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The Florentine
Food and wine in Florence and Tuscany, including food stories, restaurant reviews and wineries.
Whether relaxing during a mid-day siesta or unwinding after a long day at work, Italians delight in sitting back and sipping a good drink. Though you may imagine them swirling a glass of Chianti or pouring a bottle of Nastro Azzurro, Italians have in fact been mixing up the
The season that graces Florence with wisteria, iris and roses has finally arrived. It’s spring! Every café, restaurant and bar is throwing open its doors and moving chairs and tables outside to fill each square inch of available space. Why? Because it’s time to
My first memory of eating an artichoke is an image of my mother showingme how to bite down on the leaf and pull it through my front teeth. I must have been very young, because myteeth marks were tiny compared to the others in that great heap of discardedleaves
It must be hard to be an excellent red wine but get virtually ignored because your ‘big brothers’ are so well known. This is the dilemma faced by the Barbera, Dolcetto, and Roero wines of the Piedmont region that are so overshadowed by the Barolo and Barbaresco wines
We all know Piazza Santissima Annunziata because of Brunelleschi’s beautiful Ospedale degli Innocenti, with its magnificent porticoed colonnade and Della Robbia’s blue-glazed terracotta tondos with cherubic babes wrapped in swaddling clothes. But next time you go there, stop a while to admire more carefully the
For cooks, one of the true pleasures of life in Italy is the bounty of beautiful fruits and vegetables that are so readily available throughout the year. I am always fascinated by the artfully arranged displays set up by vendors, particularly those on street corners. My local ambulante di frutta
The holidays evoke an inevitable urge to cook, not that I ever need much to be inspired here in Florence. I am almost thankful that there is no Thanksgiving here in Italy, as the feasting rites of Christmas almost put me under the table. In this country, food always seems
The Italian wine community is especially proud this year. The tasting panel at Wine Spectator, one of America’s top sources of information, sampled 13,500 wines from around the world in efforts to select this year’s ‘Top 100.’ Not only did Tuscan wines
When November approaches, umbrellas crop up all over Florence. I asked Elena Galluzzi, a busy Florentine who runs a family hotel here, what she likes to cook this time of the year. Her answer? ‘Hearty bean soups and stews,’ she said, ‘a truly traditional
Italian chefs live by the season. Every season signifies a change of the menu which reflects the produce found during each time period. For many chefs, October in Italy means truffle season. Truffles, or tartufi, date back to the times of the Greeks and Romans and were historically perceived as
The beach house is closed for the season. The rientro is complete and everyone is back in the city where school and work schedules once again dictate the rhythm of daily life. What’s the first thing a Tuscan cook thinks about in autumn? That’s the question
The turn of the seasons signifies many things: the beginning of a new year for academics, the emergence of a new wardrobe for the fashion world, and the end of ...
At the source of the Arno River lies Il Borro, a striking medieval hamlet whose origins stretch back more than a thousand years, when the area was once dominated by a fortified castle. Named for its deep yellow gorges, or borri, the region was originally inhabited by the Etruscans and
One story places all the blame on the Pisans. In fact, an old Tuscan proverb declares, Meglio un morto in casa che un pisano all’uscio, which roughly translated means ‘Better a death in the family than someone from Pisa on your doorstep’. This epitomises the rivalry
The current popularity of ‘enogastronomy’- wine and food related tourism – may seem new but Italian wines have been drawing visitors since the Greeks overran the Etruscans. However, unlike food, wine in Italy in the last 35 years has changed dramatically. Around that time, Italians began to realize
You’re bound to have seen them in the countryside: men and women, often elderly, bent over double as they forage and pluck in fi elds and on grassy verges of roads, tossing their pickings into a sack. What are they gathering so diligently? It’s no mystery.
