Another trip I never had time to write about: Enrico and I spent a weekend in Torino in January (in unusually warm weather, lucky us!).
Category Archives: Italy travel
Guests of Conti Sertoli Salis: Part 2, The Palazzo
After an excellent (if somewhat hasty) lunch, the four of us had a private tour of Palazzo Sertoli Salis, which is still the home of the Sertoli Salis family, as well as the headquarters of the winery.
My photos don’t do justice to it: the palazzo is charming, rich with newly-restored tromp l’oeil frescoes cleverly designed to make the ceilings appear far higher than they are.
The paintings and furniture were intended to display wealth, yet the style is somehow appealing and cozy. Some of the family’s collection of antique documents and pictures is displayed museum-style, with (unusually for Italy) explanatory text in several languages.
^ Detail of the saloncello (small salon). Sertoli Salis’ “titled†wines are named after features of the palazzo.
Guests of Conti Sertoli Salis: Fine Food and Wine in Valtellina
Part 1: Lunch!
Many moons ago, spurred by a question on Fodors.com, I wandered the Internets, looking up wineries in the nearby region of Valtellina. Several had sites, some gorgeously produced. Sertoli Salis particularly caught my eye because the site was so very beautiful, and I knew the wines to be good, but the English translation was laughable.
Desperate for extra income, I wrote them, hoping to be offered the job of re-translating the site. They replied that, having just spent a lot of money to redo the site, they couldn’t pay cash, but there might be some wine in it for me.
They sent me the files, I translated a small piece and sent it to them, then my life got busy, I changed computers and lost some of the subsequent work I had done. The winery must have liked what they saw: they wrote asking if I could do the rest. Eventually I found the time (and some new wine-related vocabulary) to finish this not-small job and send it off.
NB: The English on the site today is not mine! It will be quite a job to replace the text on the site as it’s mostly embedded in the Flash – an unfortunate mistake made by many Italian web designers. The site is still well worth visiting for the beautiful photos.
I therefore had a standing invitation to visit the palazzo and winery for a tasting and a gift of “our very best wines”. Finally, last Saturday, we were able to make good on this offer.
Enrico and I set out with Pancrazio (a TVBLOB colleague) and Emanuela. Between bad weather and traffic we were an hour late for our lunch reservation at Ristorante Jim, which meant that we had to rush, while this fine establishment deserved more leisurely attention! Jim offers very interesting seasonal menus (in addition to a far-from-boring regular menu); this time the specialty was mushrooms and wild game.
Emanuela and I started with a vellutata di porcini (wild boletus mushroom soup). Oh, my. That was special. I want to go back and eat more of that.
The boys had tagliatelle al sugo di lepre – home-made egg pasta with wild hare sauce. Very gamey, very tasty.
For secondo, Emanuela had bocconcini di capriolo (“bites” of roebuck), which she said were tender enough to melt in your mouth. I had breast of wild duck in a balsamic vinegar reduction – I love duck, and this was even more flavorful than usual. Umm… don’t remember what Enrico and Pancrazio had, except that they both managed to squeeze in dessert afterwards!
Then we headed off to the object of our visit, the winery.
High Water (Not Hell) in Venice, part 7
Hummingbirds & Other Venetians
Sep 29, 2007
^ detail on Saint Mark’s cathedral
^ So much for the singing gondoliers. They seemed to spend most of their time on their cellphones (like everyone else in Italy).
^ Alitalia Italian Airlines? Not for much longer…
The scene above took place on the balcony of the apartment, whose beautiful hanging garden of herbs and flowers attracted the local wildlife, including very large black bees and what appeared to be hummingbirds – which caused some debate among us. When finally convinced that they were birds, Enrico hoped that we had spotted something rare and strange (he’d never heard of hummingbirds in Italy). I asked our seemingly knowledgeable boatman later on about the surprising presence of colibri’ in Venezia, and he claimed that they were common.
Turns out everybody was wrong.
They weren’t birds.
They weren’t bees.
They were hummingbird moths. The antennae should have tipped me off. I did notice those, and thought it odd for a bird to have something like that on its head…
High Water (Not Hell) in Venice, part 6
Venice’s Bad Karma
On Saturday morning, I learned what a macchiatone (“big spotted one”) is: it’s basically a caffé macchiato (coffee “spotted” with steamed milk), with a bit more milk – so, somewhere between a macchiato and a cappuccino, served in a cappuccino cup. I had it with a delicious little torta di riso (rice cake).
Then Enrico and I explored some more.
^ “In this antique home of the Dario family, Henri de Regnier, poet of France, Venetianly lived and wrote in 1988 and 1901.” Venetianly?
^ This was a mystery. Was the pigeon already dead when someone gored it with an umbrella?
The apartment we were staying in was owned by a Jewish family. On the wall near the kitchen was a framed edict of 1777, issued by a prince of Venice on the orders of an “Inquisitor of the Arts”, detailing horrifying restrictions on Venice’s Jewish community. Sobering reading. The Venetians invented the concept of ghetto, apparently.
Venice is indeed a beautiful city, but it has many centuries of bad karma to pay off.