Saturday morning, starting in Carrara, aforementioned home of the finest white marble in the world, the Giro plunges into the loveliest rolling hills and gem-like hill towns of Tuscany, through Pisa, Volterra and finishing up in Montalcino. If you were to sign up for a guided bike tour here, it will be intermediate level, which means you'll face significant hills every single day, and you'll probably be climbing up to your final destination, be it Siena, Volterra, San Gimignano, and so on.
Tuscany is the only part of Italy in which I will order steak. In that southwestern tip, reaching out over the Tyrrhenian Sea toward Elba, is the Maremma, where they ranch cattle. The fiorentina is a 3-inch steak that has been dry-aged and grilled over a wood fire so it's black on the outside and pink in the middle. It could feed a small family, so only order one for your party, because if you ask for a doggie bag, Italians have no idea what you are talking about.
When Stoney and I were in Italy together for the first time in January 2006 we took a trip away from our 2-week apartment in Rome to visit Florence for a couple of days, using Amex points to stay in Villa Cora, a massive old Baroque palazzo near the Boboli gardens. We went for drinks and snacks to the Hotel Bernini, where the waiter so loved chatting to us and practicing his English. We wanted a reasonable bottle of red, and he recommended Brunello. Unfortunately, this kind of wine has been discovered here, and it is no longer cheap. Not as deep and tannic as Chianti, or its fancy Super-Tuscan cousins, it's a friendly easy-to-quaff wine that is 100% San Giovese, but a clone local to Montalcino originally, and unlike many other wines from this area, as a type of wine, it is only as old as the 19th century. It's now the priciest DOCG wine in Tuscany.
They sell various versions of it at Bevmo. The Castello Banfi version is pretty nice. Castello Banfi-- the original castle--is in Tuscany, but since they also make Prosecco and seem to be in just about every liquor store in L.A., I'm thinking they are part of a massive consortium. Below is a link to a fancier Brunello at Bevmo, from a smaller producer, with some fancy high points--95!
Buy a Fancy Brunello di Montalcino from Bevmo
I fondly remember our first day in Florence, after getting off the train at Santa Maria Novella and making our way through a Siberian gale over the Ponte Vecchio to the other side of the Arno. We found a restaurant with a view of the bridge with its lovely little jewelry shops hanging out over the river. I ordered just a soup--Papa al pomodoro, which is made with day old bread ground up, local cheese, tomatoes, and some fresh basil. Totally simple and local peasant food. And I ordered it with a glass of a Super-Tuscan. It came in a big stemmed glass with little concentric steps at the bottom, and the waitress poured a little bit of it into the bowl and rolled it around to prepare the glass to properly aerate the wine. It was so good. And the Christmas after that we bought the same glasses for our kitchen.
But to me, this is Tuscany--great peasant food with super-fancy wine. An outrageously rich payload of art and architecture, created by a grasping and greedy patronage--the Medici--so feared and hated by their equally greedy aristocratic peers as to inspire at one point an assassination plot between the Pope and the Duke of Urbino. Exquisite beauty, sublime humanism hand in glove with medieval barbarity. A bloody bistecca fiorentina paired with a transcendent Sassicaia. Great stuff!
Viva il Giro! Viva Italia!
A domani!
No comments:
Post a Comment