Parma and Milan day 1

Woke up and dragged ourselves out of bed. Here's a problem with being on vacation: you want to relax and therefore sleep, but you want to get up and see things. I try to balance seeing things with sleeping, and the result is I get about as much sleep on vacation as I do at home, maybe ½ hour more per night.

Anyway, we walked through Parma again and stopped for coffee. We then went off in search of Parmesan cheese to buy, which we found at a store which may or may not have been the same one where we bought it last time. We bought a chunk of 24-month-aged cheese and had it shrink-wrapped.

There was a big market in the streets nearby — centered on Verdi, which is one block over from the main street we've been walking on most of the time. It's like a provincial market, meaning that it's largely clothing, with a little food, too. The clothing is nothing special, but I looked at socks, because somehow I seem to be two pairs of socks short for this trip. I didn't buy anything.

We checkout of our hotel and hit the highway, and were making good time. We probably could have made it to Milan in time to have lunch there, but we knew we'd want to check into our hotel and then return the car, and it would be easier to do if we weren't thinking about lunch at the same time.

We considered stopping at an AutoGrill, the highway restaurant chain — some of which are restaurants, and some of which are snack bars — but it seemed more reasonable to try to find a place to eat in a town along the way. And of course, there are towns along the way, but they are generally ignored by guide books, and we didn't know what we might find.

But on a whim I pulled off for a town called Casalpusterlino or something like that, on the grounds that we could go through it to Cremona, a town that was actually listed in our guidebook, but wasn't too close to the highway. Then I thought, oh, let's just eat here, the town has a really amusing name. We followed signs to a restaurant that advertised here and there, and found it to be in a sort of suburban development, and decided to pass and look for something in the center of town, instead. We hit the center of town, and parked, and found no restaurants at all. So we made our way back toward the first restaurant, and then got distracted by another place that advertised, and thought, let's go there. We never did find it. Just on the other side of the highway exit was a tiny down called Ospedetta Lidogiana (Lidogiana referring to the fact that we were in Lido province). We drove down the main street, past a restaurant that seemed closed. The street dead-ended at a sort of estate, and we turned around and said, fuck it, let's get back on the highway and go to the AutoGrill.

I was curious about how the experience would be at the AutoGrill. Eric and I ate at a French rest-stop restaurant once, and it was nothing to repeat. In Spain, on the other hand, they tend to have very good sandwiches. However, a few miles before pulling off the highway, we had passed an AutoGrill restaurant, meaning that the next one would probably be a snack bar, which is was.

The confusing thing about these snack bars is that you pay first, at the the cashier, and then go over to the bar with your receipt and order your food. It feels ass-backwards, and there are no signs telling you what to do. Anyway, Eric had a “baguetto”, which was a ham. goat cheese, and sundried tomatoes. Mine was a “dolomito”, with speck and fontina. Both were really very good.

After some coffee, we hit the road again. We had no trouble following the directions we'd gotten to the hotel (except for Google Maps trying to send us down a one-way street, but we figured itout anyway). The hotel is really quite nice. We checked in an unpacked everything, so it could be repacked logically tomorrow night.

Then we drove the few short blocks to the train station, to drop off the car... well, we needed to fill up the tank, so we looked around for a gas station (not easy to find, actually), and then looked for the car rental place. And looked. And looked. Then I pulled over and sent Eric to to look for the office in the train station, and he couldn't find anything. I was expecting that (as is usually the case) we were to drop the car off in a parking garage, in a marked space; I found other rental agencies listed on garages in the area, but not ours. Finally I called for instructions, and what he told me didn't make sense. “Past the taxis there is a blue barrier, and past that there is a parking.” (“A parking” is a phrase you hear foreigners say a lot in English, though it is of course not proper English. Typically it means a parking lot or garage.) I didn't see anything that I'd call a blue barrier after the taxis (apparently looking in the wrong direction, though I wouldn't really call what he was talking about a “blue barrier”, more like blue walls around a construction site), and I couldn't find a “parking”. I drove and drove; all in all it took an hour. We called a total of three times, though he only answered twice. We had to finally pull over near the front and go in looking again... this time we found him. His instructions still didn't make any sense, and finally when he had another colleague with him, he sent to colleague out to show me what to do. The “parking” he was referring to was a loading zone that was clearly marked “no parking”. I said to the guy. “Well that's why I couldn't find it. It says no parking!”

The whole affair left me kind of steamed, but I was over it after a couple of blocks of walking.

Milan is really quite big; bigger than it looks on the map. It was a pretty good long walk into the center, to the Galleria Vittoria Emmanuele and the Duomo. The Duomo is under restoration, and so you can't see it all, but what you can see in gorgeous. The inside is quite beautiful, too. There were actually services going on; it was odd that they still let tourists in during that, but on the other hand the singing added to the ambiance nicely.

After the Duomo, we sat in a cafe in the Galleria and had some prosecco. It was lovely. The prices were, let's say, premium. Rather like having a glass of champagne at the Rainbow Room: it's not the champagne you are paying for.

We then headed down Via Torino and Via della Porta Ticinese toward the canal district for dinner. Though we though reservations would be a good idea for a Saturday night, our chosen restaurant did not have a phone number in the guide book, usually meaning no reservation is needed. This didn't turn out to be true, so I reserved for tomorrow, and we found another place to eat.

The canal district is interesting: it's an area where three old canals come together, and it used to be entirely industrial. Now it's restaurants and nightlife, very hip. Sort of the meatpacking district with canals.

We ate at a place called L'Osteria, which is an unassuming place that features nice quality cold cuts and cheese in a variety of simple preparations. Very simple preparations, really; mostly slicing, assembling, and heating. (We were near the kitchen, or what passed for a kitchen, and could watch. The sauces were all preprepared. The polenta was from a package, and microwaved.) The insalata rustica (radicchio, fennel, pears, a medium-soft cheese, possibly taleggio, and olive oil) and piatta valdostana (cold cuts: venison salami, venison proscuitto, lardo, and another medium-soft cheese, possibly fontina) that we shared were both really great. The venison salami was fabulous; the venison prosciutto really interesting, and the lardo (which neither of us had had before) really delicious. (The lardo was not quite the transcendently exquisite experience I'd been led to believe it might be, from articles in magazines and whatnot, but it was still great. Unlike in Modena, where the term referred to a spread, here it was thinly sliced cured pork fat; in the US is sometimes sold as "white prosciutto", a somewhat bastardized term that nonetheless gives a good impression of what it is.)

Service was a bit off. The main waiter who helped us spoke English fluently, and switched freely between Italian and English with us. He joked around a lot, and was pretty funny, but when we needed something, we couldn't always find him. So it took quite a while to get coffee after dinner, and even longer to get the check. (He did apologize for the delay, and said it was mistakes, not laziness, for what that's worth. He also said it had been a hard day, but he wasn't giving up, because he was a warrior. Indicating the man behind the bar, who I suspect was his father, he said: “He'll give up first, but not me.” I don't know what he meant, but it was pretty funny nonetheless.)

After that we walked back to the hotel, through the throngs of people on the streets of the canal district and the Ticinese area, up through the Piazza del Duomo (stopping to photograph the steeple), and through the nearly empty streets to the hotel. The walk took one hour. And now it's bed time.

Labels: food, italy, journal, personal

posted by Tony at 11:59 PM