Birra

Most people associate Italy with wine but in fact a lot of beer is consumed here. Years ago Italians consumed wine with their pizza, today most have pizza and a beer. Wine remains a staple of most home meals and of food in restaurants but there has always been a mix of beverages available. There have always been Italians who drink no alcohol and some who prefer soft drinks to wine or beer.

A typical Italian grocery will devote as much shelf space to beer product as to wine. In both cases that is very ample space. Most Italian beers resemble most popular American or European beers, being very mild flavored lagers. A brand popular here, and also available in the US, is Nastro Azzuro or literally Blue Ribbon. A few American brews are available here, most commonly Budweiser (American brewed and imported) and a few micro brewery types. Not surprisingly, Northern European beers are popular the largest selling being Heineken, Beck's and Stella Artois.

What is also available here are Europeans ales and other more full bodied and higher alcohol content beers. My favorites, and very popular here, but never as popular as the Heineken type, are: Trappistes Rochefort 8 and Duvel. The Trappistes beer is brewed in a Belgian monastery and also available with the numbers 6 or 10. The number are not directly related to their alcohol content but do correspond to rising alcohol contents of 7.5%, 9.2% and 11.3%. These are beers that start to have wine like alcohol contents. I usually drink 8 because 10 is not always available and 6 has a similar but more watery taste than 8. I understand that 6 is hard to find in the US but here it seems to be always available and 10 is difficult to find. Rochefort 8 is a full flavored beer that is a joy to drink. Because of its full body I never seem to want to drink as much of it as I would a more watery beer which is probably a good thing considering the 9.2% alcohol content. If you have never tried it, I highly recommend trying one.

When I want a change or when we are having pizza, I drink some Duvel beer, another Belgian ale but this one more like a typical mainline beer. It has an alcohol content of 8.5% and a taste much more like an American beer than the Trappistes Rochefort. It is not a light beer but resembles American beer before light beer became the dominant type. Duvel is a great pizza beer where the Trappistes beers are, in my opinion, too flavorful to accompany pizza. Duvel is stocked pretty much everywhere in Italy, and Europe, but is outside of the popular beer base of the like of Heineken. Duvel's lighter taste makes it easy to drink in large quantity, so you have to beware of its alcohol content.

While these are my favorites, the good news is that most grocery stores stock a pretty full range of Northern European Ales, mostly from small specialty producers. The Belgian, Dutch and Flemish breweries produce some remarkable ales that always surprise me. If you come to Europe on vacation you should not miss the opportunity to try a few.

To Rome and Back

On May 15 we drove to Rome and back. We went to see some old friends who were on part of a Rome-Greece-Turkey-Egypt-Rome tour. It was fun to see them and to be in Rome again. It is easy to forget how shocking it is for new visitors to see ancient Roman ruins on every turn. Our friends were staying at a hotel a couple of blocks from the Colosseum and we wandered around in the area for a short time. I think they had been to Rome before but not for a long time and their prior visit was very short. In any event, it was fun to see how interesting they found the "stuff" everyone in Rome just lives with. We had a nice lunch, talked about old friends and poker and returned in a light rain.

I was interested in the driving statistics. It was a total of 121 miles from our door to their hotel and took exactly 2 hours 15 minutes. That's not too impressive until you consider that it includes driving in Rome. It took about 1 hour and 45 minutes to get to the end of the autostrada inside Rome and another 30 minutes from there to the Colosseum area. The good news about the Roman drive was that it was on a Sunday so the traffic was, by Roman standards, light. Maybe not as bad as many American cities during rush hour but close. We also managed to average 42 mpg which includes some city driving, going through the mountains (while there is a tunnel a little longer than 10,000 meters that everyone refers to as "under Gran Sasso," in fact there is a substantial climb to get to the tunnel) and long stretches at 140 kph (about 85 mph).

Our friends gave us a DVD made and edited by one of them of a get together of a group of former public defenders. We enjoyed watching it when we returned. It's quasi-surrealistic, but very enjoyable, to sit on the Adriatic coast and watch video of the gathering of a group of former colleagues in a park in Ohio. Probably like coming from Ohio to see old Roman stuff, aka ORC, that just sticks out everywhere.

Chocolate

When I think of chocolate, I think of Switzerland. And our recent visit to Switzerland confirmed that they make some of the best artisan quality chocolate available. However, I have never seen a people more obsessed with the making of and eating of chocolate than the Italians.

Any respectable town has a chocolate shop; not just a shop that sells chocolate but a shop that makes chocolate and makes it own molds and candies. Often the chocolate shop is in conjunction with a caffe but often they are free standing.

Chocolate is in everything: breakfast food, cakes, cookies, ice cream and then just pure chocolate bars. Every supermarket has a large section devoted to chocolate; not chocolate candy but pure chocolate bars of every quality, kind and description. Italians think eating chocolate for breakfast is healthy so the sort of breakfast cereal that Americans see as unhealthy is seen as a good breakfast for children.

Perugia has probably the most prominent annual chocolate festival though many other cities also have chocolate festivals. When the Perugia festival is in full swing every local tour agency schedules day long bus trips often with specific tour schedules.
Ferrero SpA is one of the largest corporations in Italy and the family that owns it has recently become identified as the richest family in Italy (though they now live in Monaco). It not only makes Ferrero Rocher chocolates, the little round hazelnut and chocolate balls but also makes Nutella (a national obsession), Tic Tac mints and the whole line of Kinder branded products (while little known in the US, Kinder is a very prominent and wide ranging brand of snacks in all of Europe). Ferrero SpA is privately held, has annual revenues in excess of 6 billion euros, about 9 billion dollars US, employees 21,500 people, produces all of its products on machines engineered and built by its own engineering department, is famous for is obsession regarding the secrecy of is formulas and has never held a press conference.

The prominence of chocolate in Italy is not readily apparent because it is so seamlessly integrated in all aspects of food that it is easily overlooked; however, when one becomes conscious of it and looks for it, its presence is very obvious. I have fallen victim to its overwhelming presence. I always liked chocolate but did not eat it every day. It's difficult to avoid it when a piece or two of extremely good chocolate is frequently placed on your saucer when you have a caffe. That, coupled with its prominent display in every store, has done me in.

Beach and Hill Town

About 2 miles from the beach where we live is a hill town that is about 800 feet above sea level. The view from that town, looking west (i.e. towards Rome) is above. The large mountain is Gran Sasso d'Italia. Please click on a photo to see it full size.



We live near the ocean and near the beach. A very small section of the beach is reserved for fishermen using small boats. It looks like the above. They are the remaining fishermen from an age passing them by. I ride my bike past their landing almost every morning. I have yet to see one who is not very old. In a few years they will be no more. They leave most of their equipment and boats open every night. I am sure someone has disturbed them sometime but I do not know of it. In the late morning their wives gather at this spot an await their return.

Until recent times (which means within my lifetime), few people who lived in the hill town and near it had been to the beach. My best friend took his father to the beach, for the first time, around 1968. He waded in up to his knees and no further. He was wary of the ocean. A huge man, standing 2 meters, he had worked his entire life on his farm and never been to the beach.