Trained In Bologna

I have seen pictures of myself playing with trains as a child;  a pastime that, according to my dad, provoked hours upon end of curiosity and delight.  But I had no idea what level of pleasure trains can truly provide until I rode them all over Europe, and especially all over Italy.  Train rides in northern Europe, for example -- through Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, etc. -- are often flat and uneventful, until you get really north to the fjords of Norway.  You’ll definitely need a good thick book at least as far as Stockholm.  Tolstoy and Dostoevsky work well, I find, as does anything by Dickens.  Stick with the major authors, as it just might lead to a fun conversation.

At any rate, during the christmas holidays of my junior year abroad, my new friend the Wineoceros and I decide to travel throughout Italy;  by train, of course. After a glorious three-day bacchanal in Venice, we hop on a train headed for Bologna. Bologna is the capital of Emilia-Romagna, at the fertile base of the northern edges of the Apennine mountains that form Italy’s eastern spine. The train moves slowly -- never take an express train through tiny Italy, or you’ll miss everything -- allowing us our first daytime views of the captivating countryside. Unlike the ugly suburban sprawl that now surrounds Paris, here we see the urban and the rural cooperate in new ways. Or perhaps I should say that we simply see them cooperate. Neat walled cities are surrounded not by ugly apartment buildings and chain stores, but by fertile fields and vineyards that nourish the city.

In Italy, clay and limestone manors atop verdant hills blanketed by trellised vines populate the landscape everywhere the eye turns, continuing an ancient partnership between domestic life and the soil itself that is unique to our young eyes. We notice the stuccoed and syncopated parapets circling the roofs of many of the estates, roofs that are accessed by hidden spiral stairways beneath each parapet. This clever design permits the padrone many points of entry to the top of his castle and the panoramic view it provides. And ciao bella! what a view it is, with a neat orderliness to the spacing of vines that suggests the ethereal calm of pews in a chapel, while also maintaining strict quality control. Trellises prevent the vines from collapsing on the steep hillside, you see, where the additional stress on the vine produces a much more concentrated albeit limited yield, ultimately resulting in more intense, flavorful wines. Basically you sacrifice quantity for quality, leading to the hearty Lambruscos and soaring Sangioveses we all know and love. Particularly noteworthy is the rich rosy color of these wines, as mysterious and magical as they are potent. I later learn that this is largely attributable to the lengthy growing season in the plains, which allow the grape an extra six or seven weeks to mature on the vine.

After a four-hour train ride we roll into Bologna at high noon. The Wineoceros and I stride out of the station into yet another magical ancient town, and once again I ask myself why I have been living in the classroom the previous decade. Like Paris and all ancient cities, Bologna is a walker’s paradise, only to be seen on foot. In addition to boasting the oldest university in Europe, Bologna looks to me like a great cathedral upon which the architect has chosen not to place a roof. Hidden alleys become the porticos for great open squares, busy as the nave of Notre Dame on the feast day of Joan of Arc, surrounded on their outer edges by colonnaded walkways that lead the eager feet past more cafes and restaurants than one could explore in a month of exploring. These cafes are like little chapels off the outer aisles of my open cathedral.

Specifically, the Wineoceros and I have followed our map to Piazza Maggiore, the largest in Bologna, for a late lunch of whatever looks good. The Piazza is studded with cafes whose tables spill out onto the sidewalk. Each has a particular flavor, and the abundance of choices makes it hard to choose one over another. But after making a complete tour of the Piazza we are very hungry, when to our delight a wizened old man motions to us by bringing his hands to his mouth. “Are we hungry?” he seems to be asking. The trattoria behind him smells of garlic and oil, and a splendorous warm light spills out of it onto the sidewalk. How had we missed this?  The old man beckons us inside, through towering sandstone columns and wide stone arches, and sits us down at a marble table in the corner. The atrium directly above our heads looks like a family heirloom that has been left in the attic too long, with splashes of vibrant color and faces of the saints hidden beneath centuries of cigar and coffee fumes. And in the very center of every table is a half-full unmarked liter of red wine. A middle-aged waiter in a spotless white-cloth jacket with thin lapels comes by our table bearing dark green olive oil and crusty bread. He speaks halting but endearing English. The bottle, he explains, is for whoever sits down: “You only pay for how much you drink.”  He pulls out a small piece of chalk and marks the level of the wine.

Lunch is superb in every possible way. My first thought is of the Heineken in Amsterdam, which is so much fresher than the stuff we get in the States. We begin with bruschetta featuring cherry tomatoes dipped in sticky Gorgonzola on a bed of buttered bread still hot from the oven. This brings out the darker notes in the house wine, notes of leather and tobacco. There is no turning back: We need another dish that will keep up with this increasingly seductive and spirited wine. As a matter of fact, we need more wine. And forget the chalk this time.

I order a juicy pollo in bean sauce while The Wineoceros orders a Tortellini Bolognese, assured by our talkative waiter that the spicy mortadella and ham have been cured and seasoned with rosemary and garlic for two full days. Hearty eater that he is when traveling, The Wineoceros comments that that this might be an excellent way to avoid just getting a plateful of pasta, having already reconciled himself to the likelihood that pasta might well be impossible to avoid. Allow me to share a secret: like the Heineken in Amsterdam, real Italian pasta will make you forget everything you thought you knew about pasta, since it is always homemade and therefore as unique as the plate on which it is served. There is a tender melts-in-your-mouth texture to Italian pasta that might easily be compared to the texture of San Francisco sourdough, and the locals aren’t kidding about the seasoning either. If you don’t cook with garlic, you don’t cook.

The afternoon melts away, our waiter cajoling us into trying one local dish after another. We rave about the wine, which is complex and refreshing at the same time. Almost magically, like an out of body experience, the wine makes it seem as though we haven’t been eating all afternoon. We ask the waiter who makes the wine  --  we are at a bit of a loss without a label  --  and where we can buy it. His eyes twinkle as he tells us that this is his family’s wine, and that the old man who greeted us at the door is the wine maker. We are floored! The Wineoceros proclaims the old man a saint and asks again where we can buy his wine. The old man smiles and motions for his son the waiter to settle our bill. We pass huge sums of lira back and forth, and notice that after three hours of eating and drinking we are only charged the equivalent of $40. Having paid our bill, we are led out of the trattoria by the old man. He doesn’t look like he can walk another three blocks, and yet he leads us on a meandering journey up out of the city center into the surrounding hills. The city makes a graceful transition from busy avenues and shops to quiet narrow streets that wind uphill. After half an hour we emerge on a plateau overlooking the city. Below us lies the beautiful red buildings of the city, and next to us lie steeply-terraced vineyards separated by ancient stone walls, with weather-beaten granite houses also dotting the landscape.

The old man leads us to one of these houses, at most ten feet by twenty feet. Inside is a simple living room with a hearth for cooking and a couch which probably doubles as a bed. We walk through this room into a storage room in the back. It is crammed with dark, cool bottles of wine. He pulls one down and opens it, gesturing for us to sit down on the couch. A table is drawn up and an old woman, presumably his wife, emerges from a second room in back, which must be a kitchen. Somehow she has been told that we were coming, and is therefore bearing a hefty tray of cured prosciutto and mortadella. We eat and drink well into the later afternoon, enjoying their stories told in increasingly confident English. We feel guilty that we don’t speak much Italian, but no one seems to care. As we are getting ready to leave, the old man disappears into the back room and emerges with a cloth bag filled with four bottles of his signature wine. We make a weak attempt to refuse this all-too-gracious gift, but he insists and we leave grinning, amazed at our luck. Several days later we share one of these bottles with a man we meet on yet another train. He proclaims the wine to be a simple Lambrusco -- a vin de table, nothing noteworthy. We chuckle, not bothering to correct him. After all, it is a wine that had bridged language and age, single-handedly making our trip to Bologna unforgettable.