Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (12 page)

“The alimentary habits of the Milanese people are heavily influenced by their frenetic life: always in a hurry and assailed by the need to appear efficient, they resign themselves to considering food as simply a matter of loading up on nourishing substances necessary to accrue energy so they can produce and work with joy and diligence,” writes Enrico Bertolino in a little book that is part of the genial series Le Guide Xenofobe:
Un ritratto irriverente dei migliori difetti dei popoli d'Italia
(An irreverent look at the best faults of the people of Italy). “Some eat only because the majority of antistress drugs must be taken with a full stomach.”
¹

In any case it would be somewhat reductive to equate Lombard alimentary habits with the label “Milanese.”

In the early and late Middle Ages, following the Lombard invasion of the sixth century, the primary city of this region was not Milan (which has dominated Lombardy only since the fifteenth century), but Pavia, capital of the Lombard realm. Pavia is a regal city, though its name at first deceives us, alluding not to imperial authority,
but to papal power (in Latin,
Papia
). In the Middle Ages, Pavia enjoyed unparalleled prosperity by virtue of its favorable position on the only water route that allowed Venetian trading vessels to sail from the Adriatic to Piedmont. At the beginning of the eleventh century, while goods were in short supply in most of the beleaguered continent, in Pavia one could buy anything. Over time, merchants from France, Spain, England, Germany, or the East stopped in Pavia more and more frequently to buy goods from the Venetians and bring them back to their countries. Therefore, as northern trade developed, the importance of the route to the north grew.

Pavia entered a difficult period beginning in 1176, when the city (along with Frederick Barbarossa, who governed it) was defeated by the Lombard League (Milan, Bergamo, Lecco, Cremona, Mantua, and Brescia) in the Battle of Legnano. With the opening later on of a new trade route through the St. Gotthard Pass, leading to the Rhine Valley and passing through Basel and Lucerne, Milan's ascendancy began. The city was able to wrest regional supremacy from Pavia specifically after Archbishop Ottone Visconti was proclaimed its ruler in 1278, gaining not only religious power but also civil authority over the city. Thanks to this dual government, the city was strengthened even more. With the growth of Milanese power, Pavia and Milan exchanged roles, and Pavia became a political appendage of Milan. When a tunnel was dug under St. Gotthard in 1882, Milan no longer had any reason to fear possible competition for its role as Europe's main communications node.

The Duke of Milan, Gian Galeazzo Visconti (1351–1402), spent his summer holidays in the outskirts of Pavia and built a sumptuous castle there, where he loved to surround himself with literary figures. A taste for erudite pastimes, poetry, and refined society had been passed down to the duke from his uncle, Giovanni Visconti, ruler of Milan, who had hosted the exiled Petrarch at his court from 1353 to 1361. And so his residence in Pavia was expressly intended to pass time in a dazzling way, and the most sumptuous Renaissance banquets and feasts (whose main dishes were fresh meats and game) were given there. Leonardo da Vinci, arriving at the court of Ludovico il Moro (the second ruler of the Sforza family, which had supplanted the Visconti dynasty) in Milan in 1483, designed hydraulic systems and canals, among other things, that are still used today to irrigate the rice paddies that surround Pavia and extend almost to the gates of Milan.

It is clear from both the tourist guides and the toponymy (Via Laghetto and Vicolo Laghetto, the street and lane in the historic center) that from Leonardo da Vinci's time until Mussolini's, Milan could boast an efficient system of canals (
navigli
)
connected to the Ticino and Po rivers. Milan was therefore a port serving five seas. Blocks of Candoglia rose-colored marble and Ossola granite were transported along the shipping routes through Lake Maggiore directly to the Duomo, whose construction took more than six centuries. Mussolini later ordered a large part of these channels to be filled in and covered with cobblestones, to combat the excessive mosquitoes and traffic congestion.

Stendhal was enthusiastic about the intelligent planning of the city's traffic (only a memory today) and about the elegant, expert paving (whose beautiful remains are still visible in the center of present-day Milan), and he described the drainage outlets, canals, and sewers both in the city itself and in its suburbs in a detailed report, accompanied by sketches and recorded in his diary.
²

Milan's supremacy over the surrounding territory was possible thanks to the city's excellent water supply, which had a colossal reserve: the glaciers of the Alps! Flowing down from the alpine summits into subterranean caves, the meltwater from the mountain snows fills vast basins found in Milan's subsoil. You can guess this from the city's boulevards and piazzas, where, in spite of everything, the scrubby plants in the flower beds do not wither even in summer.

In the countryside, present-day irrigation systems have been perfected since Leonardo's time, and include a system of small fountains that spray a fine, dewy mist over the pastures and fields. The temperature of this mist is maintained at a constant 8 degrees C, which protects the fields and pastures from heat waves and drought, as well as from frost, making it possible for growers and breeders to yield several harvests of fodder a year. Hence the flourishing cattle-breeding industry, one of the areas in which Lombardy's agriculture has specialized. Although the economy in Lombardy is mostly industrial, the region holds second place in agriculture in Italy (after Emilia Romagna).

“The city of Bologna nestles against a ridge of hills which look towards the north, much as Bergamo reclines against a similar range of hills which face the south. Between the two there stretches the proud Vale of Lombardy, the most extensive cultivated valley in all the civilised world,” Stendhal wrote on December 28, 1816.
³

It was in this man-made paradise that Lombardy developed its economic power. In his
Notizie sulla Lombardia
(Notes about Lombardy), Carlo Cattaneo describes a land “nine-tenths of which is not the work of nature; it is the work of our own hands; it is an artificial country.”
⁴

Traveling from Milan to Pavia, Stendhal recorded on December 16, 1816:

 

From Milan to where I am at present, the highway cuts through some of the richest farming-land in Europe. At every turning, the traveller beholds dykes of running water, spreading fertility on either hand; his road hugs the banks of the deep-water canal which forms the shipping-link between Milan and Venice and gives access by sea to the Americas; on the other hand, however, he may as likely as not find himself set upon by highwaymen under the very glare of noon.
⁵

 

With so much water available, Lombardy's two main crops are rice, grown in the Lomellina Valley (that is, between Pavia and Piedmont) and southwest of Mantua, and the grain harvested in all accessible valleys, to feed the flourishing swine and cattle industry. Indeed, in the thirteenth century, Bonvesin de la Riva, who initiated the study of grammar and was a tertiary in the Order of the Humiliati, wrote in his work
De magnalibus urbis Mediolani
: “Our lands, fertile with fruitful yield, produce a very great and very admirable abundance of every kind of grain.” According to Bonvesin, thirty thousand bulls plowed the Milanese fields, and thanks to him we have impressive descriptions of the abundance of meats in the city markets.

Earlier, in the eighth century, folkloristic works were written that exalted the fabulous wealth of this region's meat, wheat, and wines. Here the food is caloric and substantial: perhaps precisely because people work hard and zealously, with an almost Calvinistic perseverance, from early morning until late in the evening. With no time to sit down at the table, Lombards find a way to transform traditional food into nourishing fast food. For example, the slab of beef, half a kilogram per portion, that in Tuscany is grilled over coals and known as steak Florentine in Milan is served in slices: all you have to do is exactly that, slice it width-wise, cook it two minutes, and you don't even have to chew it—swallow it and off you go. You can fill up even on eighty grams. Duty first, pleasure second.

In spite of their great prosperity, Lombards value parsimony, and their cuisine makes excellent use of leftovers. If it's still good, why throw it out? In fact the Milanese are proud of their characteristic
riso al salto
, or rice sauté (risotto from the day before sautéed in a pan) and of their
mondeghili
, meatballs made with chopped leftover stewed meat. This dish is sometimes served in Milanese homes with olives and little balls of rice, to accompany an aperitif.

Giovanni Raiberti referred to Milan as “the meatball capital,” which does not appear to be a flattering judgment. In
I promessi sposi
, Renzo, Tonio, and Gervaso go to an inn shortly before the “surprise wedding,” and Manzoni has them eat a large plate
of meatballs. When the writer's mother, Giulia Beccaria, asked him the reason for such a choice, “don Lisander” (Alessandro) replied: “Dear mama, you made me eat so many
polpette
from the time I was a child that I thought it only fair to make the characters in my novel taste them too.”
⁶

 

Among the typical products of Lombardy, one stands out as a political statement, so to speak. It is the cheese Bel Paese, created in 1906 by the entrepreneur Egidio Galbani from Melzo, a town situated between Milan and Bergamo. Galbani, inspired by the success of French cheeses, decided to offer the international market a product that would have a less pronounced taste and a less insistent odor than traditional Italian cheeses. The name of the new cheese was invented in one of the earliest marketing campaigns in the history of the Italian food industry, with Galbani appropriating the title of a book by the abbot Antonio Stoppani for his “patented” product. Published in 1875,
Il bel paese
(The beautiful country) had enjoyed great success among the Milanese bourgeoisie. In its time Stoppani's book was one of the first attempts at a geographic and geopolitical description of the unified nation's effort to openly pursue a common sense of self. The expression
il bel paese
, common parlance in Italy by now, was used for the first time by Dante in the
Inferno: “del bel paese là dove 'l sì suona
” (of that fair land where
sí
is heard).
⁷
Here
bel paese
refers to the region where the Italian language is spoken, that is, the land of the “language of
sí
.” Petrarch applied the expression
bel paese
to Italy as a geographic area defined by the Apennines, the Alps, and the sea: “
il bel paese / ch'Appennin parte e 'l mar circonda et l'Alpe
” (that fair country / that the Apennines divide and the sea and Alps surround).
⁸
In Antonio Stoppani's book the descriptive expression appeared for the first time as a publicity slogan, and it was a universally accepted formula by the twentieth century. Bel Paese cheese was one of the first attempts to promote a brand through an ideal image.

 

The list of Lombard cheeses is infinite. The northern half of the region is made up of Alpine pastures (Valtellina, Valchiavenna, and so on), where cheeses are produced mainly from cow's milk, while in many other regions of Italy, where the mountains are barer and the grass less succulent, goat or sheep cheeses prevail. In order not to have to depend on its neighbor Emilia Romagna—the other main producer of cow's milk cheese—for Parmesan, Lombardy created an aged, dry cheese of its own, irreplaceable
in the kitchen. It's called Grana. Grana may be
padano
(from the Po Valley), the most familiar and most widespread, or
lodigiano
(from Lodi). The latter, produced in small quantities in the area around Lodi for specialists and connoisseurs, is aged for at least four years, and even after that length of time, the cheese is still said to “shed a tear,” that is, it oozes drops of whey when it is cut. Two fundamental varieties of Grana
lodigiano
are known; their taste depends on the time of the milking. The first is the
maggengo
, or
maggiolino
(May), Grana
lodigiano
made from summer milk; it is produced with milk obtained from Saint George's Day to Saint Michael's Day (from April 23 to September 29). The second is the Grana
lodigiano vernengo
(winter), made with winter milk, which has a different flavor and a different vitamin content.

Gorgonzola cheese, produced in the provinces of Bergamo, Biella, Brescia, Como, Cremona, Cuneo, Lecco, Lodi, Milan, Novara, Pavia, Varese, Verbania, and Vercelli, and in the territory of Casale Monferrato, needs no introduction. It is distributed in food stores and restaurants throughout the world. A brother to Roquefort, green-veined, sticky, and viscous, with a delicately pungent flavor, it is delicious and unparalleled at the end of a meal. Accompanied by pears, it can create a uniquely surprising dish. Drizzled with honey, it makes an elegant dessert. Italians would probably agree to give up many things, but never Gorgonzola. The partisan diary of Giorgio Amendola, well-known exponent of the Italian Communist Party and head of the Resistance during World War II, attests to this. The clandestine hero describes his secret journey from Milan to Bologna in 1942 this way:

 

After Lodi it was necessary to make a detour to take a ferry that went to an island in the Po. The column stayed on the island a long time because daylight had come. The journey became a rustic excursion. A trattoria supplied us with rabbit cacciatore, a wonderful salad, and above all a delicious Gorgonzola, tastier than I have ever eaten since, with plump, shiny worms that crawled out onto the plate.
⁹