Down and Out in Denver

View of the Ponte Vecchio from the Uffizi Gallery, Firenze

Forgive my silence of late (not that you’ve probably noticed, Alastair has been so busy in his postings), but I have been abroad.  In Italy, to be specific, with mi famiglia (that is about the extent of my Italian).  La famiglia di Blake rented a house on a working vineyard in the hills northeast of Siena (courtesy of la mamma di Blake).  We spent a couple nights in Firenze and then rented a car and drove south. When we arrived at what we had somewhat facetiously been calling “the villa,” we realized the description was not far off.  It was a house on the property of an actual eighteenth-century villa.  We were met by the scion of the wine-making family, who acted as caretaker for the rental properties. Pietro came in from a nearby field he had been tending, and, dear reader, he was seriously cute.  He was also a former semi-professional tennis player. Were I a heterosexual teenage girl, this would have all the makings of a summer blockbuster starting Amanda Seyfried. We would have had a romance complete with moonlit chases in fields of grapes and chaste makeout sessions in abandoned medieval castellos on winding lanes.  It would have ended in heartache when I returned stateside, but then Pietro would have…  I digress.  Instead let me share some of my observations on the pluses and minuses of Italia.

The pluses:

1. Gelato.  In all of its many wonderful flavors.  My two favorites — which, I kid you not, I consumed every single day — are caffè and cioccolato.

2. Wine.  As I believe I mentioned, we were staying on a working vineyard and while we consumed plenty of wine just about every time we ate (including lunches), we also got a tour of the vineyard and a private wine-tasting with Pietro’s older brother, Alessandro, who heads up the vineyard.  Though it is purely coincidental to Alastair’s recent post on the wonders of the rosé, I brought back a bottle of the very stuff that I look forward to sharing with him soon.

3. Wine, part due.  We mostly drank red — we were in Chianti, after all — but ordering a glass of house white in Italia you can be almost guaranteed you will not be served a dreaded, oaky, buttery California chardonnay.  It’s pinot grigio and soave and orvieto all the way.

4. Acqua gassata.  I hate water.  I need flavor or carbonation to drink the stuff.  And so I love that at all restaurants in Italy you are automatically given the choice of acqua naturale OR gassata.

One of the tamer moccasins at Maledetti Toscani

5. Footwear.  The shoes are gorgeous.  From the moment we landed at Roma’s Fiumicino airport, I knew I was in a different land because people were just so well shod.  The leather!  The stitching! The colors!  The shapes!  Women and men, boys and girls.  I picked up two hand-stitched pairs in a shop in Montelpulciano called Maledetti Toscani.  Check out their men’s selection here.

6. Eyewear.  Ditto above (minus the leather and the stitching).  The colors!  The shapes!  Italians just are not constrained by trying to blend in and the men especially don’t seem to be super concerned with appearing masculine so they take chances that straight American men would see as “gay.”

7. Which brings me to my final point.  Italian men wear clothes that fit.  And while some of them are tight (even overly so at times), this is not my real point.  They buy clothes in their actual sizes, not in the American straight man’s baggy large and extra-large.  This is bad in one way because one of the American homosexual male’s tried and true methods for identifying his brethren is to look at the fit of clothing and Italian men (like many of Europeans) are thus confusing.  But it is good for two even more important reasons: (a) it is so easy to find clothes that actually fit!  Stores there have real size small and even the equivalent of an extra small.  (b) Italian men look good in their fitting clothes!

Minuses:

1. The bread was surprisingly awful.  Dry, tasteless, floury.  As my mother remarked at one dinner, “And they’re  really not that far from France, you’d think they could figure it out.”  Indeed.

2. The showers (or lack thereof).  Many European homes still insist on those cumbersome bathtubs with handheld shower heads that you have to manipulate yourself while trying not to flood the whole room.

That might be it.  And when you’ve got a view like this one to come home to every night, complaints seem foolish:

View from the porch