Pietro’s ears lift and he’s wagging his tail. Maybe if they fed him a few tastes, he’d get the idea. For us, with one bite, the action in the room fades and the pure experience of this simple and ancient flavor takes over. Musty, earthy, mysterious. If there’s ever an occasion for that overused word umami, this broth with passatelli is it.
We sometimes get summer black truffles in Tuscany and relish those days, though sometimes the texture resembles wood chips. These are both firm and tender. Order another portion? But the tasting platter arrives and all I want to do is stay in this room and eat—a fluffy omelet with truffles, polenta with truffles, crostini with fonduta of pecorino and truffles, a potato sformato. A blur of truffles. It’s over too soon. I’m almost expecting truffle dessert. Since we’re headlong into indulgence, we order another true taste of fall, the tortino di castagne con scaglie al cioccolato caldo, chestnut torte with melted chocolate.
Now that we’ve simmered down, and coffee is ordered, I wonder about the painted restaurant sign we saw outside the door of two gentlemen, Taddeo and Federico, namesakes of this restaurant. A note on the menu explains that the two Zuccari brothers, born in Sant’Angelo, were artists in the mid and late 1500s.
Over coffee, Ed reads to me. Taddeo had left for Rome by age fourteen, quickly establishing himself. He painted frescoes in the Villa Farnese. He died in his mid-thirties and was buried in the Pantheon, where his neighbor is Raphael. Federico was already working at the Vatican by age eighteen. He became famous, too, later painting in Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Florence’s duomo, Galleria Borghese, all over. He was a pupil of Correggio from Parma. His twenty drawings of brother Taddeo are at the Getty.
“Both brothers from this tiny and remote town. How did they make their way to Rome as boys? What was in the water?” I never stop marveling at the level of culture that has thrived in Italy for centuries, even in back-of-beyond corners.
“The father was an artist,” Ed says. “He must have wanted more for them and pushed them out the door.”
Three-thirty seems like a good time to finish lunch. We go in search of our car, which we parked somewhere. Then we recall, the magic phones will tell us where. Soon we won’t have to think at all. Just eat.
* * *
WE CHECK INTO a B & B just on the edge of Mercatello sul Metauro, only six kilometers from Sant’Angelo. Third floor of a simple house, small room, simply furnished with a wrought-iron bed. Cold. We’ve been on the move since dawn. We’d like to relax, prop up on pillows to read our Blue Guide to Le Marche, go over today’s photos, check messages. I mean cold. The shower is minuscule. One of those folding panel doors that slide open at the corner. You have to squeeze in sideways. We take turns freezing. Fortunately, the bed feels good and the fluffy white duvet soon warms. The radiator makes encouraging sounds.
* * *
HAVING DRIVEN SEVERAL hours, we want a nearby restaurant for tonight. At the recommendation of the B & B owner, we try Ristorante Pizzeria Barbara, just down the road toward Sant’Angelo. He calls for a table for us. Lucky he did. When we arrive, the very large, well-lit restaurant is totally packed with local families and groups. We are the only lone couple. Clearly, this is where to go on Friday night. Everyone visits from table to table, stopping to greet a dozen people as they enter and exit. The waitstaff knows everyone. We order a liter of house wine and survey the ample menu, finally deciding to try the pizza, since everyone else seems to have done just that. Here’s a sense of community. Here’s where you came after your first communion, for your first date, with your kids, with your grandchildren. One of those important neighborhood classics we all long for. Our place. Where we have our special corner. Where the young girl waiting tables is your dentist’s daughter. As flies on the wall, we participate in this weekend routine that everyone here knows so well. And the pizza is terrific. Margherita with sausage for me, capricciosa, chef’s fantasy, for Ed. Only a small slice of chocolate torte for dessert. No truffles tonight!
* * *
AT BREAKFAST IN a glass sunroom, the owners’ King Charles Spaniel keeps trying to leap to the buffet table. Two other guests, Francesco and Maria Grazia from Venice, sit with us. Over the dog’s antics we strike up a conversation and linger talking to them for a couple of hours. Maria Grazia owns a family palazzo in Mercatello. They’re here because it’s the Day of the Dead. She comes back every year, as Italians do all over Italy, to her hometown to decorate the family graves with flowers. They don’t stay in their palazzo in winter because it’s too cold. They must have a warmer room here than we do, though ours has heated to a bearable temperature. They’re working on repairs, enjoying visiting with family and friends. We swap photos on our phones, talk Venice, talk Tuscany, talk interesting places in Le Marche. I take notes of towns they know. But finally, Francesco says, “My life in Venice is a joke. I am from Naples and I must go to Naples every month. I fly. It’s close. I have to go because it is my reality.”
I’m always drawn to people who are indelibly bonded with a place. Maurizio, a Cortona friend from Naples, says that those who were born and lived there never can be satisfied with anywhere else. Francesco, case in point. Maria Grazia (Mary Grace, such a nice southern name) smiles indulgently. She’s heard it before. Instead, she is wed to Venice and to this small village in Le Marche.
* * *
WE RUSH BACK to Sant’Angleo to the Saturday morning market stalls, where not only truffle vendors are set up, but hundreds of stands selling clothing, vegetables, and every household item imaginable. I buy some shiny marroni, the most prized of the chestnuts. Score! Six euros a kilo. Bins are mounded with walnuts, the preferred Italian nut, and with nespole, which are a popular fruit. When I lived in Palo Alto, we had loquat (also called medlar) bushes that seemed always laden with fruit. Seeing them rot spurred me to make preserves, but as the fruit simmered, the color turned from translucent orange to gooey gray. I should give them another try. Sacks of red potatoes labeled La Patata di Sompiano are obviously a special local potato. Duly noted.
The weekend market weaves down a long street, branching into narrow side passageways, spilling out the gate and onward. It’s vast. As we walk by the cluster of truffle stands, we catch the unmistakable scent. Ed looks askance at the truffle-flavored olive oils on sale. Usually adding something to olive oil means the oil isn’t top quality. A few hunting dogs hang out around the truffle sellers but they aren’t the famous truffle sniffers. “What kind of dog is that? Does he have a good nose for truffles?” I ask one seller about his shaggy friend.
“Bravissimo,” he answers. “Un bastardo, il migliore.” A bastard, the best.
Signs on restaurants shout out today’s specials: pastas with white truffle, vitello al tartufo scorzone, beef with black truffles, and fagioli con cotiche, the robust dish of stuffed pig’s foot and white beans. Trippa and cinghiale, equally full of force: tripe and boar. Those guys manning the tractors out in the wheat fields will feast.
* * *
AFTER SOME TIME happily lost, we find the Romanesque complex Santa Maria dei Servi Extra Muros, outside the walls. There are thirteen altars from the seventeenth century (much younger than the walls themselves), each one donated by a local family. Imagine the competition! Many gifted painters never become household names, and here I see some of them, although I should have known Raffaellino del Colle, whose Annunciation I saw yesterday. I read about him last night. He’s prolific and marvelous, as in Madonna e Bambino con Santi, his work at one altar. A fluid style and colors that wash over you. We’re the only ones in the airy church, so the bored guard accompanies us to the museum wing, assuming the role of guide. From room to
room, he points out what we shouldn’t miss, watching to see if we are as impressed as we should be.
We get to see one of Federico Zuccari’s paintings. I photograph close-up the exquisite hands on several of his saintly figures, and a young boy’s sweet face. He’s thoughtful and staring right at you. Could that be his brother Taddeo?
* * *
IN A PERFECTLY flat field on the edge of town, we find the Domus del Mito, House of Myth. This is mysterious. Archeologists in 1999 uncovered an intact mosaic floor of an A.D. first-century Roman house of one thousand square meters. How could it not have been found before? It lies barely under the ground level. Hasn’t anyone ever plowed this land? What else lies under the grass? The perfectly clear floor plan could be a good one for a house today. The mosaic designs in each room functioned like rugs. Stunning images of Bacchus, Acteon, Medusa, Neptune, some of them colored and others black and white. Then the subjects pivot from mythology. Here’s a hunting and fishing scene with an eel biting an octopus who catches a lobster, all surrounded by geometric patterns. Optical illusion patterns of diamonds and squares surround the central depictions. Of all the many mosaics I’ve seen in Italy, Greece, Spain, this is the most intimate and domestic; the most touching, because it’s easy to imagine the furnished house, the splashing of a fountain, the lives in the rooms.
* * *
BACK IN THE centro and waiting for lunch, when Ed stops for yet another espresso—how does he not fly into the sky?—I wander on along a narrow street. In a doorway, a blur of candlelight catches my eye and I look into a room just below street level. Stepping down, I find myself in a small cave-like space completely covered with photographs. Faces of people, or standing front and center, posed in their finery. All over the walls, framed or thumb-tacked or lying loose on the table. A memory room for the town. There’s a place to kneel, a metal stand where you can light a candle for someone dead. The bride whose eyes brim with life. The boy who fell down a well, the ones who went to war, grandmothers, all gone. Everyone. All the past equally over. And for those who remain, a space on the wall waits for them.
Over a flower-covered altar hangs crucified Christ, He who died for all these smiling faces. The scent of roses, carnations, waxy yellow begonias, blazing pink cyclamen, dried hydrangeas. Hot wax, dank air. Like burying your face in the hair of the young woman who has lifted off her hat.
Orange Flags, Bandiere Arancioni, are awarded to villages deemed especially attractive, historic, and interesting. I’ve listed these small places, most of which I’ve never heard of, in my travel notebook. Tuscany has thirty-eight, Piemonte twenty-six, and Le Marche twenty-one. What a quest—to see them all.
* * *
THAT’S HOW I found Mercatello sul Metauro, right down the road from Sant’Angelo. What a good place to stay for two months, working on a novel, paintings, or an opera. Peace and quiet, a still point on the spinning world. On this late October day, hardly anyone is out, though they must have been earlier, since this is market day. The large piazza, grand enough for a city, is a gift for the fourteen hundred inhabitants. Church, arcaded loggia with shops and cafés, grand and imposing town hall. Branching off, streets are lined with upright palazzi. How such a rural market town became so prosperous, I don’t know. Sheep? Herds clump on many hillsides. Wheat? Probably.
* * *
THE USUAL COMPLEX history from Etruscan settlement to a small coin in the Papal States coffers, and lots of action in between. Across the ages, the town somehow remained intact: clean and proud streets, houses with interesting doors, an arched and pleasing Roman bridge over the river. I keep saying the word idyllic.
It’s quiet. The two museums are closed. No cars to disturb. We walk every street, making up stories about the lucky residents of the palazzi. Which one belongs to Francesco and Maria Grazia, the couple from Venice we met at our B & B? I wish they’d lean out a window and call us, “Come up for a drink.” Would the rooms hold old chests of drawers stuffed with parchment printed with music, photographs of dead babies with cotton stuffed in their noses, wills with names angrily scratched out? I’ve been in many old places where nothing has been disturbed in certain rooms for generations. Hunting clothes in the armadio, stiff nightgowns folded in a chest, a mangy toy elephant on a windowsill.
* * *
WE WIND OUT of town on country lanes through bucolic countryside, wondering if we’re on the wrong road. How can a restaurant be so far from anywhere? But Osteria del Boscaiolo, recommended by Maria Grazia and Francesco, is everyone’s destination for a traditional Sunday pranzo. Boscaiolo is packed. If it were warm, we’d be sitting along the river under a pergola. Instead, we are stuck at a table by the kitchen door. We’re fine. Lucky to be here! A party takes up half a room. Children run outdoors, play on the lawn for a few minutes, then dash in again. A family-run place; the staff seems calm as they race around a capacity crowd.
Much to choose from. A liter of house wine appears as we try to decide what comes after the pasta with truffles. But wait, here’s gnocchi di patata rossa di Sompiano, the red potatoes I saw in the market yesterday. The server says they’re unique to this area, grown in the nearby village of Sompiano without any chemicals. He recommends the town’s festival celebrating this local favorite the last weekend in August, with all the traditional foods of this area and a big emphasis on potato tarts and pastas.
We must try this gnocchi, and, yes, we can have truffles on top. We both think the stuffed pasta with ricotta, ginger, and bacon sounds interesting, so we order that to share, too. Boar, guinea hen, pigeon, duck, hare, veal—I opt for the guinea hen and Ed for the pigeon, one of his favorites. I partially kill my appetite because the bread is too good. Should we have chosen the ravioli with pumpkin and chickpea filling? We continue to go over the menu, speculating about the sweet-and-sour boar, and anticipating the desserts.
Guinea hen, faraona, is fantastic to roast. You hear “tastes like chicken” about everything from frog to rattlesnake. No, faraona doesn’t taste like chicken. It’s richer, more savory, with a hint of the wild, though the birds usually are farm raised. My neighbor keeps a flock and always has one turning (along with pork liver and sausages) in his fireplace when we go over for Sunday lunch. He knows I love the crispy skin and herb-infused taste. Guinea hen was never popular in the South when I was growing up, but it wasn’t unheard of, either. My mother insisted on serving these birds at my older sister’s wedding dinner. Enormously popular and normal in Italy, guinea hens appear in every butcher shop. Compared to plump chickens from good markets in the United States, the guinea hen looks skinny. What they lack in quantity, they compensate in flavor.
This one is tasty. So are the special roasted potatoes that come with it. I liked the gnocchi, too, but couldn’t detect anything particular about the special potato in either. To appreciate the nuance, I’d probably need to taste one simply boiled, served side by side with a common potato.
Not a bite left of the cinnamon gelato with pear and wine sauce.
* * *
AFTERWARD, WE DRIVE a few kilometers to almost-deserted Castello della Pieve. Up, up, an aerie with sweeping views of the river valley. We planned to hike in these verdant hills, but the pranzo knocked out that idea. We stroll the tiny stone village instead. It actually has an inn and restaurant but no one is in sight. A plaque says that here in 1301 Dante Alighieri was sent into exile by Charles of Valois. Who knows why the king of France’s brother was in residence and what this hidden place had to do with the poet. The up-and-down buildings look like a setting for a tale with goblins and fairies and a magic child somehow raised by an ancient woman who casts spells. I twist my ankle. We sit on a wall drinking fizzy water and taking pictures. Then we see a couple, quite normal looking, shaking out a tablecloth and setting out glasses and wine. Maybe everyone is just asleep.
* * *
WE WALK INTO town just after dark but still too early for dinner. Seeing a glow at the end of a
street, we find the cemetery on this night of All Souls’ Day. Every grave is lit with a votive candle, both the graves on the ground and the stacked ones like square drawers in walls. Flowers, everywhere. Mostly yellow chrysanthemums. (I learned long ago never to give that flower to the living.) White cyclamen lit from below glow cold and perfect. On each grave—here and everywhere in Italy—a framed photo of the person below stares back at you.
I’ve never, even on a Halloween dare, been in a graveyard at night—but this one, warm with candle glow and vibrant with flowers, seems friendly. A large moon, gold as a Roman coin, shines down on all. I try a few lines from “Blue Moon.” Ed isn’t sure the dead need my serenade and we walk quickly back into town.
Another meal. We are heroically capable, but even we falter after such a pranzo. “Let’s order sensibly,” Ed says, glancing at all the tantalizing choices. Most Italians enjoy a feast with family or friends on Sunday at lunch, then order pizza, or make an omelet or something easy at home. But here we are. We decide on ravioli with—what else?—truffles, and salad.
See You in the Piazza Page 23