Perugia in 7 Bites: Eating in Italy

For our last activity in Perugia, we decided to take a food tour. It was run by an American woman living in Perugia, who was good, and the tour group was made up of us and about 7 Americans, including 4 who were friends of the tour guide, which was a bit weird to be honest. I mentioned this somewhere before on the blog, but one of them worked at Eately in New York and wouldn't stop comparing everything we were eating to which aisle it was sold on back in NYC.

But in general, the tour, which lasted 4 hours and took us to 7 locations to eat and drink around the city, plus a bit of sightseeing and history, was a fun way to spend the day.

Stop 1 - delicious thick hot chocolate (for me) and coffee (for everyone else) with pastries for breakfast

Stop 2 - cheese and proscuitto in an old cellar purportedly frequented by Perugino

Stop 3 - wine and olive oil tasting. It was surprising how grassy and peppery - and bright green - the olive oils were. We bought some at a discount

Stop 4 - truffles. Truffles aren't as bad as normal mushrooms, but that's about the best I can say about them. We went to eat truffle pasta AND to a truffle shop, which is entirely too much truffles if you ask me. The truffle shop, in particular, stank of them. But it was semi interesting hearing about how they find them. This box is apparently worth thousands

My generously-truffled pasta. It was... fine... but I really don't understand why anyone would pay top dollar for this. Tastes of nothing and the truffles scratched my throat on the way down

I evidently forgot to take a photo of our visit to the chocolate shop, where we tasted, amongst other things, balsamic vinegar-filled chocs, but you can't go to Perugia (home of the famous Baci chocolates) and not have chocolate so here's a bonus photo

This doesn't look like much, but it was my favourite treat of the tour. A warm "torta al testo", a local stuffed flatbread speciality filled with sausage and something green. Broccoli rabe? Kale? I forget

Last stop, gelato. Our guide assured us it was perfectly Italian to eat gelato twice a day

Some of the sights of the city we also saw on our walking tour:

Beam me up, Jesus

In the last post, I talked a little about the Rocca Paolina and the nice views from on top. We both completely missed that underneath is a maze of ancient and medieval squares and passageways. There is even an Etruscan gate. We would have completely missed it if not for the tour, duh. And we had the joy of one of our fellow tourists (one of those irritating "I'm Italian" American guys) asking the guide "is there some special symbolism in that sign?". It was one of these...

A perfect day

It's perhaps a little unconventional to nominate a perfect honeymoon day as one in which my sister and a friend tagged along, but last Saturday, we really did have a wonderful day. The weather was great, the scenery spectacular, the food good and the company fun.

Post-wedding, my sister took the opportunity to travel a little in Italy also, before heading back to New Zealand. By coincidence, we happened to be in Bologna on the same day, so in the morning, we set out for Ferrara, set a rendezvous point on the edge of Bologna, and picked up Jess and Jo for a trip to the Opera02 agritourism centre, located in the hills about 50 minutes from Bologna.

Emilia-Romagna, the region which is home to Bologna (and Ferrara, Parma, Modena, etc.) is known above all for its fine produce and cuisine. Amongst its world-famous products are Parma ham, Parmesan cheese, mortadella sausage (the original "baloney"), and Balsamic vinegar, as well as recipes like bolognese sauce, lasagne and tortellini. We knew we wanted to do some food tourism while we were there, and picked Opera02 because it offered two kinds of food tours - balsamic vinegar and lambrusco wine tasting, because it had good restaurant reviews, and for its stunning location in the countryside.

It delivered on all points. We learnt a lot I didn't know about Balsamico tradizionale di Modena. The first thing being that there is such a thing as Balsamico tradizionale di Modena. It turns out that, while the vinegar you can buy in the supermarket labelled "Balsamico di Modena" probably is authentically produced in Modena, it's actually not the super high quality (and expensive), certified "Protected Designation of Origin" stuff. The Tradizionale vinegar is aged longer, produced differently (from cooked grape must only) and must be certified by the governing body and placed in a specific bottle.

We tasted balsamics (by the way, the name comes from "balsam", as it was used to dress wounds and as a medicine for things like sore throats before people thought of it as a condiment) of different ages, plus one which was used as a traditional sweetener before Europeans had refined sugar. You really could taste the difference between them and the standard supermarket stuff. All the vinegars produced at Opera02 were made in the same process, but there was a big price jump between those which had the tradizionale label (aged longer and certified) and those that did not, so all of us opted to buy the 12 year aged but non-certified variety. This is meant to be used as a condiment with strong cheese or meat, rather than as a salad dressing, due to its strong flavour (and price!)

The "battery" where tradizionale vinegar is aged. It starts in the biggest barrel on the right, and then after a year, some is scooped out and put into the next barrel. The sizes decrease as the vinegar loses volume to evaporation, and each barrel is made from a different type of wood to impart different flavours to the balsamic. The barrel on the right can then be topped up again from a large vat.

Part two was a tour of the wine-making part of the operation, where they produce a variety of red and white wines, but particularly sparkling lambrusco wines. I'm no expert on Italian wine, but I gather lambrusco has a bit of a bad rap. A sparkling red is not to everyone's taste, but it was enjoyable, and we all particularly enjoyed the sparkling rosé lambrusco.

Bottles in riddling racks

Next was lunch, on the most beautiful terrace in gorgeous weather. It rained most of the next day, which made the recollection of our lovely lunch all the sweeter. The food was great too.

Our view

Lamp friend

My sister's travelling companion Little Shark trying to steal some dessert

The perfect day continued back in Bologna, but I think I'm going to have to make that a Part Two. Ciao!

Gardians of the Galaxy

Honeymoon Day 4, Wednesday, was all about relaxing and taking it easy on the shores of Lake Garda. Our apartment, a rather bare but spacious and functional space, was located a couple of miles from the pretty town of Malcesine, on the eastern side of the lake. We headed into Malcesine first thing, primarily to wander around and take plenty of photos of the picturesque cobblestoned town and its gorgeous lakeside setting.

After our walk, it was time for lunch at Re Lear, in a cobbled square in the centre of Malcesine. It was quite an unusual place, since it had a quick menu with the likes of pasta carbonara or croque monsieurs alongside a gourmet tasting menu, focused on local "zero kilometre" food. I have some issues with food miles as a concept, as it fails to take into account other factors such as differences in heating or cooling or fertiliser use in different parts of the world, which can mean that your apples from New Zealand are not actually worse for the environment than those from France (yes, some bias for my heavily export-dependent home country as well), but as a tourist experience, I do like the idea of tasting fresh local products, which tend to be made with more care than somewhere that's just microwaving a frozen dinner for undiscerning tourists they know they'll never see again.

My favourite dish, an entrée of sea bass raviolo with rhubarb foam

After lunch, we headed south down the lake to Bardolino, an area reputed for its wine. There are lots of places you can taste wine in the region, but we opted, for convenience, to go to the Zeni wine "museum". It was evident going in that it would be a bit touristy and that the museum was basically just a bunch of old equipment in a room, but sometimes it's okay to do the touristy thing because it's easy and set up for people, as opposed to fetching up at some working vineyard where they're not really expecting tourists and maybe don't speak English. Plus, as it turned out, the staff was really nice and friendly, and it was overall a good experience.

We arrived just before they reopened after lunch, and there was already a large group - of Germans, I swear everybody here is German, we have been counting the non-German cars on the road - waiting outside, so instead of going into the museum, where they offer free wine tasting, we went around the corner to the cellar where you can pay a small fee to taste some of the more expensive wines.

Love among the barrels

We decided to do the "olfactory experience", which consisted of smelling mystery odours in a series of unmarked boxes and writing down our best guess as to what they might be. It was super hard! I knew already I'm not very good at identifying wine tastes and smells, but this confirmed it. Each of us only correctly identified three of the scents. Some I wasn't too far off (I reversed the leather and tobacco samples, for example), but my worst blunder was guessing "red fruits" for coffee! Ironically, I really hate the smell of coffee, so I would have thought I'd get that one for sure. After we were finished smelling, we tasted two glasses of wine and tried to match their profiles with some of the scents we had sniffed.

As our tranquil wine tasting was coming to an end, the big German group appeared downstairs so we absconded up on to the museum/shop level. Here, you got a free tasting glass and could dispense your own wine right from the bottle. Fun for the whole family!

I don't really know a lot about Italian wines, so it was fun to taste a couple (and I'm sure we'll have more opportunities to discover as we go!)

1 hundred dogs, 1 hundred dogs... 1 hundred dogs!

(Does anyone else remember 2 Stupid Dogs, or just me?)

2016 was my 7th trip to the Vitiloire wine festival in Tours and Jules's 3rd. Every year since the first, I've managed to forestall a trip to Chenonceau by promising "maybe next year". This year, I couldn't get out of it any more, so we duly made a detour to the château on our way to Tours.

Don't get me wrong, Chenonceau is one of the fabled châteaux of the Loire that people dream their whole lives of visiting. It's just this was my fourth visit (trip one, two and three), so you can fairly count it crossed off the old bucket list. But Jules had never been, so finally we went along to tick it off his list too.
 

They have actually opened up a new part of the château since my last trip - the second story of the bridge across the Loire that you can see in the photo above. It had quite a lot more information on the history of the château through the ages, so trip not wasted. My favourite sign in the new exhibition:

"Hey, fish! Your mum smells like cabbage!"

Other than that, it's fair to say we did a relatively whirlwind tour, trying to dodge the inevitable coach-loads of Russian and Chinese tourists.

From Chenonceau, it was on to the main event in Tours. Our group this year was a little smaller, with my sister and my friend Caroline having moved to New Zealand (in separate incidents), but my sisters' friends have got such a taste for it that several of them came along anyway! I didn't go quite as crazy as the year before (since we still had a few bottles left over), but we acquitted ourselves pretty well. 

Ready for wine

Me and the British (slash Kiwi) contingent

Mel very proud of her wine purchases and her wine boy who had to run around after her carrying them

As you can see, the weather for the festival was pretty good, but by Sunday evening, the heavens had opened, and on Monday it rained solidly the entire way home across France and Belgium. I don't know if it registered with people outside France, but that week saw flooding across big areas of the country. We were lucky to get home, because the next day I saw friends on facebook posting pictures of some of the motorways we travelled home on completely washed out.

So it wasn't the greatest weather to go and do a partially outdoor activity, but we forged ahead with our plans to visit another of the dwindling list of major châteaux of the Loire I haven't yet been to. Namely, Cheverny, the inspiration behind Marlinspike Hall in the Tintin comics.

Walking in the footsteps of Tintin (and Snowy!)

Hergé lopped off the wings on the sides to make it a bit less grand

I promptly forgot pretty much everything about the inside of the château, but looking back through my photos, it has some pretty sumptuous rooms. It's not huge, but I'd rather a small but pretty château than a huge empty one, (looking at you, Palais des Papes). 

The hall was covered in vignettes from Don Quixote

Apart from the Tintin collection (assiduously promoted in the gift shop and also in an exhibition that we didn't visit since you had to pay extra), the big attraction of Cheverny is seeing the feeding of the more than one hundred hunting dogs which live there. We got in position fairly early, but even with the rain we had to stand way over on one side, so I imagine it gets really crowded on a nice day in the middle of summer. As it was, I got constantly dripped on by the umbrella of the woman next to me, but at least we got a reasonable view of the dogs.

There was a lot of waiting around, and then more time spent herding the dogs out of the yard to clean it, spreading the food, and then the master made them all line up patiently for a while before they were allowed to eat. The dogs were pretty well-behaved up to that point, and then when they got the signal to go eat, it was a total scrum. They all climbed over each other to get to the food, some even doing a comical handstand over the backs of the other dogs to make sure they got some. Which was just as well, since in under a minute, all the meat was gone. There was at least one thin and presumably timid dog who got fed separately to fatten her up, but otherwise, you snooze you lose.

The dogs and their master before feeding time

My wet sleeve and I go in for a pat

Waiting to get fed (video doesn't work on mobile, sadly)

 As usual, it was a great blend of visiting new and familiar tourist attractions, catching up with friends, and - of course - drinking a lot of wine. I especially like the new little tradition we've had the last couple of years of stopping off somewhere on the way to/from Tours. It really turns a long weekend into a proper mini holiday.