monthly emails: gennaio 2022

Gennaio = January! I thought a little Italian-language practice wouldn’t hurt anyone here…

The last time I wrote, I was settling into Azorean life on my last week of holiday break. Now I’m back in Bra, settling into Braidese life after 4 constant weeks of travel and adventure. These days, that means reluctantly waking up and lifting the heavy metal curtains/shutters that keep the heat in at night. After assessing the weather, I slip into my fuzzy robe and slippers and shuffle to our frigid kitchen to put a pot on. I don’t exaggerate when I mean frigid – as only our rooms are heated with radiators, the rest of the house embraces whatever temperature outside. Most mornings I see my breath and steam up the kitchen just making tea! I shuffle back to the warm-ish corridor, do the bathroom thing, and go back for the tea. Return to bedroom, pull out the day’s outfit and put on the radiator to warm up before committing to the strip-down-and-suit-up, a practiced, efficient activity completed next to the radiator that limits exposure to the wintry chill. I consider it like a quick yoga and a calisthenics. Once the layers are on, I brave the kitchen anew and make quick work of breakfast, usually a Camille (an orange and almond muffin-like baked good that reminds me a bit of a Magdalena) and a cuppa for the trip to uni. My 6 bus has started to show up more on time, likely thanks to the new female driver on the route (sorry gents). If I have enough time, I usually walk up and down the block to say hello to all the dogs – one pitbull, three short scruffy little brown and black mutts that I’ve dubbed the San Michele Street Dog Gang, two St. Bernard (one adult, one puppy), an older black lab who loves a good ear rub, a German Shepherd who gets a distanced wave, and a nippy little white foo-foo dog who is all bark and a lot more bite. Then it’s onto the bus to the central station, the 1 bus to Pollenzo, and then I usually have about 10 minutes to get a cappuccino and focaccia from the coffee bar at school. Then it’s down to the academics!

Gennaio courses have covered continuing topics from before the holiday break, as we’ve bridged over to finish off our cheese course with history and law and now we’ve segued into food communications. In Italy, it’s quite common to plan for your finals after the holiday break, a free gift of looming study stress from the Italian education system. For this reason, it’s been very quiet socially this month as many programs have had final exams to work through these past weeks. A seemingly stressful time at uni, but since our specific track is built differently and a bit more dependent on projects and papers, it was a relatively relaxing time for academics.

COVID has really rocked our schedule, with a handful of cases post-study trip and from other programs. Our visiting professor on honey was postponed until the end of the month and our food communications courses begin just this week, so my time has been spent on my remote internship with Roots & Routes Intercultural Collaborations on their Pluriversity team for the semester. I’ve also been working with an experimental lab at school to foster better student-staff relations for the Tavole Academiche, the lunch commons where visiting chefs and culinary experts would come to cook for us. COVID has suspended that program but we are working with them to reopen in feasible steps by creating tea times for visiting professionals to roundtable discuss with students. This way, the space can reopen and trial having larger occupancy indoors and match participation with staff and material needs. It’s where we can be now, but we’re shooting for more as boosters become abundant and restrictions loosen. Coming with a “Western/American” perspective, my attitude and efforts, even in the most minimal of capacities, receive an overwhelming amount of gratitude. It’s mind-boggling culturally, really, to have our work-your-nubs-off culture be seen as beneficial and inspirational. I have to remind myself that time and schedules work here differently, and it’s certainly a change in pace from the high tourism seasons of Florida. My former coworkers may especially appreciate my next exasperated statement – UNISG, my school, pays for a Google license, yet not ONE PROFESSOR nor student uses the scheduling tools, availability finders, nor any other software components of the system. *flips table*

Even with restrictions remaining and varying anxieties over the virus, our study trip the second week of Gennaio was an absolute success and joy to be on. We roamed the Piemonte, visiting vineyards and wineries (like…way too many – I couldn’t stomach a glass of wine until this week), artisanal producers, restaurants (again, we ate way too much, sometimes two three-or-four-course meals every day), distilleries, historical sites, and stunning vistas. My favorite experiences included visiting a young (as in a 19 year-old) producer of cardo gobbo, a Slow Food Presidia cardoon that is manipulated in the winter to produce a soft, white, mild stalk typically paired with bagna cauda, an anchovy-based hot-dip of the Piemonte. I highly recommend watching the videos I uploaded to my shared album from this experience – winter farming is no joke. My toes were absolutely frozen! We also visited a stunning ricetto near Biella, Il Ricetto di Candelo. Only a few intact ricetti remain, which served as refuges during Medieval times for towns and surrounding countryside when under seige. The ricetto in the Biella region was designed for storage, production, and safety, uniquely being created by, for, and owned by the people since its inception. Farmers and producers could store equipment or produce here, and process their products as well for sale or distribution elsewhere. This isn’t a dusty visitor center these days, it still is a functional commercial center for restaurants, producers, and townsfolk to use – a fantastic example of living history and continued-use spaces.

It’s been full-throttle chill mode since after the trip. With the handful of COVID cases put most of our Master’s in quarantine and with the recently surprisingly pleasant weather, it’s been too easy to attend class virtually from our kitchen patio, which is luckily still an option instead of in-person. I think I even got a tan one day! A Full Florida Kiva came out from the chilly interiors of the house.

Weekends include ski trips now…well, at least that’s what I’m trying for, but the previously mentioned pleasant weather is the nemesis of the Alpine winter, as we haven’t had a proper snow since before the New Year. I spent the past weekend in Bardonecchia, just on the border of France and Italy dead west of Turin. A classmate is a ski instructor and a former Alpine ski racer, the latter which she managed to omit mentioning until we arrived at her grandmother’s condo in the town with the walls peppered with her image and shelves covered in her trophies. You can see why, after 5 hours of snowsports with my ass to the top of the hill, I sarcastically laughed at her when she referred to the 2006 Olympic Run behind her as “not that hard.” It was that hard, and nearly an 80 degree angle. It made our apres ski Aperol spritz after it all the more appreciated.

For the first time in a while I’ve had free time to be and to read. I’m currently working on Salt by Mark Kurlansky, which has proven to be ever-helpful in understanding anchovies in Italian cuisine. They’ve never been appetizing to me, yet I’ve found myself now depending on olive oil and anchovy paste to start off my sofritos for soups, risotto, and pastas. Before my winter holiday, I finished Destination Anthropocene: Science and Tourism in the Bahamas by Amelia Moore, an environmental anthropology publication that gave supportive and contradictory points of view to my limited knowledge of environmental tourism, but has certainly planted a seed in my mind for further interest and research. Potential thesis topic? We’ll see!

I’ve had some projects to turn in and exams submitted, and although they still haven’t been graded yet, I thought I’d share one of my projects that I found to be personally and academically rewarding. A special thanks to my family for helping to compile the information and photos included in this cookbook project, attached in this email. I hope you find it as interesting as I did, or if you don’t, feign interest 😉

I’ve scrolled this email a few times now and realize that these must be big blocks of text when viewed on a mobile device! Your persistence and commitment to reading these is humbling - I appreciate all of you who have stayed along with me for this ride. Until next month, famiglia e amici!