Stage 9: Biking by Queen Amidala's Palace

I would like to thank Disney's Grand Californian for having speedy wi-fi, and for having Universal Sports on its cable lineup. I'm also very late to thank Universal Sports for airing every Giro stage live, so I can watch it in the morning before I go to work.

Tough stage today. Loved watching the sports director hanging out of the sunroof of the Saxobank team car shouting at stage winner Sorenson "Allez, allez, allez!"

Tomorrow's stage goes from Frosinone in the province of Lazio down into Campagna skirting Naples, Pompeii and Vesuvius to end in Cava de' Tirreni, which is above the Amalfi Coast. Should have some very challenging climbs, and hopefully the fog will lift so we can see some fantastic helicopter shots. The Giro will roll through Caserta, where in 1752 the Bourbon king of Naples built a palace to rival Versailles. It doubled for Queen Amidala's palace in the ill-fated Episodes 1, 2, and 3, which I refuse to rant about here. Also, it was a staircase in the Vatican in Mission Impossible III, and in Angels and Demons.

The real history of Rome and the Vatican is so much more interesting than Dan Brown even begins to suggest in that book. I'm reading this great biography of Lucrezia Borgia by Sarah Bradford. Picture this: the Pope's daughter by a previous mistress living with the Pope's current mistress in a fancy palazzo somewhere near the Vatican while all of the crowned heads of Europe send their ambassadors to shower the women with jewels and silks. Because they, above all others, have the ear of the Pope. Imagine the Pope deciding who gets to rule the Kingdom of Naples. All of this happened. Fantastic read! I'll talk more about it when there isn't so much cycling on TV....

So many kinds of food and drink to choose from inspired by tomorrow's Giro stage, but today I'm feeling the Limoncello from Sorrento, a little town on a spit of land reaching out across the bay of Naples toward the island of Capri. The lemons there are a specific variety and the soil is ancient volcanic earth--the gift of Vesuvius. The result is a thick-skinned lemon with an extremely flavorful peel. It only grow here. These lemons are special--they make the best Limoncello in the world. It's not too sweet, not too bitter. Put a bottle in your freezer and open it to sip on a summer's day. It's the essence of the Amalfi coast, the ultimate luxury vacation spot, where I believe Sophia Loren has a home.

To me this area brings to mind images of film stars of the sixties. White Capri pants, which I just can't own because they are so easy to stain, and I never avoid spilling stuff on them. Little gladiator sandals with a silk scarf and big Jackie O sunglasses. To me the Amalfi coast has a Burt Bacharach soundtrack with a Carol Bayer Sager lyric, sung by that girl with the guitar in Blake Edwards' "The Party."

You just have to see it before you die. The cliffs are a crumbly gray stone encrusted with green and almost look like they belong in a Chinese mountain painting. But the houses decorated with blue and yellow tile, the beaches, the men in loafers and woven shirts with complicated pastel stripes. The bougainvillea and wisteria climbing over endless staircases. The church domes with iridescent colorful tile patterns like exotic lizard skin.

What to eat there? Seafood. Above is a picture of a nice octopus salad with citrus. So yummy and refreshing.

Ahhhhhhh......

Viva Italia! Viva il Giro!

A domani!

Stage 8: Umbria

Watching stage 7 and the announcer is saying they are on the strade bianche for the first time ever in the Giro. Strade bianche means "white roads" and what they are is dirt and gravel--the kind of surface you had when they held the Giro in those first few years, and paved roads were scarce in Italy. The first Giro d'Italia started on May 13, 1909, which is why last year's edition was called "il Centenario." It's muddy on the strade bianche, though, and in Tuscany the roads aren't white but a reddish brown. It's going to be tough for any riders who haven't raced on this surface. Some of these riders have cyclocross experience, which will come in handy. Cyclocross is like a cross between road biking, mountain biking and some kind of steeplechase. It from time to time involves getting off the bike and carrying it over obstacles. Today the course is like the cycling equivalent of clay courts in the rain. Except I think in tennis when it rains they don't play on clay courts. I could be wrong.

One thing's for sure, though, with this rain, every rider will end the day with a big muddy stripe on his butt. Fenders add weight, but today they could use some.

Tomorrow's stage takes the riders through many of the places I visited this past October. Umbria, with its hills and mountains, tiny lovely hill towns, each with its own churches, many of which have frescoes by the greats of the Renaissance. The dukes of Perugia, the capital city of Umbria, were in the Renaissance, the bloodthirsty Baglioni, who underwrote a gorgeous chapel in Spello, where there is this fabulous enoteca. The owner buttonholed us and poured for all 5 of us 3 glasses of the most amazing wine I've ever tasted. And out came the paper-thin slices of salumi and cheese. So delicious. Salumi is the Italian word for cured meats, and this includes the prosciuttos and the culatella, the bologna, the mortadella, and the filetto di cinghiale--a cured loin of wild boar. Sliced thin it is ruby red and transparent, and so so good!

No, you can't buy it in the USA. But if you go to Umbria, take a side trip away from the more usual sites like Assisi and Perugia and go to Norcia, which is famous for having the best pork butchers in all of Italy. The main drag is lined by shops selling cured pork, black truffles, cheese, wine, lentils, and pasta, and you can sample many many kinds of cured meat, some you won't find anywhere else, even in Italy. In Umbria they have truffles year round. In early fall they still have the summer variety, which is much less expensive than the more aromatic winter kind.

And don't forget, outside of Norcia, each village has its own kinds of cheeses and meats. We once went to Orvieto, which is a great city to visit because it's next to a train station, and the train will take you to Rome in only about an hour. Orvieto has a great history and was a refuge for the Pope, Clement VII, I believe, when Rome was sacked in 1527 by Protestant troops. The Pope ruled from Orvieto, and sponsored public works, including the building of a deep well of St. Patrick so he could have good drinking water. Orvieto is on the flat toop of a mesa and was an Etruscan town conquered brutally by the Romans, who relocated all of the villagers to another town. But the filetto di cinghiale we brought back from this place! It lasted maybe 4 days because we couldn't stop eating it! Smokey, delicate, lean, flavorful. The wild boar wander the hills around Orvieto eating the plentiful hazelnuts. What a place! Umbria is like grown-up foodie Candyland.

And the wine. Montefalco is another small hill town right in the alluvial plain in the center of the region. It's famous for a kind of wine called Sagrantino, which is a unique variety of grape only grown in this region. You can pay about $40 for a half-bottle at Joan's on Third here in L.A., but when we were there, we found we prefered a blend of Sagrantino and Montefalco rosso. Sagrantino tastes a bit like Syrah, but it's sweeter and more minerally, so blending it with what I suspect is our friend Nebbiolo smooths it out and brings out its best characteristics.

In Norcia we had a plate of sliced salumi and it had maybe 9 different kinds of meats, including head cheese, which I actually liked! I always like the weird stuff. Why is that? Norcia is a gorgeous town--it was a Roman country village where Cicero had a home, and where Virgil's family came from. It would be a great place to spend a week in winter. You can ski around there, and then hang out eating meat and cheese and drinking wine by an ancient fireplace. Saint Benedict was born here.

So many places I could talk about near tomorrow's stage, but finally, it goes by the Cascate delle Marmore, which is a Roman-built waterfall. The technology still works, and they turn the waterfall off on Mondays, which was too bad, because that was the day we tried to visit in October, but we were on our way to Poggio Bustone because I wanted to paraglide over the beautiful lakes and valleys on my birthday week. And I did. I can't even describe what that was like. Stepping off the mountain and into the void, feeling feather-light, like a lot of dreams I've had.

Ahhh Umbria. I must say, I'm a little verklempt.

Viva il Giro! Viva Italia!

Look at Cadel Evans' face all covered with mud! Today's stage is brutal! It's going to be a big game changer because Nibali crashed with no team car in sight! And will they ever wash all the mud out of that pink jersey?

A domani!

Stage 7: Carrara to Montalcino

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!

Stage 6: Too many choices!

So great to be out of Amsterdam. Not only does today's stage look glorious, but tomorrow's promises so many choices of food and drink, I'm getting dizzy!

Oh, and one more thing about Novi Ligure, the finishing town of today's stage. It was where Fausto Coppi, legendary Italian cyclist, was working as a butcher's assistant when he went pro. He won the Giro several times, and was also the epitome of Italian heroism and style. When Lance was planning to come back to the sport and do the Giro for the first time last year, he looked at pictures of Coppi to see how to comport himself in Italy. There's a museum in Novi Ligure--Il Museo di Campionissimi--that commemorates his exploits and those of other great Italian cyclists. How could I not love a land that adores its cyclists so? Magical place.

Tomorrow, the race winds its way from Fidenza village, over rolling hills to the sea and Marina di Carrara. From this marina must have sailed the ships carrying massive blocks of white stone hand-selected by Michelangelo for his slaves, for the David, for the massive tomb of Pope Julius II, which was never completed on the original planned scale because Michelangelo was forced to take a side job he felt ill-suited his gifts--the painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. On the roads near Carrara white marble dust covers everything, and I think it was 2 years ago the Giro went directly through there and the riders finished looking like they'd ridden through a flour mill.

Fizenza Village is very near Parma, where they make some of the best cured ham and cheese in the world. You can buy real pieces of parmigiano reggiano at Costco, which is a pretty good deal, and they have some pre-sliced prosciutto di parma by Citerio, which is also the real stuff. Anything else is not really the prosciutto you want to be eating. It's divine wrapped around little balls of honeydew melon, and I bet it will pair very nicely with this slightly fizzy red from Parma. They grow wine grapes in the hills around the city, the Colli di Parma. Parma is part of the Emilia Romagna, which is the food capital state of Italy. The wines from this area taste like nothing else you've tried. I'm still in love with a Lambrusco from Medici Ermite they stock at Silver Lake Wine--the Concerto. So good, and I can taste it now.

Marina di Carrara is fairly close to the Cinque Terre, Porto Venere and the Gulf of the Poets, so loved by Lord Byron and friends. I went jetskiing with my mom once there, a decidedly unpoetic moment, but loads of fun. The Cinque Terre is 5 adorable ancient villages, each with its own dialect where they fish and make wine. Wine from there was found in the ruins of Pompeii. The pesto there is fantastic, being so close to Genoa, where it was invented. You can hike and take trains between all the villages, and there is a ferry that covers the area as well, which gives you great views of the gorgeous cliffs.

Above: Top to bottom, Fausto Coppi, Vino di Colli di Parma, Proscuitto di Parma, Porto Venere, Marina di Carrara

Watching the Italian feed of the TTT. Liquigas looks good! Majestic glory of this sport....

Chocolate and Barolo in Piemonte

Today is the Team Time Trial from rainy Savigliano to Cuneo. Cuneo has been a big cycling town and, in fact was a destination in last year's Tour de France and part of the reason Alejandro Valverde, who was banned from cycling in Italy, could not do the Tour last year. From the sky Cuneo reveals its orderly grid, which leads me to believe it has a history as a Roman outpost and trading town, sitting on a road leading through the Alps into France.

Getting sunny in Cuneo now, and Cadel Evans' team hangs on to first place. British Team Sky is still out on the course, though, and Garmin hasn't even started. Garmin has something to prove today, since their General Classification contender, the unfortunate and charming Christian Vandevelde, broke his collarbone and had to abandon the Giro for the second year in a row on the third stage. Which is so sad! Get better fast, Christian!

Tomorrow's stage is still in Piemonte, the most northwesterly region of Italy, and the most influenced by French culture and language. Folks from Piemonte often roll their 'R's in the back of the throat just like the French, and the closer you get to the border, the more towns have two names--one in Italian, and one in Piemontese, which is more colored by French. The city of Turin is a good example--'Turin' is the Piemontese name, and 'Torino' is the Italian name. Which can create confusion for us English speakers.

Tomorrow's stage finishes in Novi Ligure, which has its own chocolate factory! In almost any Italian airport, they sell gianduiotto, which is soft chocolate and finely ground hazelnut candy in a distinctive triangular cross-sectioned shape. Pick up a box to bring home to your friends. It's usually a bit darker and less sweet than the flavor of Nutella. We can thank Piemonte for this kind of chocolate, and this region still does well selling it to the rest of the world. Yes, it's my second day to suggest a chocolate pairing with a stage, but don't worry, there's more variety to come. And today's wine is Barolo, so how bad could it be? Barolo is the priciest Italian wine these days, because of its huge flavors and ability to be nicely aged for years. And it comes from Piemonte, where the uber-expensive white truffles are also found.

Someday I want to go to the truffle festival in Alba, which is in the early fall, and watch fancy restauranteurs from around the world haggle for massive funghi. Imagine the aromas! The ferragamos and fancy cashmere sweaters! The truffle shaved over my pasta! The local prices on Barolo! Ahhhhhhh.....

Team Sky is approaching the finish line for the TTT, and it looks like they might take the lead and win today. The Brits should be proud! It's close! But they have it! If they hold onto this, I think it's Bradley Wiggins in Pink at the end of today, and Sky will have to work hard to hold onto it. They have been looking so strong, so it would be awesome to watch them try.

Viva il Giro! Viva Italia! A domani!

Watch Novi Chocolate Ad

Buy Barolo at Bevmo

Stage 3: Under the Middleberg Sun

Turned on the TV this morning and there were 2.5k to go! Nice sunny finish in lovely Middelberg. The town makes me think of the THE STUDENT PRINCE starring Mario Lanza. Wasn't that set in Middelberg, a university town? No, that was Heidelberg, Germany. The pink confetti drifts down over the head of the GC leader. Sunshine makes all the difference and Middelberg is a series of postcards. I don't like this guy, but I like that he speaks so many languages.

Tomorrow will be a rest day as the race moves back to Italy--to Piemonte for the Team Time Trial, which is a beautiful kind of stage, and I can't wait. A certain number of riders from each team must finish together, so they travel in flocks wearing their matching kit, taking turns on the front and peeling off in formation. Any grand tour without a Team Time Trial is missing something.

The stage will be 30-something k and will finish in Cuneo, where they make a rum-filled chocolate called cuneesi al rhum, shown above. I would try this with a nice dessert wine from Piemonte--red and slightly fizzy, Brachetto. Drop some strawberries into a glass. Yum!

Buy Brachetto d'Aqui from Bevmo

A domani!