Richard Turen
ROME -- For the 24th consecutive year, my wife and I are taking our annual "vacation" in the company of two dozen clients from around the country. In recent years, our daughter has joined us for this annual adventure.
This year's trip should be memorable, but it will not be particularly profitable. The planning has taken far too much of my time. Seeing Italy by cruise ship would have been easier. The logistics have been challenging, primarily because the entire 13-night journey will be spent in Rome and points south.
In Italy, there are two economies. There are two ways of looking at life. There are latent antagonisms that date back centuries. The north and south don't get along particularly well. Snobs in Florence and Milan see the southerner as a lout, not sophisticated, not well-dressed and, shame of all shames, a people enamored by simple pleasures like lemons and tomatoes.
Having lived in northern Italy for six years, I'm very aware of these generalizations about the south. The north feels the south is a drag on its economy. The police who patrol northern cities in Italy have always hailed from the south. Just like the trash collectors.
But unlike the previous tours, culinary and otherwise, that I've put together for clients, this trip has a rather specific purpose. It is called "In Search of southern Italy's Best Pizza." That means we'll have to go to Sicily, walk the back streets of Naples, to try the best along the Amalfi Coast.
Then back to Rome to make certain we have not overlooked a crust in some pizza joint with toppings deserving of being named "Italy's Best Pizza." At the end of the trip, we will be voting by secret ballot. I want you to come along with me on this itinerary.
We started out in the Eternal City, eternally chaotic Rome, for a few nights at a four-star hotel called the Rose Garden Palace, a favorite of our ground operator, Abercrombie & Kent Italy. It is a pleasant place with a lovely garden dining area and good access to a number of area restaurants. It also happens to sit directly across the street from one of the main security gates at the American Embassy.
One member of our group, whose room overlooked the embassy gate, said she had a hard time leaving the hotel in the evening as the show right outside her window was so fascinating. Every person was questioned. Every car was searched. Even the incoming food was inspected.
Rome today seems more orderly than I remember it, with street construction everywhere, a huge undertaking given the potential treasures underfoot.
I read the local news before arriving and during my stay, something I always do when I travel. Rome got a new prime minister this year, 39-year-old Matteo Renzi. I hesitate to use his name, as this will seriously date my piece because no one can possibly know if he will still be in office when you read this. But Renzi is young, handsome, dresses elegantly and is the former mayor of Florence. He helped lead the opposition to the notorious Silvio Berlusconi, and some in Italy expected a rash of reform. After all, half his 16-member Cabinet is female, a sort of revolution in Italy. Alas, during my stay in Rome, the papers headlined "Renzi accused of appointing female ministers based purely on their looks and youth."
On day two, we headed for the Rome central market, the new one, where we stopped to taste fruits and vegetables we hadn't seen before. It might have been the environment, but we tasted tomatoes that made us angry about the fake food sold in the States, including chemically altered tomatoes.
I found a stand that sold small bottles of my favorite Italian vice, tartufo salsa. These tiny jars of truffle paste can turn ordinary dishes at home into something magical, and a little bit goes a long way.
After the Testaccio market, we headed to a small villa in the center of Rome, down a lovely side street. We met a delightful chef named Daniela, who showed us how to cook a complete summer meal, which we enjoyed at a long table in the garden.
For the next day, I had designed two tour experiences that were a bit off the charts. I wasn't at all sure how things would turn out, but they were both experiences that I wanted our clients to try.
First, we headed over to the Universita' La Sapienza in central Rome. With 130,000 students, this is the largest educational institution in Europe, and our tour leader was a guide who had been a student there. I had requested an honest appraisal of the Italian educational system, and I think we got one. After our tour of the campus, we met in a vacant classroom with one of the school's deans, a woman involved in overseeing a number of academic programs.
The three hours we spent at the university were like a skit out of "Saturday Night Live." Everything was a disconnect. Our questions received answers that often bordered on the incredulous. Here were my take-aways:
• Almost everyone attends an educational institution that is publicly financed.
• Many students have great difficulty finding the building on campus and the room where their classes are being taught. No one has a guidance counselor. Since education is essentially free, the attitude of the administration seems to be "You're in college, so it's your job to figure out how to sign up for courses and how to find your professor." The latter is made more challenging by the fact that professors often change their rooms and are quite arbitrary about what time they will be teaching. We met two students who said that at least one of their professors had rescheduled a class in the middle of the night due to dinner engagements.
• Students may "reject" their grade. They have the right to take a course as many times as they wish until they achieve the grade they deem acceptable.
• Since the education is essentially free, and unemployment among the young is approaching 30%, students take their time. Many do not complete their college education until they are well into their 30s.
• There is no social stigma attached to living at home with one's parents, something many young people do well into their 40s to save on rent, dry cleaning and food.
The following day, things started getting serious. We were deposited at the doorstep of Tony Vespa at his well-known pizzeria, Al Grottino. Mr. Vespa is a Canadian with a sharp wit and a passion for making pizza the classic, "technically correct" way. He married a Roman woman and lived in the city perfecting his pizza techniques for 30 years.
Our hands-on class lasted four hours and culminated in the design, from scratch, of a certified "world-class pizza" cooked by each of us. Some were better than others, as we each used different ingredients. But the crust had to be perfect or we would be instructed to start again. We had to place the pizza in the brick oven and heat it just right.
I have more to tell you about pizza than I have space to tell it, so let me close with two bits of insider pizza education.
1) If your pizza is not charred a bit on the bottom of the crust, it is not cooked properly.
2) The rudest thing a pizza maker can do is slice a pizza before serving it to guests. Slicing up a perfect pizza is a truly personal decision.
Next, we left for Naples, where we found Italy's best pizza in a rather unlikely place.
Senior Contributing Editor Richard Bruce Turen was named a Superstar Generalist in Conde Nast Traveler's most recent list of Top Travel Specialists. He is the owner of luxury vacation firm Churchill & Turen and also owns and edits TravelTruth.com. Contact him at [email protected].