A Tour of Italy
By Paul Finkelstein (Fink) | October 11, 2010 at 8:29 pm
Over the past couple of summers I’ve had the incredible opportunity to lead groups of high school students on culinary pilgrimages through different regions of Italy, cooking and eating our way towards a greater appreciation of Italian cuisine and culture. Our classrooms on such trips are the kitchens, markets, fields and farms of the various regions of Italy, where we learn about every aspect of Italian food, from its production to its preparation to its consumption. Through meeting the farmers, working with chefs, and dining and speaking with locals, we learn all about Italian food from the inside-out.
This year, we visited the Southeast region of Puglia. It’s always incredible how slow the first few days go and how quickly the time starts to fly after everyone settles in. Puglia is a magical place. The weather is only bad if you don’t like blue skies and the temperature averaged 30 degrees (Celsius) with a nice cooling breeze coming from the coast. The small towns of this region are peaceful and inviting and the larger cities clean and vibrant. And I can’t say enough about the people as they are the friendliest you’ll meet anywhere.
Untouched by excessive tourism, Puglia is a place that you should visit before the rest of the world finds it. (I guess I should watch what I say if I want to keep it a hidden gem!) The students are motivated just by being there: they’re hungry to cook and rise to every challenge that we throw at them.
I’m always fearful of using too much fish, but aside from a couple of “landlubbers” the crew was eager to try any item they were given. This is a good thing, as our villa was just a mile and a half from the quaint town of Margherita di Savoia, which sits right on the sea. The large selection of fresh fish and seafood, often available right off the dock, allowed us to try many recipes and broaden students’ taste experiences.
Have no fear, though — the landlubbers didn’t starve. Italians love their cured meats and cheese, so there was always a broad selection of great food in the refrigerator. And I do mean “broad” — this area of the Puglia region has a long history of consuming horse meat (the photo below shows the ingredients for a grilled horse steak sandwich). While getting the kids to try Italian Stallion was a bit of challenge at the beginning, they eventually jumped in the “saddle” and enjoyed it as much as beef!
It’s rare to find an area that so fully prides itself on its hospitality. In any town that we visited we were treated with kindness and respect. Twice we needed major directions to and from a grocer, and both times we had individuals volunteer to lead us in our their car to where we needed to go… although maybe my Italian is so pathetic they felt sorry for the kids sitting in the vans.
From the quaint and inviting side of Italy, we then traveled to the unfriendly beast, Rome, and then on to the well-trodden Tuscany. While both were fantastic, neither matched the ever lovely Puglia.
I’m one of those tourists who hate tourists. When I travel I like to pretend I’m a local. Even if I can’t speak a lick of the language I ignore other tourists and do my best to assimilate to the local flavor. When I traveled through through the middle east in my late teens I learned enough of the local language to answer any foreign traveler that I don’t speak English. Luckily I didn’t bumped into any that spoke more than I did!
What to do you think of tourists? Do they sometimes embarrass you and make you take on a foreign identity to separate yourself from them? Share your worst tourist experience or two.
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