adven­tures with wild boar

Trav­el, like so many oth­er pleas­ant things (mar­riage, for exam­ple) is all about com­pro­mise.  Unless you go abroad with peo­ple who share your inter­ests, unlike fam­i­ly who just share your life, you end up doing a lot of things because oth­er peo­ple want to do them.  So because John and his mom were very hot to do it, Avery and I climbed up with them to the top of the Duo­mo even though once we got up there, we were too ter­ri­fied to move, much less take a pho­to­graph or pose for one!  Avery bolt­ed straight back down the 523 steps, I lin­gered for just long enough to real­ize I real­ly felt ill, and fol­lowed her down. Here we are, very tiny and low.

Our hearts were pound­ing, from a com­bi­na­tion of exer­tion and sheer fear, for about the next hour!  Dur­ing which, because Avery want­ed to, we all trooped into Sepho­ra, where if there is a lim­it to her atten­tion span, we’ve nev­er reached it.  She can spend a mind-bend­ing­ly long time in there, perus­ing — no, actu­al­ly touch­ing — every sin­gle tube of lip­stick, shade of blush, shim­mery things and glossy things and by the end of an hour the entire back of her hand is cov­ered with tiny sam­ples of all the products.

Have I ever men­tioned that Avery writes a make­up blog, in fact?  She’d love for you to vis­it.  She’ll tell you every­thing you need to know about any item you might want to apply to your face… and yet she her­self always looks com­plete­ly nat­ur­al.  How does she man­age it?

And then, because my fam­i­ly are real­ly very nice peo­ple, we went to… the Mer­ca­to Cen­trale, the Cen­tral Mar­ket, where I could eas­i­ly have pitched a tent and lived for WEEKS, just going from stall to stall.  It is HUGE!  If you’ve ever been to Bor­ough Mar­ket, here in Lon­don, it’s a sim­i­lar atmos­phere, only for some rea­son much bet­ter lit!  Heav­en­ly.  Every­one so friend­ly and allow­ing me to speak my ragged Ital­ian, only slip­ping into Eng­lish when I was proved total­ly incom­pe­tent to dis­tin­guish between types of sala­mi I want­ed to buy!  Of course I had a com­plete­ly won­der­ful time buy­ing dried porci­ni, truf­fle puree, Parmi­giano in huge chunks, spe­cial sea­son­ing mix­es for all sorts of pas­ta dish­es, and fresh produce…

The most excit­ing, and also chal­leng­ing, thing to buy was the Holy Grail of my vis­it to the mar­ket… the wild boar that I’d been so eager to get a recipe for at the restau­rant the night before.  And buy it I did.

From there it was nec­es­sary to pla­cate my troops, not linger at every stall, and final­ly just choose the mush­rooms and fen­nel that would com­plete my shop.  Why isn’t it this much fun to buy mush­rooms in Lon­don?  And mel­on!  Don’t get me start­ed.  The pro­pri­etress gave me a sam­ple and it was the juici­est, the most fra­grant I had ever tast­ed.  I bought more of every­thing than I real­ly needed.

By this time I had com­plete­ly spent my fam­i­ly’s patience with the mar­ket, and had to be con­tent with the unwieldy and heavy bags con­tain­ing all my plun­der, includ­ing the wild boar which had come with instruc­tions for “slow cook­ing,” as I already knew.

Off we were to a self-improv­ing day at the Uffizi, although truth be told, Avery and I were slack­ers.  We looked duti­ful­ly at paint­ings, not­ing that the thing we most want­ed to see, Bot­ti­cel­li’s “Venus on the Half-Shell” as it’s known in the art his­to­ry trade, had some­how dis­ap­peared.  We con­sult­ed our guide­book, our guide to the muse­um itself, a lit­tle map I had secret­ed in my bag.  “It’s got to be along that cor­ri­dor we first vis­it­ed,” John said opti­misti­cal­ly, and there­upon anoth­er round­about of the gal­leries in search of that one lit­tle jew­el.  And find it we did, but to me, the real jew­el was the view from the gallery window.

We emerged, final­ly, hav­ing sat­is­fied every­one’s wish­es for the day: archi­tec­ture, scary upward­ly mobile views, the per­fect eye­lash, the per­fect wild boar, Bot­ti­cel­li, and, our glo­ri­ous restau­rant of the night before, for dinner!

“We can cook the wild boar tomor­row night,” I assured every­one, “and remem­ber, he’s closed tomor­row night, so we’d bet­ter go now.”

THIS night, how­ev­er, we were treat­ed even more roy­al­ly than we had been the night before.  The pro­pri­etor greet­ed me by name, we were seat­ed in what we thought of as “the natives’ room” as every­one was speak­ing Ital­ian around us, instead of Eng­lish as they had the night before, not that we had mind­ed.  And the stroz­za­preti al spinaci, even more mag­nif­i­cent than the night before… a beau­ti­ful night.