Stocking up for the long hard Winter that never comes

Nordic cuisine involves complex smoking processes, canning and preserving - all ways of saving food through the rigorous often food less winters. Not everyone is a fisherman who can carve a hole through the ice to get some fresh fish, or a hunter stalking through large snow capped coniferous forests in the hopes of an elusive creature to skin and cook.

The Italian climate is a lot kinder to nature. Each season provides its bounty: beautiful mushrooms and chestnuts in the autumn, citrus fruit in the winter, greens for the Spring and masses of tomatoes in the summer. Not to mention the plentiful grapes and olives that grow all over the peninsula. Yet each region of Italy will be busy pickling and preserving at various stages of the year.

This is the moment for bottling the last of the summer tomatoes. Various cookery magazines give their tips and advice on the best ways to go about this. Do you want a rough sauce or a silky smooth sauce? How is it best to crush your tomatoes: in a processor in an old fashioned hand-cranked mouli? - which then adds the question of which size holes should the tomatoes be moulied through? 

Do you want added flavours such as a hint of garlic, some basil or something more herbaceous with some flat parsley? Should you use a jar, a bottle and of course what is the best method of sterilising your chosen container? For this last most seem to opt for boiling the filled container.

The question of preserving tomatoes in the shape of 'passatas' (tomato sauces which can be smooth or chunky) or whole in oil or sun-dried seems a tad overdone in a country where you can buy them ready made and of premium quality. Why go to the trouble?
Because the final result is always better than the factory produced alternative considering that most of the produce has not been force mass-produced in a greenhouse under artificial conditions. There are no additives, just genuine freshness and flavour. There are also different types of tomatoes to choose from: pomodorini, torpedini, a grappolo etc... an endless well of freshness and taste.

It's also pesto season. The leaves on the basil are wilting, the plants are producing their little white flowers, it's time to harvest. On the town markets basil is sold in large one euro bunches, and while Roman basil will not be the same as that grown in Liguria, lacking its original 'terroir', it is still good enough to make an optimal pesto or if you omit the nuts, a provençal pistou.

Then there are the jams, the marmellate, which food magazines encourage readers to make. Thus, they can take advantage of the soft velvety flavours of summer peaches and apricots as well as the early autumn plums. It's as if the new growing season were months and months away at the end of a long and difficult winter à la Helsinki. It isn't. 
In the Northern, Alpine regions, the winters may be suitably wintery but in Rome the temperatures barely dip down to zero, in February. Balcony herbs are unaffected and plants, unless they encounter snow, grow on as usual. There is no dearth of fresh produce ever.

Reading in Italian

The first book I read in Italian was 'Il giorno della civetta, " by Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia. I chose it because it was a slim 120 pages and was about the Sicilian mafia. I don't think I understood much. I' d only been in Italy a year. Likewise, my first cinema experience in Italian, at roughly the same time, 'The Sixth Sense,' an American film, as I correctly surmised the dialogue wouldn't be as logorrheic as an Italian one.

Learning a foreign language is fundamental when moving and settling down in a foreign country. While I have met some people who resolutely refuse to adopt the language of their new country, I wouldn't recommend doing so. It took me three years to be fluent and comfortable speaking Italian. I understood it far earlier. Acquiring a TV, and leaving it on as background noise whilst I cooked and tidied my very small apartment helped. And so did reading. 
I quickly realised as I read that pausing to look up words in continuation,wouldn't work. It halted the flow and it made reading irritating. So despite often not understanding much I would persevere, I would try to figure it out from context. I remember from the second book I read in Italian "Se il sole muore" by the Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci, the same unusual and incomprehensible word kept coming up so often that once I reached the end of my alloted number of pages for the day, I looked it up. In those early reading days I started with a target of 10 pages a day, if I was gripped by the story, I would continue. Nowadays I read as many pages as I feel like.

One big frustration was the speed at which I read. Ten pages seemed to go on for ever and ever and ever. Getting used to convoluted structures could be a headache too, as well as the long sentences, though to be fair, rarely Proustian in length. French and Italian writing excels in going on for a long time without actually saying very much or having much of a point. Undoubtedly for natives there must be some kind of beauty in this style of prose but for newcomers to the language wading through paragraph after paragraph and chapter after chapter to get no where and say not very much can get irritating and frustrating.

However there have been some memorable books in Italian: Alessandro Baricco's Novecento, a monologue; Stefano Benni's Il Bar sotto il Mare; Pier Paolo Pasolini's 'Ragazzi di Vita'... This last was made all the more memorable by discovering that I lived 500metres up the hill from where the characters in the book, based on real people, had lived. Pasolini himself had lived in Monteverde on Via Fonteiana before his violent death on the Lungomare in Ostia.

Then came the first un-put-downable book, Fabio Volo's Il Giorno in più, which I made the mistake of telling an Italian friend of mine I had read. She sneered. Volo was hardly a serious writer. Maybe not. He was at the time an ex-MTV VJ and aspiring actor. He may still in those days have had a show on TV. These were definitely not the credentials of a serious writer. But what he wrote was engaging and flowed. He wrote about people, his books were set in Milan, and he wrote about relationships. I read a few more of his books until I noticed a pattern emerging.
Reading 'La Solitudine dei Numeri Primi' by Paolo Giordano, his first book, a prize winner, gave me more kudos. The subsequent film was a bit of a let down. Umberto Eco in the original made me feel great until I was told that the book I'd read 'La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana' wasn't his most complicated so not that big an achievement. It probably wasn't. I had abandoned Foucault's Pendulum which I tried to read in English translation. I hadn't got past the first chapter! 

Over the years, I've become less systematic and more relaxed about reading in Italian. Nowadays, it's more a case of if I feel like it. And inevitably I tend to read in English because even after 20 years in Italy it's easier and faster. 
Having said that, this summer I finished Elena Ferrante's magnificent quadrilogy which starts with 'My Brilliant Friend' and concludes with 'The Story of the Lost Child'. It has taken me four years, a book a year. But the sense of achievement isthere. I'd never even considered reading it in translation!

As for that very first book, 'Il giorno della Civetta' I read it again a few years later and discovered a different story. And then again in 2014, when I uncovered new details that I'd failed to pick up on in the previous two readings. That, of course, is one of the pleasures of unveiling a book in a foreign language, the words that escaped me in a first reading. the gaps I'd stabbed a guess at, the passages of opaque grammar and wordiness suddenly flow smooth as a river with still the occasional rock which means I can read that book again and again with a renewed sense of discovery.