I feel like all I did all weekend was eat. Saturday's mountain lunch turned into Saturday's spooky Giat Neri dinner (on a budget, we opted only for pizzas, instead of the 6 course "lover's meal", that involves such outlandish house-specialties as giant scallops steamed in-shell, risotto with truffles, and oven-roasted filet of Rombo, sizzling in butter, a glistening fish the size of our torsos), turned into Sunday's all-you-can-eat assault on the region's local favorites.



My only goal for Sunday was to avoid getting completely drunk, which is actually a feat when enduring 8 hours of wine-festival-style hoopla with FL and his friends. I opted out of the wine (or paced myself, at least), and went for the porchetta, instead. The sun was boiling hot, to everyone's dismay, and heavy winter coats and fur-lined boots were discarded across picnic tables and sidewalks, collars unbuttoned and paper plates folded into mock-fans. "Mock" being the operative word. I was sweating bullets, the steam from the grills and fry-ers and spits carrying roasted pigs to crisp perfection causing my eyes to blur. Even this did not inhibit my appetite, which is made of iron and insatiable.



We ate goose, we ate deer, we ate prosciutto and frico with pear. We sampled local cheeses and beer made of chestnuts, porcini mushrooms, fresh breads, mixed seafood (grilled and fried), and, of course, polenta.

About 8 o'clock the festival turned from an apple-cheeked, wholesome cultural celebration- peppered with old Italian men in green tweed caps and babies running about merrily with sponge bob balloons- into an assault on the ears by the local youths, who insisted on proving their flush of our-whole-lives-ahead-of-us glory with blaring techno beats and the introduction of "mojitos". It all just felt wrong to me for some reason, and FL and I parted ways with the kids and went and sat on the steps of the great piazza, eating hazelnut gelato and pretending that it was the year 1880, that we were in a seat of power, that history was still being made here.



The train ride home was brief, thankfully. We fell right asleep, waking to another beautiful day. It is FL's father's birthday, actually. He is 56. I went downtown to a little bakery and bought him a tower of powdered-sugar-coated cookies. One can never go wrong with sweets.