Eating in Italy, Part 2

imagine jackson turning to me three times a day and asking me how much a cappuccino costs in new york and me saying, once again, FIVE DOLLARS

Hello from ……. grad school! I’m up in Vermont at Bennington College for ten days, where the dining hall houses not one but TWO Maine Root soda machines. We’ll have a (very exciting) guest post next week, and then it’s back to your regular programming. I’m hearing rumors that July will be Tomato Month???? But now we have part II of my Italy recap—this is the really good stuff—you can find Part I here.¹

I mostly want to tell you about Elsa, and about pork.

I drove us up to Umbria from Rome, through the rolling hills that a friend had described as just as beautiful as Tuscany but with fewer crowds, and he was right. We’d booked five nights at a guest house in Todi, one of the region’s many Medieval-walled towns with steep cobblestoned streets and mazes of hidden alleyways. I knew we’d have a big room and breakfast on the terrace overlooking the hills and after the whirlwind of Rome I that easy quiet was all I craved.

sorry to brag !!!

The first night we set out for an aperitivo with a list of restaurants from the guest house’s lovely manager, Chiara, in my Notes app. We trudged up a steep street to the main square, and wound around to a scenic lookout, across from which was, conveniently, a bar. Across from the bar was Enoteca Oberdan, a restaurant whose nightly hand-written menu is posted just outside the window, and which sits at the overlook’s shoulder like a quiet boast.