Why we love Italy

By Jack McCallum

The fishing village of Riomaggiore,
Cinque Terre © RUSM

If you are going to Italy for the first time, someone who has already been will tell you where you absolutely must go. If you are just returning from Italy, someone will tell you where you should’ve gone. And if you’re a friend of someone who just returned from Italy, you will be worn down by tales of where they have been.

We can’t agree on much in this country, but we agree on Italy. “I’ve never had an American come over here and not rave about Italy,” says Catherine Gardner, a transplanted Scot who with her husband, Dave, runs Villa Bordoni, a beautiful inn high in the hills above Greve, a Tuscan town in the heart of Chianti country.

But why is that? In search of answers beyond the predictable “The food and the people are wonderful” (they are, by the way), my wife and I constructed a 15-day itinerary. We spent four days in Rome, three in Florence, two in Cinque Terre and six back in Tuscany, all the time ruing how many places (Venice, Lake Como, the Amalfi Coast, Sicily) we were not going to see.

A seamless mix of ancient and contemporary

Rome’s municipal offices sit high above the ruins of the Roman Forum. “I go to work every day in the midst of history,” said the former mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, a couple of years ago. Many American mayors go to work among ruins, too, only they’re from last week.

The Colosseum was irresistible long before Russell Crowe climbed into his loincloth in “Gladiator.” A whiff of the depravity of the place — where men fought men, animals fought animals, and men fought animals — endures. But we have to concede that had America existed in the first century A.D., we would’ve done the same thing and called it the Super Bowl. Not for nothing does our grand annual spectacle include Roman numerals. The Roman ruling class afforded its citizens a vote on whether a gladiator should live or die; we have the same system today, only it’s known as sports talk radio.

There is none of that gladiatorial ambience in arty Florence, but the organic link to the past is still there. A warren of side streets leads suddenly and dramatically to the city’s centerpiece, the magnificent Duomo. Not even in Athens does antiquity blend so well with modernity as it does in Italy.

The Duomo, Florence
© Hedda Gjerpen

The sacred and the profane

Nobody flips the morality coin better than the Italians. Take the Pantheon, one of the best-preserved of Roman buildings, which was constructed as a pagan temple but eventually passed on to the Roman Catholic church. Two Italian kings are also buried within this remarkable structure, and so pro-monarchist organizations also maintain a vigil there. In America, where we’re still confused about this whole church-and-state separation thing, we get this.

We get the Vatican, too. We get the fact that we can visit the place wearing either the beam of the believer or the smirk of the cynic, and still walk away in awe. Our Vatican guide, a pleasant man named Giovanni, says he never gets tired of showing tourists around Vatican City, the smallest sovereign nation in the world. “Something new always catches my eye,” he says.

Art guilt assuaged

You know who you are. You should’ve taken an art appreciation class. You should know something about painting. Well, in Italy, you bathe in great art. No matter how thick-headed you might be about art, you will learn something.

My wife and I were at dinner in Florence one night when a couple next to us were discussing their trip to the Uffizi, one of the oldest and most famous museums in the world.

“The guy who really got me was the real early guy, that Goto,” said the husband.

“It’s Giotto, dear, pronounced gee-OH-toe,” she corrected. I didn’t laugh. Before my trip to Italy I thought a triptych was something prepared by AAA. My wife and I almost never discuss art, yet it filled our conversations when we were in Italy.

St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City
© Cheng Chang

Michelangelo or Leonardo?

Which brings us to the geniuses. On another evening in Florence, we got into a discussion with a waiter (with whom we had bonded over a mutual affection for Tom Petty) about who was the greater Italian: Michelangelo or Leonardo.

Our vote was Michelangelo, probably because we were just hours removed from gazing at David. The 17-foot sculpture which stands majestically in the Galleria dell’ Accademia was truly the most astonishing man-created thing upon which we had ever laid eyes.

But our waiter cast his vote for Leonardo. “Leonardo did so much more,” he reasoned. “Art. Science. Painting. Sculpture. He did everything.”

“But David,” I argued. “The Sistine Chapel. Those alone…”

“Here, my father will tell you,” the waiter interrupted. He queried the old man in Italian.

“Leonardo,” said the father, shaking his head with conviction.

How splendid it is that the essential Italian character evolved from two geniuses who got their hands dirty, men propelled by an inner vision incomprehensible to the rest of us. We Americans envy the Italians’ paint-and-marble past.

The food

We love the fact that the Italians love food, and they love that we love it. We love that they take it so seriously, yet produce food that doesn’t seem serious and is blended so harmoniously into regular life.

Entire forests have been denuded by writers going on about Italian food, so it’s best that I just describe the cooking class my wife and I took at the Villa Bordoni, during which we helped a chef prepare a five-course meal, then ate it that night in the dining room.

Nothing that our chef, Ettore, showed us was beyond our culinary skills (even though I shredded a finger slicing up the veal). It was the precision with which he put it together that stamped him as a master. He did 10 minutes on the correct way to poach an egg — which he later coated with flour, egg, and bread crumbs and gently fried, thus creating a crusted egg that hid a soft center. He lectured sternly about not skimping on the quality or quantity of the Chianti. He slaved over the correct way to dice the red onion and garlic, and was insistent about the correct time to add the salt used in the peposo alla vecchia maniera. Which was basically a simple beef dish. Which was about the best thing I ever ate.

Special places

Maybe the best thing about Italy is that it’s a land of a million special places, and part of the joy is discovering your own. “Never pass a church when you’re in Italy,” Giovanni lectured us. “You cannot know what you will find inside.” We took him at his word, and there’s no use even trying to describe the captivating chapels and grand cathedrals into which we wandered.

Perhaps your special place will be a small Tuscan town. We loved Colle di Val d’Elsa, which is off the standard tourist map, a two-tiered city (the old-town part sits high on a hill) famous for glass-making. Perhaps it will be an Italian character; ours was a bubbly capitalist hawking warm limoncello to parched tourists halfway up a cliff walk between Monterosso al Mare and Vernaza in Cinque Terre. Or perhaps it will be a restaurant. In fact, it probably will be a restaurant.

Our real special spot turned out to be in Tuscany, halfway up a mountain, at a place called Ristoro di Lamole. As we drove further and further from civilization, my wife and I must have said to each other 10 times, “We might as well turn around,” except that there was nowhere to turn around on this perilous cliff road from Greve to Panzano. Suddenly, we came upon the brightly lit restaurant, out there among the distinctive Tuscan cypresses, and were greeted warmly by co-owner Filippo Masini. Later, filled with homemade sausages and homemade wine, I asked Filippo why Americans love his country so much.

“I have given this much thought,” he said, sitting down at our table despite the fact that the restaurant was still busy. “It is because you are like us. You do not think so, but you are. You love food. You love to be outdoors. You love beauty. You love to talk. You are not … closed. The British are closed. Americans are not.”

We talked for another few minutes and we told him we were leaving the next day.

“Oh, no, you have not seen nearly enough of our country!” he said, as sadly as if he were informing us about a death in the family. “No, no, no! You must stay another week! There are so many more places to go!” Then he started to name them.

You see? Now we are just like him.

Jack McCallum has been a writer for Sports Illustrated for nearly 30 years and is the author of eight books.

AAA Connection
AAA Colorado can help you plan and book an Italian vacation. A variety of escorted tours are available in addition to independent travel options. Visit AAA Travel or talk to an agent at your local branch office.

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