As part of a “youth happening,” the “BB Band” came to Lecco, complete with dancers. The music was live and very good, and the youth happening turned into an all-ages event with everyone enthusiastically dancing. Who says today’s young people don’t appreciate good music?
Category Archives: Italy
There Goes the Neighborhood
You may have heard that George Clooney owns a villa on Lake Como. He’s over on the Como/Menaggio side, about as far from Lecco as you can get and still be on the same lake, so we are not exactly rubbing elbows with him. But it seems that his fancy friends have now taken a fancy to “our” lake.
George has bought the two villas flanking his own, partly for privacy, partly to have room for all his guests. Brad Pitt and various other luminaries were up here a few months ago filming “Oceans Twelve,” and local rumor has it that Mr. Pitt fell in love with the place and is seeking a home somewhere in the Varenna area – a good deal closer to us.
Richard Gere is also supposedly looking for a villa somewhere on the lake. Well, none of these is among my favorite actors, but they’re not bad additions to the scenery hereabouts, so I guess I won’t complain. Especially if Brad Pitt goes boating in bathing briefs…
Italian Recipes: Torta di Pane (Bread Cake)
This is a good way to use old, dry bread. The recipe is more or less one that I scribbled down from a magazine in a waiting room.
- Cut/break 1/2 kilo of dry bread into smallish dice
- Soak it overnight (in the fridge) in about 1 liter of milk; I also add a few tablespoons of amaretto or other liqueur
- Mix two eggs with 50 gm melted butter, 200 gm sugar, and 50 gm cocoa powder (unsweetened is fine)
- Add a grating of lemon peel, raisins, pine nuts or other nuts. I also tend to toss in any other dried fruit I have around, e.g. figs.
- Mix in the soaked bread; I use an electric mixer, which also helps pulverize the bread into smaller pieces, but the batter will not be smooth in any case
- Bake at 175 C / 350 F for about an hour  It’s okay if it comes out a bit puddingy. It tastes best when warm, and reheats well in the microwave.
Il Capriolo: A Wonderful Restaurant in an Italian Alpine Village
Saturday Enrico and I were restless and decided to go for an outing. We visited the abbey at Piona (a small town at the northern end of Lake Como), then headed up the mountain. We had a booklet listing restaurants in the province of Lecco, including one more or less in the area where we were. Turned out we hadn’t looked closely enough at the details – it was way up the mountain at 1100 meters, and took quite a while to reach over a narrow, twisty mountain road. We had to call several times for directions and to ask how long the trip should take, and we almost turned back several times.
But Il Capriolo turned out to be worth the trip. For primo, we shared a dish of gnocchi (potato dumpling pasta) with sweet gorgonzola cheese – creamy and rich with just a hint of gorgonzola sharpness. For secondo, we had the local buckwheat polenta, with generous portions of three different kinds of meat: brasato (braised) beef, spezzatino di vitello (small pieces of veal) with porcini mushrooms, and pork loin cooked with pancetta (bacon). The brasato was good, almost black on the outside from long, slow cooking in red wine. The other two meat dishes were even better, each with just enough gravy to add flavor to the polenta.
For dessert we had panna cotta (“cooked cream”) with a warm berry compote (see the video). All this, plus over half a litre of the house wine (a more-than-decent Cabernet), came to 40 euros for the two of us – cheap at the price!
Il Capriolo is also the local hangout for the inhabitants of this tiny mountain village, so there were people playing cards, watching TV, reading the newspaper, and a father came in with his kids to buy popsicles.
Customs – Clearing Personal Freight into Italy
When Enrico and I left the US, we had been living a grad student life (he was the grad student, I was just poor), and didn’t have all that much to move. Lots of books, my memorabilia, clothing, that was about it. It worked out to 30 boxes and a couple of trunks, which we shipped sea freight to Milan, where we would be living. It took six months or so to arrive, but that was fine as it took us almost that long to find a home and get settled in Milan.
One day we finally heard from the shipping company that our freight had arrived, and we had to go to the customs depot in Milan to get it. We arrived fully armed with inventories of every item that had been packed. It turned out I had been a little too punctilious in compiling the lists. The mention of “folk paintings from Africa” caused one stickler for protocol to threaten us that an art expert would have to be summoned from the local academy to assess the value of these paintings. All in vain my pleading that they were tourist items for which I had paid about $5. But he sent us off to another office for a second opinion.
The second man, fortunately, was on our side.
“Let’s get this stamped and get you out of here,” he said, “because in a couple of hours we’re going to have a sciopero bianco.”
“A white strike? What’s that?”
“That’s where we actually apply every single rule in the book, and nothing moves for days.”
We had planned to get the paperwork done and come back the next day with a truck to actually take our stuff away, but this bit of news galvanized us into action. I believe we finished the paperwork, went for the truck, loaded up (by ourselves), and got out again within two hours.