Italy

It’s annoying as hell walking around Perugia with Miss Baldoni. Everyone, it seems, knows her. Waiters at the sidewalk cafes across from the duomo leave their tables to rush over and give her a kiss on the cheek; a young woman selling daffodils in the piazza offers her a free bouquet. Even a capuchin monk, on his way to Assisi, stops his journey to give her a hug and then prattles on for 10 or 15 minutes about god only knows what.

Finally the bearded monk in his pointy little hood hurries off and we are able to continue on, heading down a narrow street until Maura suddenly stops and looks all around her, as if for the first time. “I love this street,” she says. “Via Maesta delle Volte. It’s one of the most sensual streets in Perugia. Do you see what I mean?”

My guide, Maura Baldoni. Photos by David Lansing.

Frankly, no. To me, it’s dark, dank, narrow. A bit claustrophobic.

“You are blind, aren’t you?” She sighs. “Look,” she says, pointing back up the street. “Focus. Pay attention. This street is like a woman, full of arches and curves. It is vuoto and pieno—empty and full. You see?”

Slowly, I do see. The gorgeous arches above the vicolos, the inviting openings that entice you onwards. The play of shadow and light, the different textures and colors.  She’s right. It’s incredibly sensual. Why could I not see this before?

We continue down the hill as Miss Baldoni explains to me that Perugia has always had the lines of a woman. “It was founded on two hills,” she says, “with the flat space—Corso Vannucci—between them.” She stops and faces me. “You see,” she says, directing my attention to the mounds of her chest with both her hands, “this is what Perugia looks like.”

Point well taken.

We end up on the edge of town where a round church sits on a nob in a tranquil setting of rose gardens and cypress trees. She has brought me to San Michele Arcangelo, one of the oldest Christian churches in Umbria, dating to the late 5^th century. It is intimate, simple, peaceful and quite beautiful. There is no one inside. I walk around its circular walls, touching the well-worn stone.

The feminine curves of San Michele Arcangelo in Perugia, Italy.

“It’s something special for us, this church,” Miss Baldoni tells me as we sit on a wooden bench. “A very popular place for Perugians to get married. Do you understand why?”

I do. This time she does not need to explain the romantic nature of the architecture to me. There is something sweetly feminine about this little church. Something that invites you into its intimate space, something that makes you feel tranquil and happy. A post-coital emotion that even I can sense. 

(baldonimaura@libero.it)

Whenever I ask the concierge at the Locanda Della Posta how to get somewhere, he tells me it is next to or very near someplace else. Someplace I’ve never been and have no idea how to get to. He tells me, for instance, that the Osteria il Gufo, where I planned to have dinner Saturday night, is across from the old cinema on Via della Viola (a street that’s not on any map). The truffle shop, he tells me, is on the same street as the gelaterie. But since there are about a thousand gelati shops in Perugia, I ask him which one and am told, “The best, naturalmente.”

Rather timidly, I ask him if the best gelati shop in Perugia has a name? No, he says. “But everyone knows it.” And he dismisses me as the idiot I am with a wave of his hand.

Saturday afternoon, after asking the concierge for directions to a shop nearby selling cheese, I ended up walking down a narrow, dark vicolo, completely lost, where I stumbled upon Cacioteka Formagi Salumi (although, somewhat confusingly, it says GIULIANO’S in big blue letters on the front).

Leonardo Spulcia in Cacioteka. Photos by David Lansing.

Cacioteka is owned by Leonardo Spulcia and when I ask him why the store sign says GIULIANO’S, he shrugs and says the name has always been on the front of the shop and why ruin a perfectly good sign just because the original owner,  Giuliano, may have died of cholera in the 15^th century? Well, who can argue with such logic?

I tell Leonardo I’d like some local gorgonzola and he instructs his assistant to cut me off a chunk from a lovely wedge in the display case. While I’m waiting, Leonardo gives me an assaggio from a big, fat, round sausage in a cloth bag labeled coglioni di mulo. I don’t know a lot of Italian but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that mulo is mule and coglioni sounds very similar to the Spanish cojones—balls. Mule’s balls sausage.

Would you prefer the mule’s balls or grandpa’s testicles sausage?

Italians, who have an endless number of food items named after male and female sexual parts,  seem to find this sort of thing hilarious.

When I compliment him on his mule’s balls, he cuts up a crinkly-looking sausage, palle del nonno, made from local wild boar. The name translates into something like “grandpa’s testicles.” It’s even tastier. Not as fatty as the mule’s balls but with a better mouth-feel. I take a quarter kilo of each and happily munch on them, and my gorgonzola, out on the balcony of my hotel room while watching the swallows dive bomb for insects above a very busy Corso Vannucci.

Here in Umbria, it’s starting to feel a little bit like spring. 

Usually I don’t mind eating alone. In fact, I kind of like it. Nobody pays any attention to you (including the waiters, which, okay, can be the downside) and I can just sit there unobtrusively drinking my wine while trying to figure out everybody’s story instead of listening with faux-rapt attention to whoever I might be dining with (this is, after all, what a flâneur does).

For instance, last night I ate alone at La Taverna Ristorante in Perugia. While I was waiting for my ravioli di radicchio e speck al gorgonzola e pere, which was very good by the way, two different couples walked in. Both dressed head-to-toe in black (it’s an Italian/NY thing). The women looked so similar they could have been sisters: early 30s, black shoulder-length hair (great cuts), pale skin, dark eyes, Roman noses, hoop earrings (are they back?). One of the guys was better looking than the other: better haircut, better suit. The other guy wore a stretched-out turtleneck and had a Beatles haircut (which, I’ll admit, looked very hip in 1963). Otherwise, demographically identical couples.

One couple—let’s call them the “Cute Couple”—do all the date things: run fingers along the rims of their wine glasses while they’re oh-so-intently listening to the other’s story;  she plays with her hair, he puts an index finger on his cheek; they laugh and tilt their heads at the same time; touch hands, faces, thighs; ignore their food when it comes.

The other couple—“It’s So Over,” shall we call them?—keep their coats on; sit with their hands on their laps; and talk to the chef, Claudio, when he wheels his cart over to slice up some lamb for them, but otherwise ignore each other.

Question: Which couple is going to get laid tonight?

It’s obvious, huh. So what do you think–was it the guy’s haircut? 

We’re not off to a great start, Perugia and I. It’s been a bit of a slog just getting here; two long days of planes, trams, buses, trains. Having arrived close to midnight and finding no taxis around, I consider just trudging up the dark hill to my hotel (it doesn’t look that far on my map), but outside the mostly deserted train station the impervious Umbrian night shows her indifference to my arrival by going cold on me; small rain begins to fall. So I walk a block to a mostly-deserted café and ask them to call me a cab. Just as well. What looked like a short jaunt on the map turns out to be a very long drive up a ridiculously steep hill with perilous drop-offs on both sides of numerous switchbacks. I would have perished walking. 

The taxi driver, unable to proceed past the piazza, drops me off blocks from my hotel, pointing in the darkness up a slick cobblestone street leading to the heart of this medieval town in the middle of Italy. I am soaked and exhausted by the time I climb three flights of stairs (the elevator is out of order) and put the key in the door, revealing something resembling a monk’s cell: a ridiculously tiny room and a bed smaller than the one I slept in as a child. The blanket is thin and my feet hang off the end.

The view from my room. Can this possibly be the sexiest small city in the world?

All night long, the rain beats against an ancient window that does not seal; the cold hilltop wind whistles obscenely at me through the cracks. Beyond tired but still unable to sleep, I lie in bed thinking of a poem from the Middle Ages I memorized years ago to impress a girlfriend in college:

Western wind, when wilt thou blow/The small rain down can rain?/Christ, that my love were in my arms/And I in my bed again!  

In the morning I send Hardy a text message: Arrivd Perugia lst nite. Bst pay off bet.