Vincent Van Gogh heard colors. Billie Eilish perceives people as shapes and color. To Eilish, her brother, Finneas, is an orange triangle. The Town of San Gimignano in Tuscany did that for me. Not speaking Italian, I relied on my senses for context. It was disorienting and wonderfully captivating. We arrived in the thick of heat to unwind at the Hotel Leon Blanco after a short drive in from Pisa. Once gathered, we shopped for brightly woven purse straps, wild boar salami, and pecorino cheese. Then we lounged on the steps of the Duomo Collegiata di Santa Maria Assunta before making our way to La Biscondola Di Volpini to eat.
There the owner gestured us to a two-top but it had only one chair so we stole over to a four-top next to a small well where kids from the next table over splashed water as their parents sipped wine. The owner spotted our table theft and uttered a slew of words at us that we understood only by the wide surprised eyes of the kid's parents. Nonetheless, our pasta and wine was superb.
After this late dinner we grabbed gelatos at a busy shop on the triangular Piazza della Cisterna across from our hotel and clamored randomly, away and down, from the hubbub, left and right, along narrow cobblestoned corridors, beyond the shopgirl's lodgings, past where the shop owners lived, to an astounding view that I witnessed as elation.
San Gimignano dates back a thousand year and is famous for fourteen feudal towers atop a hillside rising from valleys of sunflowers and vineyards, as well as cherry and olive groves. Ever ready to thwart intruders, the town is guarded by a double ring of walls. We had made our way to a high ledge of the outer wall and stood silently looking down through fog-obscured grape alleyways under an almost full moon as a gallery of field aromas and muted town celebrations wafted through. We marveled.
Red wine produced from the grapes grown on the canvas unveiled before us must contain 85% of the Sangiovese varietal to be DOC - Vino a Denominazione di Origine Controllata. The signature flavors of Sangiovese are sour red cherry, plum, dried herbs, tea leaves with a savory note. With age, this wine acquires a more meaty and gamey aroma grounded by earthiness. What we beheld on that ledge hit us as if we were tasting that wine.
Maybe there are other ways to explain it. La Dolce Vita is the sweet life. Federico Fellini's film with that title stars Marcello Mastroianni. His character pursues the good life but experiences a fruitless search for love and happiness. At the end an all too young shopgirl he desires calls to him from across an estuary but words are lost on the wind and drowned out by the crashing waves. San Gimignano is like that. Visiting, all one's senses are filled. But it is only a visit and cannot be sustained. One leaves, joyful to have visited, sad to leave, and understanding you could not live there. Such is travel, mezmerizing and fleeting.
One reason I cook is to recreate foods I experience on journeys. To me flavor is the ingredient at the core of what we are. Ancient Italians retrieved spices and foods from far and wide. That is a legacy of even more ancient hunter-gatherers colonizing habitats everywhere on earth. I enjoy learning new foods. It nourishes my soul. The process of recreating wafts and aromas fills me. But it is hard to cook a memorable pasta as it is so common. Much of its taste depends on surroundings. I eat here what I recreate hopeful my mind's eye will take me back to Tuscany. That pilgrimage of remembering.
