Food of Europe: Of Cucumbers, Smelt and Miracles

I have had a love-hate relationship with cucumbers for as long as I can remember: I loved to hate them. I have often joked that I can’t stand to be in the same room with a cucumber. Ha Ha. Ha. 

My antipathy probably dates to when I got married. This vegetable had never been served on a plate before me - to my recollection - until I got married. (I am pretty sure that this fact is attributable to my father who no doubt despised them. He had a somewhat limited palate. Even though he was raised on a fruit farm, he never ate cherry pie (!) until he was in the army.) My former wife loves English cucumbers. They were introduced to my environment and, truth be told, I somehow felt inferior because I didn't like them. My antipathy only deepened.

But on our first night in Greece, a miracle happened: I ate cucumbers (!) ... in a Greek salad. (My children will appreciate the significance of this event.) And they weren’t bad. The miracle occurred just down the street from our hotel (see picture below). We headed out that evening for something to eat after having cocktails in our room. We asked the front desk clerk if he could recommend a place that was close by, somewhere where we could get a salad.

He sent us to a small taverna half a block away. Between the hotel and the taverna, however, was another small restaurant on the other side of the street. A man whom we assumed to be the proprietor tried to get us to eat at his place, but we went with the desk clerk’s recommendation. We would later learn how displeased the man was with our decision.

Meanwhile, we arrived at the other place and sat down at a small table on the sidewalk. As far as I recall, we were the only customers there; but perhaps it was early by Athenian standards. 

There were no English menus. In fact, there were no menus. Mark told the man we wanted a Greek salad. He nodded in recognition, but waited while we told him what else we wanted. Seeing no response forthcoming, he took the initiative and started questioning. “Fish? Meat?” Somehow or other, Mark communicated that we’d like fish. As the man walked away into the bowels of the restaurant, I asked Mark what kind of fish we were getting. His response: “I don’t know.”

Mark went down the following morning and took this picture of our taverna and its proprietor (standing).

Shortly, we were presented with a standard Greek salad: tomatoes, red onions, feta cheese and … cucumbers. The miracle likely would not have happened had I not had a stiff cocktail beforehand. I started eating and said, “What the hell,” and bit into a cucumber. I waited for the retching to start, but it didn’t. In fact, the cucumber didn’t taste too bad. I had another piece. No bile rising. Hmmm. I felt a small stirring of victory and pride in myself for having ventured where I had never ventured before.

Then the fish arrived. Sardines. Or at least that's what I thought at the time. I learned later that they were smelt, or marithes (in Greek). Breaded and fried. It was time for the second miracle.

I don’t believe I had ever eaten a sardine before. (This is what was going on in my head at the time, but I would have felt the same way about smelt.) In fact, I’m positive I had not – unless it was camouflaged in something else. I’m also positive I could not have eaten those fishies had I been cold sober. As it was, I plunged in with gusto, and I loved them! I commented to Mark at one point that eating them was kind of like eating French fries. As I look at the picture now, I wonder whether I could do it sober. That will be my next challenge.

Two nights later, we were getting ready to leave the Greek island of Santorini at dusk. I’ll leave a description of our experience on that island to a later post. For now, I want to continue with the theme of food. There were lots and lots of restaurants up on the plateau of Santorini, but our cruise coordinator, Nadia, recommended a simple tavern down on the pier below, close by where we would catch the tender boat back to our ship. 

The food was amazing. I had chicken souvlaki – which was delicious - but what I couldn’t get enough of was the Tzatziki that was served with dinner. The concoction of yogurt, garlic, cucumbers and olive oil was so good that I asked for more. This, too, was a miracle because I had always turned down tzatzikii at the Salt Lake Greek Festival when ordering gyros. (What was I thinking!)

Mark took a picture of the grill out back

Nadia, our cruise director, and I discussing Greek food

What a revelation. I guess it took coming to Greece for me to learn to like cucumbers, sardines and Tzatziki.

Rome: The Vatican, Art and Antinous

Yes, I took the lead photo for this post near the steps of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome of a young Swiss Guard. It serves as a fitting lead-in to the story of our visit to the Vatican yesterday morning.

I am a gay man. There have been gay men (and women) that have existed since time immemorial. Their history, however, has been consigned, generally speaking, to the dust bin of history. Hidden. Unspoken. Just as most gay men's lives have been up until fairly recently.

There are, however, a few exceptions to this rule. One of them is the tale of Antinous and the Emperor Hadrian.

I wouldn't have thought of this but for a casual mention yesterday by our guide, Fabio, an art-historian-turned-guide, who unfolded for us the back stories of the Vatican, the popes and ancient Rome and Greece.

Mark and Fabio.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of my story. 

I had booked a tour with Fabio through "Tours by Locals." I would highly recommend this site / service that we first used during our trip to Japan a year ago. Fabio is an art historian with degrees in art history from universities here in Rome. He speaks perfect English and was able to flawlessly describe for us the historical and artistic background of what we saw at the Vatican yesterday morning. He also appeared to be well-known to the personnel at the Vatican Museum. We were escorted past lines of waiting patrons right into the museum by a uniformed gentleman whose name was probably "Rocky." He kinda looked a little like Sylvester Stallone. And there were other times when fleeting looks of recognition seemed to pass between museum personnel and Fabio.

I found it interesting to watch the various tour groups that were everywhere. Groups of people with identical headsets following their guide who carried a stick with a flag on the end. Obviously, I much preferred our arrangement. We asked Fabio at one point if he found it difficult working with all kinds of people on an almost daily basis. "Sometimes," he frankly replied, "it is difficult. For example, I recently worked with a couple from New York who were like characters out of a Woody Allen movie." We later found out that they had arranged to take a *private* tour of the Vatican Archives. Not only did they have their own guide, but they had paid 2000 Euros to the Vatican for the privilege of taking a tour of the entire museum after hours.

But, again, I get ahead of my story.

We left our inn (marked above at Via Urbana 156) at 8:00 yesterday morning for (what I thought was) the 45-minute walk across Rome to the Cafe Vaticano where we were to meet Fabio at 8:50. It was a beautiful morning. A cloudless, blue sky. Brilliant. On the way, we passed by ruins near the Forum and by the Victor Emmanuel II monument, a tribute to the man who united the Italian states in the 19th century.

We quickened our pace as I kept an eye on my watch. We walked down Corso Vittorio Emanuele II toward a tiny street, Borgo San Spirito, that would lead us across the Pont San Angelo to the other side of the Tiber, in the face of the Castel Sant' Angelo, stronghold of popes.

Castel Sant' Angelo

St. Peter's, looking up the Via della Conciliazione

Somewhere along the Via della Conciliazione, it became apparent that we were likely going to be late. We quickened our pace even more and arrived at the Cafe Vaticano just at 9:00, where we met Fabio. Then across the street to the entrance of the Vatican Museum, being whisked through the entrance by "Sylvester" (described above) and on into the museum.

The "pigna" (pinecone) in the Belvedere Courtyard that dates to the first century. It used to be a fountain and stood near the Pantheon until moved.

The best investment we made in the Rome leg of our trip was hiring Fabio. Neither Mark nor I are "museum people" in that we can quickly tire of the museum experience. This didn't happen yesterday. We were held captivated as Fabio explained the history and context of various works of art, the popes who commissioned them and little background details that he wove into a larger story. He knew - as did we - that we couldn't hope to take in every single work during the 3-1/2 hours that we spent with him. Thus, he guided us through, stopping to answer our questions, pacing the tour.

He also told us things about Vatican City that we wouldn't have known as well as confirmed a rumor that is only known in the United States in a few circles. It was an open secret in Rome, Fabio said, that Pope Benedict is gay and that his German-Archbishop Secretary, Georg Gänswein, who lives with Benedict in his retirement, is his boyfriend.

Archbishop Georg Gänswein 

But I digress ... sort of.

I was grateful for the reading I had done in the past six months that helped give context and texture to what we were seeing. I got about two-thirds of the way through The Agony and the Ecstasy last spring and recently completed Basilica (by R.A. Scotti), a book I recommend about the saga of the building of St. Peter's. This reading, along with watching some episodes of The Borgias (the Showtime series starring Jeremy Irons - which Fabio mentioned during our tour, saying he considered it an accurate portrayal of that period), prepared me well for what I saw and heard yesterday morning.

I had learned, for example, a fair bit about Giuliano della Rovere who became Pope Julius II, the man who began the construction of St. Peter's Basilica and commissioned (ordered) Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He was a collector of ancient Roman statues, and it was he who brought his collection to the Villa Belvedere, including: the Apollo of Belvedere, pictured above, which was rediscovered in central Italy in the late 15th century; the statue of Laocoön and His Sons, pictured below, which was rediscovered underneath a vineyard outside of Rome in 1506; and the "Belvedere Torso," which is pictured below the Laocoön detail.

Detail of a floor mosaic that had been moved from a Roman bath to what is now the Vatican Museum. Note the three-dimensional perspective of the meander. The ability to create perspective in art was lost until rediscovered in the Renaissance.

Eventually we moved into the Raphael Rooms, two adjoining rooms that feature frescos painted by the Renaissance wonder child, Raphael. I remember visiting these rooms in 1982 with my friend, Joe. He was an architecture student and knew a lot about what we were looking at, and I benefitted from that. Similarly, we benefitted yesterday from Fabio's knowledge.

Of all the frescos, I was most struck by the "Mass at Bolsena," pictured above (Internet photo). From Wikipedia, we learn that the following:

"The Mass at Bolsena depicts the story of a Bohemian priest who in 1263 ceased to doubt the doctrine of Transubstantiation when he saw the bread [host] begin to bleed during its consecration at Mass. The cloth that was stained by the blood was held as a relic at the nearby town of Orvieto; Julius II had visited Orvieto and prayed over the relic in 1506.[3] The Pope is portrayed as a participant in the Mass and a witness to the miracle; he kneels to the right of the altar, with members of the Curia (also portraits) standing behind him. Raphael distinguishes the "real" thirteenth-century witnesses from those who are contemporaries of the pope by their degree of engagement in the event; the latter concentrate calmly on Julius kneeling at his devotions rather than responding to the miracle."

What I found striking about this fresco is that all of the faces are looking at the altar except one, that of a Swiss guard in the lower right-hand corner. Here are a couple of detail photos that I took:

The proportions are a bit off because I was standing on the floor and the fresco is higher up on the wall. Below is a photo I found on the Internet that depicts the scene in better proportion. (Note as well the striking difference in the colors between the pictures I took and the ones from the Internet. I can only assume that the frescos have been restored in the relatively recent past.)

The young Swiss guard, who bears a striking resemblance to the one pictured in the lead photo, seems to be looking directly at the artist or at the viewer. I can only wonder what the story behind that might be ...

It then became time to go to the Sistine Chapel. Before entering (where talking is, strictly speaking, forbidden), Fabio took us aside and explained some things about both the ceiling and the "Last Judgment," each painted by Michelangelo but approximately three decades apart from one another. I had visited the Chapel in 1982, but that was before the frescos were restored. Yesterday, I was able to see them in all their original vivid colors. Of course, the place was crammed with tourists, but just being in that room, where so much history has taken place, was special.

Thence on to the Basilica. Again, my reading stood me in good stead, as it had in the Sistine Chapel. We could have been easily swamped, overwhelmed by all the art and history in the church; but as with the rest of our tour, we took it all in generally, not particularly. When I was here in 1982, my friend Joe had gone into great detail about the building of the dome, what a feat it was, and other aspects of the church's architecture. 

One interesting factoid from yesterday was that only popes who have achieved sainthood are allowed to be buried on the main floor of the basilica. When John Paul II was made a saint, his body was moved up to a side chapel from the crypt below the church. Another factoid was that is believed (by some, apparently) that the body of John XXIII (who called the Second Vatican Council and died in 1963) has remained uncorrupted. It is on display much as an embalmed person might be (e.g., Lenin; see picture from Internet below), but the claim is that no chemicals have been used to preserve the body. 

Now, back to the opening paragraphs of this post and to the subject of gay history.  One of the statues we saw in the same room as the Belvedere Apollo was that of Antinous, pictured below.

Antinous was a youth from Turkey who became the lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian (think Hadrian's Wall in Britain and the Pantheon in Rome). I had run across this story before, but seeing his statue reminded me of the intensity of the love between Hadrian and Antinous and the deification that evolved after Antinous' untimely drowning in the River Nile. Ancient contemporary sources make it quite clear what kind of relationship they had. Hadrian mourned Antinous' death bitterly and founded a city in Egypt to honor his memory.

The only surviving painted image of Antinous. It is interesting to note the resemblance to the Swiss Guard in Raphael's fresco (discussed above) and - though admittedly a bit of a stretch, to the Swiss Guard whose picture I took outside St. Peter's Basilica.

The story of Hadrian and Antinous is just one of many stories of same-sex love that is little-known in the world today. What we now call homosexuality (a term invented in the 19th century) has always been present in recorded history, but it has rarely been recorded.

Today, it's off to the Forum and Colosseum this afternoon after a lazy morning. Tomorrow, we head for Athens.

Ciao Roma!

The last (and only) time I was in Rome before this trip was 32 years ago. It was the spring of 1982. I was going on two years out of college, and one of my best friends from my old fraternity was studying abroad for a year in Paris. He invited me to come over for his spring break. I would spend a few days in Paris, and when he became free, we would take an overnight train to Rome and spend a few days there. 

It was a memorable trip - or so I thought until we arrived in Rome yesterday and went out into the city and I realized (a) I either didn't remember a lot of my visit in 1982 or (b) my memories were very different from the Rome I am now experiencing. Funny how life is like that.

We booked a very reasonably-priced place in the Via Urbana, in the Monti District of Rome. I had read that Monti is considered one of the hip new areas of Rome (it's very old but hasn't become hip until fairly recently). Where we are staying is more of an inn than a hotel. It occupies parts of the first and second floor of an old apartment building. To access our room, we go through a door at the end of a hall that leads onto a small private terrace, then go through another door that leads into our room.

We love it.

Our room

View of a church bell tower from our terrace.

After getting settled late yesterday morning, we headed out for a bit of a walk and lunch at a taverna that our innkeeper had suggested. 

Doormat at an apartment on the landing of the first floor

Entry Hall to our building

Mark descending the stairs to street level

S. Maria of Monti

Ceiling of S. Maria

Our taverna wasn't too far from our inn. When we walked in, however, the staff were eating their own lunch and asked us to come back in 15 minutes or so. We took advantage of this time to walk a little further down the street when to my surprise I realized that the Forum was just across the street. I looked to the left and, sure enough, I saw the Colosseum. 

I felt totally disoriented from what I recalled from 1982. Everything looked different. It made me wonder what it would be like to go back to the two houses in which I spent my childhood and early adolescence. Would it evoke additional memories or merely confuse the ones I have, or both? Mark had visited Rome much more recently, in 2000 and again in 2009, and his memories were much more in line with what we were looking at. 

Our first meal in Italy was simple but very enjoyable: carbonara with a half-liter of their table red.  For dessert, I elected for the ricotta cheese and cherry torte while Mark went for the pear /walnut / pinenut torte. I had asked our innkeeper for a place that didn't cater to tourists and whom should be see as we came in but a table of Dutch tourists. (For you, Koen.) But it was still a nice experience.

Yesterday evening, we went on a walking tour of Rome with a company that had been highly recommended. It was, well, an interesting experience. Our guide, as it turned out, is Dutch. (They're everywhere, Koen.)

Joseph, our guide.

There were four couples in our group, two from the Toronto area and one from San Diego. We learned that the church at the top of the Spanish Steps is being renovated and is covered with scaffolding. We also learned that the Trevi Fountain is also being renovated and is also covered with scaffolding. But most of all, we learned that Rome is crawling with tourists right now. They are everywhere, in groups and on their own. I didn't recall there being nearly that many tourists in 1982.

The Pantheon. I recall eating lunch with my friend in 1982 at a small cafe just in front of the Pantheon. It was very pleasant. Last night it was full of tourists.

We left the tour early and went back to our room. I processed memories, feelings, emotions. In the end, we went to bed early, and I told myself that the following morning would be different than the night before.

Food of Europe: Of Wine and Pavlova

In my last post, I whined a little about food. That was yesterday. We had the most wonderful dinner of our entire tour last night at a spiffy little hotel in Castellane named Nouvel Hotel de Commerce. If anyone stumbles across this post while searching for a hotel in Castellane, this is the place to stay. After a few places that have acquired nicknames in our group like, "Hotel Albania" and "Hotel Warsaw," this place is a very welcome change.

I have never been a wine aficionado. My experience with it has been very limited. But this trip has opened my eyes to a few things. We are served wine every night with dinner, but our real discoveries have been on our own. 

Things started off with a bottle of Burgundy that our innkeeper suggested when we were up in the Alps.

Until I drank that wine, I didn't think I liked reds. This one was probably the driest red I've ever tasted, and I loved it, as did Mark. La Framée Bourgogne Hautes Cotes de Beaume Mouillard. I don't know the correct way to refer to the wine, but there you have it. Apparently, it is produced in the northern part of Burgundy. We will be on the lookout for it when we get back to Utah, but I'm not too optimistic about finding it there behind the alcohol wall.

I drink rose from time to time at home, but I've had a fair bit of it on this tour as part of the wine provided with our dinners. Last night, I partook of the best rose that I've ever tasted.

I considered finding a new home for that ceramic wine chiller - mine.

It is apparently produced east of Marseilles and above Toulon. In doing a bit of research on the Internet, I discovered that 16 generations of the same family have been producing wine at Salettes. Their website states that "Château Salettes is located on the Mediterranean coast between Toulon and Marseille, at the foot of the hilltop village of La Cadière d'Azur. The vineyard stretches over 100 acres amid pine trees, olive trees and broom. The vines, planted out on terraces above "Golfe des Lecques" bay, benefit from an ideal exposure and a unique soil quality combining clay, limestone and crushed rock. Boasting an exceptional 3000 hours of sunshine per year, this area of Provence brings together all the ingredients that go to make Château Salettes one of Bandol's finest wines."

Once again, we'll be on the lookout for this wine once we get home. We may even buy a bottle to take  home, especially since tomorrow is the last day of our tour and we'll be able to repack everything before heading to Rome on Monday.

As I mentioned, dinner last night was wonderful. The dessert, pictured in the lead photo, I guess could be referred to as a species of pavlova. Two large meringues cradled vanilla ice cream coated with crème Chantilly festooned with fresh strawberries. It was delicious. I can't wait to see what we're having for dinner tonight!