Say Formaggio

Once upon a time, many moons ago, I promised to write a post about Italian cheese. The other day, after being baffled by the range of delights in my local French cheese shop, where I spent 30 euros on 5 smelly concoctions that I didn't even know the names of (to justify myself, mostly to my mother, I should say that I was going to a dinner party and had offered to bring the cheese course!), I decided that Italian cheese was a slightly more approachable subject than French. So here is the post – Formaggio for Beginners.

The two most famous Italian cheeses must be mozzarella and Parmesan. The best mozzarella is made from buffalo milk. Good mozzarella has a delicate, creamy flavour, but in the bad versions the taste quickly becomes bland. I've often been surprised by how good basic supermarket mozzarella can be, but it varies a lot, so experiment!

Parmesan is the matured version of Grana Padano. The name “Padano” comes from the Pianura padana, or valley of the Po river, where it's made. Interestingly but unrelatedly, the name La Padania was appropriated by the Lega Nord as a possible name for a separate northern Italy and the area sends sports teams to competitions for nations that are not officially recognised. Grana Padano cheese is common in Italy but in the UK, most people have heard more about Parmesan, the real version of which tastes nothing like the dry flakes we used to sprinkle from a tube on to spaghetti bolognese when I was a child in the 80s. Italians do sprinkle it on pasta, soup, risotto and pretty much any primi piatti that aren't made with fish, but you can also eat it in small chunks by itself or, even better, with slices of Parma ham.

Asiago is another one of my favourites. Like mozzarella, it's mild, so when it's good it's very good but when it's bad it can be tasteless, and you find it everywhere. It exists in an aged form, but I never tasted it.

Provolone is also common. It comes in two kinds, dolce and piccante. The texture is quite like Emmental and the dolce version tastes similar. “Piccante” means “spicy”, but it's not hot, it just has more of an aged flavour. I never particularly liked it either, but maybe that's just personal taste.

Mr A and I used to call Scamorza “penis cheese”. On reflection, this is pretty gross, but it was only because the first ones we ever saw did bear a striking resemblance to penises. Actually, it's a smoky cheese that tastes delicious and melts nicely on to pizza.

Toma and Taleggio are two creamy mountain cheeses. Most of the Taleggio I had was stronger than the Toma but the texture is similar. Like all the others, these are cows' milk cheeses. I'm not a huge fan of goats' cheese (caprino) and didn't come across much sheep's cheese (pecorino) but the different regional varieties of both could make up a blog post in themselves. Interestingly enough, when I looked up the origins of all the cheeses I ate regularly, they were all relatively local to Milan – mostly from Lombardy, the Veneto or Piemonte – so the shops and markets in the South might well sell a completely different selection. I plan to go there again eventually, and I promise to do some research!

Why I Pay for Italian TV

With my internet package here in France, I get high definition TV bundled in with the phone line and internet connection that are the reasons the package is actually worth paying for for me. There are 150 TV channels included, but nevertheless, I was more than delighted when I realised that for a bargainous 3 euros per month, I could add the Italian “bouquet”, which gives me access to Rai 1, 3 and 3 and 24 hour news just as if I were in Italy. Given the reputation of Italian TV, it may come as a surprise to you to learn that anybody, least of all somebody born and bred outside of the borders of the Bel Paese, would actually pay to watch it, but there are two reasons why I do.

The first reason is that French TV is pretty bad. It doesn't have the same number of high-quality programmes that you get in the UK, but, unlike Italian TV, it doesn't give you much opportunity to laugh at it rather than with it either. Imagine Italian TV made boring. That's French TV.

The second reason is just one programme: L'Eredità. L'Eredità alone is worth 3 euros a month. It's a quiz show, on at 7 o'clock every weekday evening, where contestants answer questions in a range of formats, being eliminated as the show progresses until only two participants are left. These two then answer questions to “inherit” each other's money until eventually the winner takes it all.

The quality of the questions varies. Some are pretty stupid but some are amusing and quite a few are really interesting. One of the rounds is a guessing game that is actually really difficult, and overall, the questions are interesting enough to keep you watching and not make you despise the contestants too much for their stupidity when they get it wrong.

L'Eredità is also good for language learning because, as well as involving a wide range of vocabulary, the questions appear on the screen as you watch, helping you to understand the basics of what's going on. After the contestants response, there is a longer explanation of the answer that is a bit more complicated to follow.

As Italian TV programmes go, L'Eredità is surprisingly inoffensive. There are fewer flashing lights than in your average quiz show (and possibly even your average nature programme in Italy) and the host's skin is not too ridiculously orange. The contestants look like normal people and do not seem to have decided to appear purely in the hope of nabbing an evening gig at Berlusconi's villa. Just to add that hint of Italy, however, there is this incongruous moment where the glamorous female assistants have to dance before going on to report on relatively well-researched answers to the questions. It's bizarre.


The way that things worked out, I haven't found myself back in Italy as often as I expected to over the past few months and I feel like a bit of a fraud for carrying on this blog when I don't live there any more. I'm not ready to give it up just yet though, so let's just hope that La Rai and a few trips in the next wee while will give me enough to keep writing about.

Ritorno a Milano

I went back to Milan last weekend for the first time since I moved away in August, what seems like seven very long weeks ago. As I was expecting, it was an emotional weekend. Mr A and I broke up when he was here in the summer and visiting Milan really brought home to me the reality of what had happened. Needless to say, that hurt.

At the same time, though, the visit was a very positive experience. I was worried that I would have grown apart from my friends since last year and that without working together we would have nothing to talk about any more, but in fact that wasn't the case at all. On Friday night I slept at my friend S's house and we stayed up until 3 in the morning catching up, then on Saturday night a big group of us from my old work went out for pizza and drinks (which turned into pizza, profiteroles, ice cream... and drinks) and had a great time.

On Saturday, I stayed with two other friends and we spent most of Sunday making ravioli from scratch:




The whole process took about 4 hours, so I ended up scarfing my bowl in about 20 minutes and running off to the airport, but it was worth it just for the fun of the cooking!

The weekend was tiring and all too short, but I was glad that I went. Lots of the good things about Italy are good in France too, but Italy has this kind of exuberance that makes you smile and makes you cry in a way that no other country I know of does. Like when I was in the supermarket and the woman in front of me paid with a handful of small coins. “Della moneta – che bello!” rejoiced the checkout assistant. Or when after all those hours in the kitchen, we finally sat down to eat and realised that the pasta was delicious and we had made it all ourselves. Or when my my plane took off from Malpensa as night was falling and I caught a glimpse of the mountains rising out of the clouds into the darkness and realised that despite everything that had happened recently, Italy, that other love of my life, was still going to be there for me.

Muse on Italian TV

I have been cracking up tonight over this clip of one of my favourite bands taking the mickey on Italian TV. Aside from the obvious joke of the guys switching places, the fact that the presenter manages to get so excited about a band that clearly knows nothing about (unless she's doing an excellent cover-up job) is hysterical. I was also laughing at her for going on about how having an English language band was "so international" ("international" is cooler than a mint granita in Italy right now, but you don't have to do much to achieve the cachet), but it turns out that Matt Bellamy has an Italian girlfriend (boo!) and the album was recorded between Milan and Como. Why did I ever leave?

Stresa in the Sunshine

I realised that after my long story about sly old ladies skipping the queue at the train station, I never posted anything about my actual day in Stresa.

I've probably said this before, but I love Stresa. It's as if they combined the best of Italy and Switzerland and put them into one little town surrounded by stunning mountains and lakeside scenery.

That day two weeks ago, my first goal was to do something energetic, so I got the cable car up to Mottorone (Ok, so not that energetic!) and set off for a bit of a hike. This is where I finished up:

If I hadn't been starving and short of water, I would probably have done the 2.5 hour walk back down to Stresa, but under the circumstances I decided that it would be better to go back to the cable car. In the interest of diversity, I decided to go back a different way, and it turned out to be steep, exposed and definitely longer than the way I came. The sun beat down and the sweat dripped off me and the half hour back to the cable car seemed endless. I arrived looking as though I had been swimming and was too embarrassed to sit in the restaurant to eat, so after mopping myself down in the toilets, I bought a sandwich and found a place to hide among the trees to eat it.

Then I got the cable car back down to Stresa and jumped straight in the lake, which is probably what I should have done at the very beginning. Hiking at midday in 35 degree heat is not good for your health!

The Post Office Again

Just in case anybody was thinking of sending parcels from an Italian post office and was utterly terrified after reading about my experiences, I thought I would post the end of the story here. Four of the boxes arrived within 3 days with most of the stuff intact (although one broken mug did lead to a whole other adventure).

The other one arrived almost 3 weeks later, when I had given up hope and was assuming that customs officials had taken umbrage at or a fancy to the bottles of wine that were carefully wrapped and included in the package. When I went to collect it at the post office, I was surprised to be given a completely different box, smaller than the one I posted and covered in Chronopost International labels. Some of the stuff was missing and a lot of it was broken. A lot of the things were newly wrapped in cardboard. A lot of the things were covered in red wine.

I'm assuming that since so many of the things were broken and since they had taken the trouble to repackage the whole lot that this was somehow the post office's fault and not mine, but there was no explanation, so who knows?

Incidentally, one of my friends posted boxes and boxes full of old clothes from Italy and wasn't even asked at the post office what was in the parcels.

Buying a Train Ticket

I came back to Milan on Saturday, and with a day to spare before getting the train back to Paris, I decided to go to Lake Maggiore on Sunday. Before I even got on the train, however, I found enough material for an entire blog post.

The trains to Lake Maggiore leave from the Porta Garibaldi train station, which has over 20 platforms and lots of departures, even early on a Sunday morning. Despite the frequency of the trains, however, the ticket office was closed. This would not have been a huge problem if two of the automatic vending machines hadn't been broken, meaning that anyone who hadn't bought their ticket the day before had to either use the regional ticket machines, which only accept coins, or the one main line ticket machine, which took bank notes but could only give change up to 4.95.

This initial hurdle eliminated many participants before the ticket buying test had even really started. Many wandered off towards the bar, which was desperately asking customers to pay for their 85 cent coffee using something other than a 50 euro note. The rest of us passed on to the competitive part of the exam: queueing like an Italian.

The queue was long. I arrived and took my place behind a guy with a suitcase. An elderly-ish woman came and stood next to me. Possibly even slightly in front of me. Despite the fact that she was invading my personal space, I sidled a little further into the space between me and suitcase man.

At this point I should say that I am normally nice to my fellow citizens. I give up my seat on the bus, let people with one item in front of me in the supermarket and would have no problem letting someone who was about to miss their train go in front of me in the ticket queue. Where I am perhaps not so nice, however, is in the fact that I like to have a choice about it. If old ladies try to cheat me, there is no way they are getting my place in the queue. Being British, however, I am incapable of turning to people and saying, “Excuse me, I was here first.” Instead I sidle, refuse to make eye contact, and spread my feet and elbows out in an attempt to fill the space that they are trying to steal from me. So, for several minutes, that is what I did.

Old Lady Number 1, however, was an amateur compared to the next one that came along. Peering over her glasses, she pretended to be examining the machine in an attempt to understand how it worked. She sighed a lot and addressed a few questions to the crowd. (“What do I do? Does it take banknotes? Can I buy a return ticket?”) A man near the front of the queue who was clearly a better person than me answered all her questions.

“Oh, signore, do you think you could help me buy my ticket?”

And with one neat move, there she was by his side at the front of the queue.

The fun didn't end there though. The machine refused to accept people's banknotes. It spat out their cards and cancelled their transactions. People at the back of the queue were offering change to people at the front in a desperate attempt to get their tickets on time. Old Lady Number One began to feel concerned. She asked Gentile Signore to help her. Gentile Signore looked worried. He had a train to catch.

“Don't worry, I can help you,” I said. We arrived at the front of the queue and, after a couple of attempts, bought first her ticket, then mine. She thanked me, and I smiled back.

“My pleasure,” I said. And it was.

Apparently, living in Italy can bring out the wartime spirit in all of us.