Coffee With a Crust

This weekend I finally moved upstairs into my roommate's old room, which has a terrace and sun through the windows and is pretty much perfect. It has a view of red shingled roofs. It's like some Italian cliche bedroom and I feel very lucky to have it. We spent most of the weekend in a flurry of moving and cleaning, but things are settled now and a very nice Dutch girl, Mirelle, is living in my old room downstairs. To welcome her on her first morning, one of the cats threw up next to her bed.

Yesterday, Massimo (the male half of the couple that owns my apartment) took me on a gastronomical tour of the pasticcerie of Bologna. (A pasticceria is where you can go for coffee and pastries and little sandwiches.) Lucia is studying like crazy for her law and notary exams, so to fill the void Massimo likes to spend his time going to pasticcerie, of which he has many favorites. We actually stopped at six or seven places, but only ate at four, and he tried to show me the entire range - from super posh rich Bolognese to the hole-in-the-wall that makes the best pastry crust in the city. The posh places were a little intimidating, probably because Bologna really is a very wealthy city. One of them, called Impero, has a specialty made from orange, cornmeal, and egg yolk. Sort of like fruity cornbread, but VERY eggy. It sits like a brick in your stomach.

My favorite was a place that specialized in coffee. The menu had pages and pages of different coffees - chili pepper, cinnamon, nut extracts, vanilla - and the owner had covered one of the walls with diplomas and certificates of his coffee education. I had a creme brulee-cinnamon cappucino. The owner actually burned the top of the foam with a torch so that I could crack it with my spoon. Pretty cool.

Massimo's favorite thing to do, other than eat sweet things, is analyze and criticize Italian culture. He comes from a mixed background belief-wise - partly super-religious Catholic, partly super-liberal Socialist: he identifies as a Protestant, but reveres his Socialist grandmother, who apparently had two vocations - cooking and politics. Massimo likes to say that the major problem with Italian culture is that Catholicism has made everyone into conformists, and that they are cursed by the fact that they don't have the ability to achieve satisfaction through hard work. (He, on the other hand, works so hard that he's given himself a heart condition.) Stuffing myself with pastries and listening to his dissection of Italian culture made for a very entertaining Saturday afternoon.

This is an old photo, from my layover in Amsterdam on the way home for the holidays. But I like it anyway.