Sicily - late March

• Traveling
• Syracuse Overview
• Getting Food
• Restaurants
• Culture Part 1
• Culture Part Passegiata

Emilia-Romagna - early April

Tuscany, Florence - April 8

Umbria - late April

Restaurants in Syracuse, Sicily

We ate in restaurants half a dozen times in Syracuse, and had coffee or wine and snacks many more times. The third night we were there was the best. We put on our "good" clothes and wandered into Mariano's Osteria about 7:30 Easter night. The joint was jumpin', and there were no tables available, but Mariano immediately took our wraps, held our hands warmly, winked charmingly and sent outside somewhere for a table to be brought and sat us right down. We would be fed properly Scilian Mariano said (at least we thought so), and he was as good as his word--whatever it was.

First, the preliminary course, the antipasto. Grilled vegetables, a tablespoon or two of fresh ricotta and toasted bread with garlic and olive oil; also fizzy water and a half-carafe of the house red (why we didn't look capable of a full carafe, we don't know; the German couple next to us got one). Excellent!

Mariano came back (even though he was clearly not a waiter). Hmmmmm, the pasta course. He declared that we would have the pennette con le mondorle (I figured this out later) and a spaghetti with a fresh tomato sauce. The pennette was increadible--pasta with cream sauce and almonds and ground almonds as the garnish. The spaghetti was also excellent and had browned bread crumbs as a garnish. We ate them all up. Unfortunately, you're supposed to save room for the second course which would be fish or beef or pork; and if brave, a side-dish with that (this is where the vegetables would come in). Maybe a salad just to tamp it down. And then dessert. Fortunately, Mariano knows his Americans. We said "finito" after the pasta; he expressed shock and wonder and finally acquiesced. Then we got the rest of the dinner.

First a small marsala accompanied by sesame seed nougat (like peanut brittle) and candied ginger--probably African influence. We ate most of it. That whisked away, we were ready for the bill. The waiter (not Mariano) brought us coffee and a cannole instead. We took the coffee, waved off the cannole. Mariano returned with the cannole, now split into two, and placed it firmly before us without making eye contact--a busy, busy man trying to make sure these foolish women get the experience they're entitled to. It was, of course, fabulous. The bill was about 40 euros -- a bargain a year ago.* And that's the last time I will allude to the exchange rate. But if we don't do something about the way our economy and our country are being run, I may have to move to Belize permanently.

Another foray into eating out in Italy was not so successful, but pretty fun none-the-less. On our way back from the market one day, we were more fatigued than a lemon seltzer (fresh squeezed, with salt, 1 euro) could satisfy, so we stopped for lunch at a little bar--they all have booze, beer, wine, panini, and many of them gelato (gelati? this singular and plural stuff is a little tricky). EXCEPT if it's exclusively a pizzeria, it usually only has pizza and beer. Note: NO WINE! So you are warned.

This bar, unusually for a bar (but not for a restaurant, a different beast entirely), had a dozen tables out front with umbrella coverings AND a waiter. We ordered salad (salata) with mozarella and white wine. The salad dressing was on the table--small packets of olive oil and vinegar and a salt shaker. Our wine arrived (two splits, not what we were expecting, usually you get a glass of whatever the house wine is); then we waited a while and waited some more. Eventually, a young woman, who had been sitting at the counter drinking a beer, came around and announced very carefully, "At the present time, there is no mozarella."

So we each got a large plastic salad bowl full of lettuce--a nice variety of types--which we tried to make yummy with the little bits of oil (so-so) and vinegar (white) available. I asked for pepper to great consternation among the staff . After a while, we got a little bowl of pepper with an espresso spoon to scoop it out. Later we learned that the restaurants that cater to tourists provide pepper, but not otherwise. We did our darnedest on the dry salad and eventually poured the rest of our wine in a water bottle to take home, paid the bill (I think 8 euros total) and wandered off. I really believe this was like a gambling bar or an old man's coffee drinking bar, anyway something that never expected to serve much food. I mean what Italian restaurant is out of mozarella?!! However, to give them some slack, there was a mozarella recall--something to do with dioxin.

Well, I won't tell much about our dinner at La Foglia (the leaf). It was a funky place, purported to serve vegetarian. The vegetarian menu consisted of a dish of raw vegetables or a dish of grilled vegetables. The place was very weird--ante-bellum whore house meets your grandmother's crochet club. Every table had at least four coverings, the bottom, usually a drape of some sort (a la Scarlett O'Hara), then some lacy slips cut up and draped about (maybe Scarlett again), then a crocheted something or other, then a hand-made horse-hair place mat or a place mat of feathers and flowers covered with plastic. There were little statuettes and cup and saucer sets and 15 different pairs of wine glasses and pictures of Garibaldi and plaster cherubim and ... well, you get the range.

We ordered and ate because we were hungry. It all tasted great. It turned out fine for Dawn. I got the poison mushroom meal and was down hard for 36 hours and not up for much for another four days.

Once we ate at a lovely fresh fish place, we had the special (swordfish steaks), but in that restaurant and several others, you could pick your fish from the "cold case." Mostly as many varieties as there were available in the market that morning, just not so many of them. Dawn wanted to have sardines, but we never got around to it. This was the place where we perfected "da porta via," meaning "to go" or "take away" and it came in handy several times (and not so handy once in Spoleto, that later).

Our final restaurant in Syracuse was a pizza restaurant, "Spizzaca," meaning "you choose." It also has a full-service menu with all those courses and a lower banquet room that was busy all the time. We sat in the tourist section with a view of the sea. Our boat captain (him later too) had said it had the best pizza in town. We think he had it right, but you have to know what to order. The first night we had a pizza that looked pretty okay--tomatoes, ham, garlic, olives, mushrooms etc (menu in Italian you understand). Dawn really wanted that one, so I agreed to the mushrooms a little reluctantly. Well, I needn't have worried, these mushrooms were gathered and prepared by Signore DelMonte. But the surprise was a half a medium boiled egg face down on each half of the pizza and the canned peas. Oh, and the pits in the olives.

The next night we tried something called the Veneto (with no eggs-uovi) and got a pretty good one--standard ham and goodies plus spinach. But the (frozen) spinach was in great 2Tbs globs and then there were tablespoons of creme fresh (or the equivalent). Smear things around and it was pretty darn good. Like creamed spinach on a ham pizza. This time we each had *two* glasses of wine, so we got the last course, too. A lovely little glass of lemon "sorbeta."

Despite our restaurant mis-steps and the difficulty in getting lemon-flavored pastries, we ate quite well. And the gelato never failed us. We did more than eat, though, a little about cultural adventures next.

* And, as we learned later, an outstanding bargain in the rest of Italy.