Torino e Amici

Greetings:

Sometimes life does bestow good luck. The process, in this case, is similar to the production of a pearl. From my marine-biological imagination a foreign object is introduced into an oyster. Chris and Gini are the foreign object and Italy is the oyster.

In conception the January portion of our trip had a very important component, meeting Mary, Gini’s step-mom, in Aosta, Italy for a three day festival. The background would be that Mary’s family has had an apartment in Chatillon, a small town near Aosta, for four hundred years. Gini and Chris and several people reading this blog have been fortunate to have visited Chatillon in the summer. Even Mary, all her life, has only been to the Valley D’Aosta during the summer. One of the reasons is that Aosta and Chatillon are at the southern base of the Italian Alps only fifteen miles from Cervino (the Matterhorn) and this makes for a significant winter. In fact, prime time for Aosta is the winter because of the snow and the mountains. Therefore the retroment schedule had to allow for Mary, Aosta and the festival.

Gini then composed an Irish segment and a Sicilian segment to the itinerary. During this planning, a friend of ours, Giovanni Leopardi invited us to an art display at his restaurant, Carpaccio, in Hanover, New Hampshire. Giovanni was from Torino (Turin) and we had originally become friends when the restaurant was in Potter Place, a suburb of that booming metropolis, Danbury, NH. The art display was to showcase the artwork of Vicenzo Reda, a friend of thirty years of Giovanni. Vincenzo painted with wine and we thoroughly enjoyed the art and the evening’s dinner. At the end of the exhibition Vincenzo said to contact him by email since Gini’s construction of the itinerary from Sicily to Aosta included a stay in Torino (two nights).

Faithful to his word, Vincenzo not only helped us plan our hotel and propose some activities but also extended an invitation to meet. This was more than we had hoped. As we prepared to leave Positano and head for Torino, Vincenzo wrote us with the news that not only would he be meeting us but that Giovanni Leopardi would also be in Torino. Unbelievable!

We arrived at our hotel and called Vincenzo. They would meet us and they had also planned a full night’s extravaganza for us. It began with driving to a hillside vista to watch dusk envelop the city. As we rode, we could not believe the beauty of this city. There were as many arcades here as there were in Bologna.

Accompanying us was Mauro Marcuzzo, another friend from when Vincenzo and Giovanni were teenagers. Mauro is a producer and works in ‘Audio Video Solutions’. They had not been together for many years and we had front row seats to their reunion as their guests. Chris figured out how to use the timer on the camera and managed to capture our happy group:

Everything was going to be Piemonte based. This is Torino’s region. We started at a wine bar and enjoyed some delicious local white wine along with some local snacks. To make the evening more special, Vincenzo’s sister, Maria, arrived to join us for wine and dinner. The four of them had all belonged to the same radio station in the 1970s and had not all been together for thirty years!

Vincenzo took this picture so he is missing from the table:

The choice of restaurant was to be, of course, an old restaurant specializing in local Torino food. This was an Antico Ristorante called Porto Di Savona. The menu choices were gratefully made for us. These included slices of a minced meat that tasted like pork, meat raviolis in a brown meat sauce, homemade taglietelle noodles in a cream sauce, ‘Brasato’, a beef served with polenta, meats done similar to a boiled dinner, and a pastry wrapped pork. Panna cotta and some other kind of chocolate pudding finished the meal (with espresso and grappa, of course). The wine, three bottles, had been selected because it could only be found in Torino. Towards the end of dinner Chris, very proudly, said in Italian that he and Gini were very fortunate to eat and be with such strong friends. This was well received by the group.

On the wall of the restaurant were drawn Gianduia and Giacometta. These are the characters from commedia dell’arte chosen by Torino as their representative masks during Carnival:

Vincenzo and Mauro decided that we must now head for a café famous as a mecca for artists and poets in the Piazza Vittorio Venetto. This piazza served as the terminus for a kilometer long arcade built by the king so he could get to the Po river without getting wet.

The café, Caffe Elena, claimed fame because Nietzche had written his last book there while he lived in Torino.

We had not been there for two minutes before the amici (friends) were shouting and hugging yet another friend from thirty years ago. It remained calm long enough for Vincenzo to capture the group with their Torino drinks of bicerin (a cross between cappuccino and pure chocolate):

So we need an artistic shot of the artist Vincenzo:


Somehow we stumbled out of there after midnight and bid Mauro and Maria buona notte (good night). However our boys were not done yet. Giovanni had the crazy idea to go for pizza but Chris and Vincenzo talked him out of it.

Instead Vincenzo began a somewhat mad ride through the streets of Torino. He stopped to show us two towers surrounding archways that were from 400 BC that formed one of the ‘porta’ (gate – Porta Palatina) to the once walled city of Torino. He then drove to an intersection and parked right in the middle to show us where the Barolo family (good wine, anybody?) had, literally, moved their palazzo (grand house) to accommodate the city. This was marked by the coloring of the bricks in the roadway showing the outline of the former building perimeter.

Finally, after 1AM we were deposited back at our hotel (Pacific Hotel Fortino). It took a while to recover from all that had happened before we could settle to sleep.

For tomorrow Mauro has volunteered to take us to the Cinema National Museum that is housed in the signature building of Torino, the Mole Antonelliana.

The pearl has formed. This will join those already formed by you, nostri amici and la famiglia (our friends and family). Grazie.