Simple Italy

Celebrating Your Inner Italian

Southern Italian Desserts

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Crostata al Gelo di Mellone (watermelon pudding tart) from Sicily graces the book's cover.

Crostata al Gelo di Mellone (watermelon pudding tart) from Sicily graces the cover.

I don’t know why Rosetta Costantino’s family emigrated from the small southern Italian hill town of Verbicaro to the San Francisco Bay Area when she was 14. But I am grateful they did.

Had Costantino remained in her native Calabria, I doubt I would be salivating over her new book Southern Italian Desserts. Written with Jennie Schacht, it is a meticulously researched cultural accounting. The book includes 76 recipes for traditional sweets from the regions of Calabria, Campania, Basilicata, Puglia, and Sicily. Some of the pastries, such as Cannoli, are familiar to English-speaking bakers but many, such as Biscotti di Ceglie (almond cookies filled with cherry preserves), are revelations.

With photography by Sara Remington and Ten Speed Press’s signature high-quality production values, the volume is as visually appealing as its recipes are alluring.(Ten Speed also published Costantino’s first book My Calabria.)

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Marcella Hazan

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I never met Marcella Hazan but we spent many an hour together in my kitchen.

Hazan, 89, died Sunday at her home in Longboat Key, Fla. Her beloved husband, Victor Hazan, was with her.

Authenticity and simplicity were the foundations of Marcella Hazan's cookbooks.

Authenticity and simplicity were the foundations of Marcella Hazan’s cookbooks.

The title of her 2008 memoir Amarcord (“I remember” in the dialect of her native Romagna) sums up her career: Marcella Remembers: The Remarkable Life Story of the Woman Who Started Out Teaching Science in a Small Town in Italy, but Ended up Teaching America How to Cook Italian. And teach she did with her first volume The Classic Italian Cookbook and six subsequent titles.

She received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the James Beard Foundation in 2000 and the International Association of Culinary Professionals in 2004, as well as an Italian knighthood. Victor was her inspiration, lifelong collaborator, and writing partner (she wrote in Italian and he translated), himself an authority on Italian food and wine.

Love was at the heart of all she did. When she met Victor, an American who had been born in Italy and lived there as a child, he had returned to Italy to write and to eat. She was a scientist with no interest in food or cooking.

As she told Linda Wertheimer in this 2010 NPR interview, “He was always talking about food. For me, a young woman, you think that someone who courts you would talk about other things, not food. Especially when you’re not interested in food.”

We all thank Victor for his ardor and persistence. Marcella and Victor’s son, Giuliano Hazan, is stirring the pot for the next generation.

Do you have memories of Marcella, her cookbooks, or classes?

On the Truffle Trail in Le Marche

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This article first appeared in the November 2011 issue
 of the award-winning subscription travel newsletter Dream of Italy

By Sharon Sanders

Acqualagna truffle hunter Giorgio Remedia assesses his treasure.

Acqualagna truffle hunter Giorgio Remedia assesses his treasure.

Acqualagna, Italy–Two dozen miles southwest of the Adriatic coastal city of Pesaro, the placid plain morphs into picturesque hills near Acqualagna with 5,000-foot-high Monte Nerone and other peaks in the distance. The terrain gets rugged quickly.

Our bus struggled up a winding dirt road to deliver us to truffle hunter Giorgio Remedia’s azienda. Although we’d been advised to have proper footware, the sight of Remedia’s knee-high rubber waders gave some of us pause. He had a no-nonsense demeanor that could perhaps be attributed to his other job as chief-of-police in Acqualagna.

Remedia explained that this area is rich in truffles. He said that they’re a symbiotic fungus that grow on the roots of oak and poplar trees. The Acqualagna area yields different varieties of tartufo bianco (white truffle) and tartufo nero (black truffle) almost year round.

This community is seriously all about truffles. It’s said that one-fourth of the residents are qualified truffle hunters and 70 percent of Italy’s truffle dogs are trained here. The white truffle is celebrated each autumn with the Fiera Nazionale del Tartufo Bianco. This year’s event begins at the end of October.

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Il Postino

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The late Massimo Troisi with Il Postino co-star Maria Grazia Cucinotta who plays Beatrice.

The late Massimo Troisi with Il Postino co-star Maria Grazia Cucinotta who plays Beatrice.

Have you ever been convinced that you’ve seen a movie only to find out that you hadn’t?

That happened to me with the Academy Award-winning Il Postino. Recently watching the DVD from Netflix, I realized to my chagrin that I had probably seen the trailer but not the entire film. For years, I’ve catalogued it in my mind as a standard Italian sex romp (doubtless because of the voluptuous actress on the poster) but that’s not what it is.

The film was made in 1994 and released in the U.S. the following year. Directed by Brit Michael Radford, it is the story of Mario Ruoppolo, the postman who delivers letters to Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda who is exiled on an Aeolian island. The sweet story portrays poetry blossoming inside the soul of the simple postman. With Neruda’s inspiration, he wins his Beatrice.

Reading reviews and features about the film, I learned that Massimo Troisi, the Neapolitan comic actor and director who played the postman died only 12 hours after filming was completed.

Troisi was plagued by heart problems since childhood and doctors warned him when filming began that he needed a heart transplant. He chose to go ahead with the work. He had become captivated with the novel Burning Patience by Antonio Skarmeta on which the screenplay is based.

Maria Laurino reported in The New York Times, “Il Postino was the 12th film for Troisi, who also directed five of the movies he starred in, and his death shook Italy. His devoted public, who had no idea that he was seriously ill, showed up by the thousands at his funeral in San Giorgio a Cremano, the small town outside Naples where he was born.

“Troisi had this ability to express the theatrical form of living that Neapolitans have in general and then translate it to the theater,” said Giuliana Bruno, a professor at Harvard University and author of Street Walking on a Ruined Map, a study of Neapolitan film. “It’s not just acting out language, but using facial expressions and body language. The soul of the people comes out in his work.”

 

Italy . . . A Dream Come True

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Civitella

Castello Civitella Ranieri, near Gubbio, is now a foundation for the arts.

By Patricia DeBellis

Italy, for me, has always been a catalyst for my dreams. I was a freshman in high school in California when I met my first foreign-exchange student and from then on my dream was to be a foreign exchange student.

This dream came true when–as an alternate for an American Field Service foreign-exchange summer scholarship (my classmate, Fred, had been picked to go to France)–I was told that an Italian family wanted a student. This was unprecedented.

Our local AFS chapter had never sent two students abroad. But, with the backing of my wonderful teachers and friends who contributed to the “Send Patty to Italy Fund,” off I went to live my dream!

This was only the beginning.

As an adult, my dreams continued to materialize. I was teaching Italian, French, and Spanish languages at Muhlenberg College when one semester I invited my French Civilization students to my house for croissants and cafe au lait.

Language professor Patricia DeBellis (left) savored 15 summers at a fifteenth-century castle in Tuscany.

Language professor Patricia DeBellis (left) savored 15 summers at a fifteenth-century castle in Umbria.

One of the students, Jennifer Downey, noticed a hand-painted ceramic plate in my kitchen. She shrieked with excitement and asked, “Is that a Rampini?” I said I wasn’t sure–I’d chosen it for its medieval knights design.

I wondered how a French major knew of this ceramics maker in Umbria. She explained that a friend had invited her for several summers to visit and stay in a fifteenth century castle not far from the small town where the Rampini family produce their maiolica.

The spring semester was ending and when Jennifer came to my office for part of the final exam, she brought a postcard of the castle and asked if I would like her to ask her friend to invite me and my husband! I gasped in excitement and said: “Is the Pope Polish?”

Jennifer Ursula

Student Jennifer Downey (left) pictured with Castello patron Ursula Corning, made Patricia DeBellis’ Italian dream come true.

In 1982 he was and we were invited!
 Our hostess was Ursula Corning, a delightful, intelligent, multi-lingual British-American who loved people and cats. Jack and I arrived at the fifteenth century Castello Civitella in time to celebrate our eighteenth wedding anniversary!

The cook, who every day rolled out the pasta on a marble slab, produced a beautiful cake with two entwined hearts. After a Spumante toast, we headed to nearby Gubbio (where the Rampini plate originated) where we attended a candlelight concert in the cloister of the thirteenth century church.

Patrizia Cicitella Road Sign

For Patricia DeBellis, Civitella Ranieri was the road taken.

This was the wonderful beginning of a fifteen-year-long invitation to a magical, artistic and educational summer stay. Is it any wonder that I love Italy?

 

Where did your Italian dream come true, or, where would you like it to come true?

Palazzo Donati Italian Holiday Tours

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At Palazzo Donati, you'll experience the gracious architecture of a seventeenth-century palazzo with modern amenities.

At Palazzo Donati, you’ll experience the gracious architecture of a seventeenth-century palazzo with modern amenities.

By Walter Sanders

My friend Luisa Donati emailed the other day with delightful stories about a group of Texans whom she’d hosted at Palazzo Donati. I envy those Lone Star ladies.

Last autumn, I stayed at the seventeenth-century Palazzo Donati and felt instantly at home. Not because of any noble lineage but because the town of Mercatello sul Metauro, where the Palazzo anchors part of the main piazza, welcomes visitors while maintaining its own rich authenticity.  The town serves a thriving agricultural area in the off-the-beaten-tourist-track region of Le Marche east of Tuscany.  From Lina, the pasta queen who took down British TV chef Jamie Oliver, to the (not-so) amateur chefs who comprise the cooking club Academia del Padlot, good food and good times thrive in Mercatello sul Metauro.

Luisa works with small groups to create customized itineraries. No two groups have the exact same experience. Here’s a sampling of what she can create for you. Contact Lusia and tell her SimpleItaly sent you!