EPISODE 8
THE STORY SO FAR:

I'd gone back to Romagna with my old friend Angelo and after 40 years we had not only discovered Ravenna but been enchanted by it! The mosaics, the history, the atmosphere, the food, the fun and the gelatos had us captivated!

And I went on to continue my adventure in Romagna, Now to learn much more about this strange and wonderful place.

I'd discovered  Christmas in San Marino, Passatelli and Tonino Guerra - and I had been kidnapped to the Magic Mountain! Met both the most powerful woman in the world and the Father of Italian Cookery. And I'd had the most amazing birthday party.

Now it was time to go to Berlin for business and back to Romagna for fun!

First stop Prague.

Strangely I had never been there before. Here, I stayed in a lovely art nouveau hotel, cheap. The streets were nice to walk, brilliant bits of architecture at every corner. And great food too. But cram-ram packed with tourists and tourist guides soliciting busi- ness. You could have any kind of tour you wanted free – food tour, fun tour, history tour – even a mathematics tour. However, I found the really offensive tours the ones by Segway. How can you protect and cherish fragile, beautiful places with hordes of young people zipping around on segways and getting 5 minutes to look. Done, zip off to the next spot. Don’t worry, I’ll rant more about the near blasphemy of overtourism later.

So, thanks Prague, next stop somewhere I’ve wanted to go to for years – Dresden, the stunningly beautiful city that my country fire- bombed into oblivion.

Parked up next to a football bus outside a posh hotel in the centre. Walked into the main square right into an anti-fascist demonstration. Doesn’t take long, does it? I had a long chat with one if the demonstrators. It’s a tough call for Germany.

As you know, Germany is very close to my heart, after all it was this country’s beauty and diversity that lured me into tourism to start with. And I’ve visited many times and watched with admiration as this smashed and defeated state has gradually, meticulously, put itself together again. I never visit without thinking how difficult it must be to engage with the hideous actions that were taken, admit them and make amends. Added to which, they had to deal with the destruction of their homes, the raping of over two million women and children, and the largest movement of people in human history – the 15-20 million post- war homeless German refugees.

Against that background, when East Germany folded, the country had been re-united at great cost with the unreconstructed East Germans now part of the family and fanning the flames of a right-wing neo-nazi movenent. That was the spectre as I arrived in Dresden.

Now, again, Dresden is beautiful. It seemed to me like a frail old lady with a fabulous bone structure. And Dresden is big in tourism with about 5 million visitors a year. Once again Dresden is a cultural magnet; one of its famous buildings, the Semper Opera is home to both a great opera and a ballet company. The city’s biggest event, a massive Christmas Market, that mixture of religion, history, eating, drinking and shopping!

Finally I arrived in Berlin for the ITB – the world’s biggest travel show, plus the IHIF – the International Hotel Investment Forum.

The ITB is probably my key to the year’s events. It was big and important when I first went there in the 1970s in particular because it faced East as well as West and because it was where you knew what Europe thought. Plus it’s always been a bit left-of-centre whereas its main competitor the London-based World Travel Market is much more overtly commercial.

Anyway, WTM is in November and ITB is in March so anyone can, and should do both. Now, ITB was big and important 40 years ago when Berlin had a big wall around it and international tourism was a tiny fraction of what it is now. You can imagine just how big it was in 2015 – enormous! And multilingual – possibly just like a million square feet of towers of Babel. At the end of the week of ITB my feet are like raw meat and my brain is blown.

But I am grateful. Although it has got progressively more difficult to distill all the diverse ideas that come from ITB, it really is edgy and thought-provoking.

Plus it’s got heart. My friend Rika Jean Francois is the CSR commissioner of ITB and I guess to her CSR simply means “Do the right thing” so she is constantly adding subjects and making people talk about – refugees, LGBTQ, human rights, child trafficking/tourism, climate change, women’s rights and empowerment, accessibility, all in a tourism context. It really proves the point that tourism can actually be relevant.

But, above all, ITB is held in Berlin and that means three important things to me.

The first is that more than any other city I know, Berlin changes dramatically every year. Well, I suppose it has to. Just 70 years ago, after five years of war and one massive invasion from four sides, it was completely wrecked. It had to be built again. As a yearly visitor, I’ve been privileged to watch that rebuilding take place, I’ve been able to see one of the world’s great historical capital cities take shape as it grows from its ruins.

And by ruins, I don’t just mean the buildings. What happens to a community when their women and children are raped and abused, when they have to scavenge for food, when their city is razed to the ground and split in four, when they must lose their self-respect just to survive, when their countrymen have become part of the greatest refugee movement in the history of the world?

I started coming to Berlin less than 30 years since this utter desolation happened and when still the city was split into two. There was one side beyond Checkpoint Charlie which was grey and impoverished, where you could still buy plastic neckties for useless money – Ostmarks. The west side, on the other hand, was peopled by fascinating international people, often renegades, who found Berlin and its unjudgmental attitude to their liking. I remember walking down Kurfürstendamm at night looking at the glitzy shops, the neon lights and that bright blue light from the gaunt Kaiser Wilhelm church and thinking – this is a demonstrarion of the opulence available in the west.

But things were changing in the Soviet Union even then, and through Land Travel we were a part of it. We were taking people for coach holidays in Poland and Hungary – as it happens many of the coaches brought back cheap caviar and cheap Cuban cigars for me!

And when the wall came down – Bonanza. We brought thousands of people out for weekends in this new colourful destination and we brought back tons of the hideous wall to give away.

The thing I could never understand though was how the local people were dealing with their swap. After all then they all had guaranteed jobs, childcare, holidays, university education, pensions and healthcare and this year they’d swapped all if it for ́freedom’

And the change stepped up a gear. Berlin became a property- developer’s delight. You could see them filling up the top hotels and cracking deals to gentrify the city.

Every year when I visit Berlin for ITB, I stay in an up-and-coming quarter that had been rescued from the rubble and is being given the treatment to deliver massive profits. It was and still is totally inspirational.

And every year I learn more about Berlin’s trauma and against that background the story is even more inspirational. But the fact that takes the Berlin story into yet another dimension of inspirational is that the Berliners didn’t just dust themselves down, get up and start again. They truly engaged with their own country’s part in their downfall. Nowadays you can’t get very far without seeing evidence of Berlin’s and Germany’s dark past, displayed and annotated for all to see.

Particularly heartrending are the brass bricks called ‘Stolperstein’ (stumbling stones) on the pavement in front of individual houses telling the story of the Jewish people (and others proscribed by the Nazis) that lived there and what awful fate befell them.

And then it was back to the UK for a month or two and back to Romagna!

I had a plan and as a result of my visit with Cristina, I had a new friend in Florence. Antonella Chiti was a historian specialising in Dante and the Italian language – she was currently in charge of events in Florence. With a mass of curls and a fun demeanour and was certainly up for a laugh! I thought we would make a great team to check out Romagna’s castles – and have a few nice meals together.

We couldn’t check them all – there were said to be over 300 of them – but we could at least check out the best, so she came over to stay with me in Longiano as a base for our adventure.

Obviously, the castles are on hills and the hills are around the river valleys. All we needed to do was to take the valleys one by one and work from the sea to the hills on each. The two main castellated valleys were the Conca and the Marrechia river valleys – and as Antonella and I drove around checking them out, these historic valleys revealed a glorious haul of fabulous and very different castles.

We started with the Conca valley and the biggie! A long time ago Cinzia had promised to take me to Gradara “Incredible, romantic” she had said, and now I knew why. First its position was perfect, looking out over the Adriatic on the one side and the hinterland on the other; no one could pass without the Malatesta family knowing. Plus it was really big – encompassing a substantial village. And it had a great deal of atmospheric history. It makes the most of the fact that it is the most likely place that Paolo and Francesca kissed (remember Dante’s Inferno?). And the ‘exact room’ is identified. But above all the touristy stuff it is beautiful and a delightful home for a thousand or so lucky residents – with nice restaurants and tea shops, bars and loads of events. None of the Conca castles were as magnificent as Gradara but they were all truly charming.

You’d think that a castle was a castle wouldn’t you, after all in the middle ages there weren’t so many architects or designers. The warlords made their own decisions and forced locals to labour. A thousand or so years of standing up in one place changed each castle, though, to its unique environment, so now each castle is very different. As we travelled down the Conca valley we experienced a fascinating range of castle surprises.

San Giovanni in Marignano is now one of Italy’s most beautiful villages. In San Clemente, the village has forced itself into the castle, each year in Montecolombo visitors stream over the drawbridge to a magnificent strozzapreti pasta festival; in fascinating Gemmano the castle hosts a wild boar festival; soaring Montefiore Conca looks like a modern skyscraper until you get there and see the old stones, gardens and the delightful castle-village. Saludecio, which often feels gaunt and deserted, comes to life each year with its own medieval festival. Mondaino has a semi-circular piazza where each year there is a real ‘Palio’ complete with soldiers in ceremonial costumes and medieval bands. Finally Montegridolfo is a true classic of Malatesta design with a moat, a drawbridge and a watchtower. As all the castles are on hills they were naturally surrounded with historic vineyards producing wonderful wines.

And the fact is that the river Conca is not even really important locally, whereas when we got to the more important Marecchia river, the curtains were opened to some glorious surprises.

We started off in Pennabilli. Right up in the foothills of the Apennines, the city has a colourful history. It’s changed hands (and ruling families and regions) again and again – the Malatestas of Romagna owned it, then the Montefeltros of Marche’s Urbino and vice versa and now it boasts its own cathedral, a couple of monasteries, an array of piazzas, a bunch of quirky museums, and a hilltop garden complete with prayer-wheels inaugurated by the Dalai Lama. And of course, its own magnificent castle!

Down the road we saw a classic chocolate-box castle – Petrella Guidi. Stunningly beautiful, from the battlements of this pocket- sized Malatesta castle it’s possible to see the gorgeous backgrounds that both Piero della Francesca and, allegedly, Leonardo da Vinci used for their pictures.

And as the lovely hill road wound into a valley, we spotted, on the next hill, Sant’Agata Feltria. Like a dream this real fairytale castle appeared. Built by the Fregoso family we thought it was possibly one of the most beautiful we’d seen. And the town around it delightful – it has an antique, still-used, teeny tiny wooden theatre, some fabulous piazzas a lovely 10th-century church and a bunch of big festivals including the massive autumnal National Truffle Festival.

Just a hop, skip and jump down the very pretty winding road we found yet another jewel. San Leo, even more important, soaring and perched on a higher rock than the others, it was sensational. The heart of the Montefeltro warlord territory, the impregnable forbidding castle, designed by Martini, has securely housed extraordinary prisoners such as the magician and alchemist Calliostro and various doomed political prisoners until just 70 years ago.

Yet the ancient cathedral built on pagan ruins was a part of St Francis of Assisi’s domain and the rest of the tiny hilltop area embodies a fabulous pocket-sized real city of art.

By now we were only half way down the valley, still to come were the lovely castle of Montebello with its legend of Azzurina the albino fairy; the daunting castle of Torriana where prisoners such as Gianciotto Malatesta, who killed his wife and brother Francesca and Paolo (remember Dante?) were held in deep pits – and the castle of Maiolo which was pushed down the hill by the almighty when the inhabit- ants performed the ‘Dance of the Angels’; naturally we couldn’t miss Talamello where hundreds of cheeses were busily maturing in pits, ready to be taken out in November!

I just couldn’t believe that there was much more to come, but then we were halted in our tracks by the sight of Verruchio, the Malatesta eyrie, the fabulous walled town created by the robber-baron family with views all over their territory.

Getting back to urban civilisation we were confronted by yet another massive Malatesta citadel dominating the sophisticated medieval city of Santarcangelo di Romagna.

Then the mountaintop republic of San Marino became visible. The triangular peak, a maze of rock-hewn streets, houses, shops, churches cathedrals and grand government buildings. And no less than three amazing gothic castles.

This should have been the zenith of our journey but the best was yet to come.

Episodes:
Episode 1 Romagna Mia
Episode 2 Meeting the most powerful woman in the world
Episode 3 The adventure continues
Episode 4 More food and fun
Episode 5 Mona Lisa Mussolini and marvellous meals
Episode 6 Paradise in a bowl
Episode 7 My Big Fat Romagnolo Birthday Party

 TO BE CONTINUED...
and more about Romagna at www.BestofRomagna.com

To enjoy the whole 241 page book full of Italian adventures you can buy  "You Lucky People" from Amazon.

INTERESTED IN TOURISM? TUNE IN TO MY IN-DEPTH INTERVIEWS WITH TOP GLOBAL TOURISM PEOPLE ON BATH RADIO

AND GET DETAILS ABOUT MY ANNUAL SUSTAINABLE TOURISM REPORT HERE

EPISODE 7
THE STORY SO FAR:

I'd gone back to Romagna with my old friend Angelo and after 40 years we had not only discovered Ravenna but been enchanted by it! The mosaics, the history, the atmosphere, the food, the fun and the gelatos had us captivated!

And I went on to continue my adventure in Romagna, Now to learn much more about this strange and wonderful place.

I'd discovered  Christmas in San Marino, Passatelli and Tonino Guerra - and I had been kidnapped to the Magic Mountain! Met both the most powerful woman in the world and the Father of Italian Cookery.

I’d never met Cristina Ambrosini before but we had talked by email as a result of TravelMole's owner Charlie Kao’s chat with her at some trade show somewhere.
 
She was the publisher and editor of the Italian travel trade newspaper aptly named Agenzia di Viaggi (Travel Agent). It transpired that Cristina had a great idea, so we had arranged to meet when I finally got back to Romagna that year.
 
I got the dinky little train for the spectacular scenic ride through the Apennines from Faenza right in the heart of Romagna to Florence right in the heart of Tuscany where Cristina was waiting for me.
 
Naturally we started with lunch. Cristina was keen on introducing me to some Florentine specialities so we started with her favourite – Crostini di Fegatini. Execrable! Maybe the only thing I have ever eaten in Italy that was totally disgusting. Not that I don’t like chicken livers but these were horrible! Mind you the pasta and the fiorentina beef- steak certainly made up for it.
 
Then to our meeting. We were talking to Antonella Chiti from the Florence municipality and Chiara Bocchio of the UNESCO office of the City of Florence to arrange a ‘Talk Show’ for the event which was to be held in Padua in September.
 
The Responsible and Sustainable Tourism Prize was sponsored by Agenzia di Viaggi and other big Italian names in tourism to be awarded at World Heritage Tourism Exhibition, which is to be held in Padua around the awarding there were to be other events such as the talk show.
 
Just the life-enhancing experience I needed to be embedded in my recent memory when, back in Bristol, I sat in front of my consultant and she told me I had cancer in my pancreas. The cancer had been causing my pancreatitis. Meg Fitch-Jones, my consultant, held my hands as she told me and looked in my eyes with such kindness that I knew she had my best interests in mind. She suggested the Whipple procedure – a major 6-8 hour operation to remove the cancer. “If it works, you’ll die of something else” She said.
 
Although I was shaken by the news and the fact that it was a massive operation which would remove some of my pancreas, some of my stomach, all of my duodenum and a length of intestine – there was no choice other than to go ahead.
 
The operation was organised for mid-September, just five months before my 70th birthday. So, I decided to have my birthday party in one particular amazingly good restaurant in Romagna. All my family were invited and they all said that they would come.
 
The anaesthetist raised her eyebrows when she heard my plan – “8 months is average recovery time for an 8–hour operation but you have to have something to look forward to – right?”
 
I spent the next few weeks getting fit and then I was off to Belgium and Italy.

First stop just had to be Ostend on the Belgian coast where my tourism journey had started. Here I needed lunch – not just lunch – my perfect favourite lunch – ripe, sweet beef tomatoes stuffed with real fresh mayonnaise and hand-shelled baby brown North Sea shrimps followed by a fat Sole Meunière (fried in butter) with real Belgian frites, finally a Dame Blanche – rich vanilla ice cream with a Belgian chocolate sauce with flaked almonds. Of course, I found this magical meal. And I followed it with a walk along my familiar promenade.
 
Afternoon – Diksmuide, where some of my family had come from and the fabulous cobbled square with the Butter Hall – which was still running the annual beer and chocolate festival I’d started 20 years previously.
 
Now Diksmuide had also become a tourist destination. Just 100 years ago the first world war had flattened the city but now, it looks just like it did before the war arrived. They’re a tough bunch, the Flemings. And they’re used to war. Resilient – that’s the word.
 
Nearby Ypres had also cashed in on the war centenary tourism – the great thing about which was that it would be a four-year tourism boom – the length of the war. Plus it would be quality high-spending tourism – older people with a bit of money.
 
And then I was off to Romagna the pretty way – through Austria and the Alps. Another bunch of memories here – like our astonish- ingly profitable operation in Zell am See and fabulous Salzburg and Innsbruck, both great excursion destinations.
 
And back in Romagna it was time to eat, drink (well in my case fizzy water) because tomorrow you may die! Plus, I needed to buy some things. I needed a truly great dinner before the op – so I needed great Romagnolo sausage for the ‘Ragu’.
 
I’d promised to do various things (like having great meals) and say goodbye to my friends, and then I was off back home via Stras- bourg for the night and a massive plate of Choucroute. Strasbourg is extraordinary, in my view it is the best food city north of Milan. There is simply everything good in French cuisine – great cheeses, amazingly good desserts and cakes (including macarons, eclairs and biscuits), and wonderful salads. For me one of the problems about French and Italian food is bread – OK you’ve got brioches etc., but where are the superb currant breads? In Germany and Belgium.
 
In Strasbourg, my culinary problems are answered – there is absolutely superb bread. And another Franco-German triumph – Choucroute. As you arrive in Strasbourg, you’ll see great fields of cabbage especially for Sauerkraut. But of course it’s not just the Sauerkraut in Choucroute, it’s the vast variety of meat too – different sausages, pieces of pork – I’ve seen 9 pieces of meat and more. With the proper bread and the correct boiled potatoes – it’s a meal that will last you a day... or until you spot another great delicious dessert! Too heavy? You can also have a Choucroute with bits of fish too!
 
Strasbourg has other culinary specialities – like flammekueche (flame cake) basically a pizza but with toppings like cherry or cheese and bacon. Just a half an hour’s walk will give you an appetite and food ideas for a week. Particularly in the baker’s where my personal passion is Cramique – a confection of brioche, currants and sugar lumps!
 
If you want a good way of preparing for an operation – Strasbourg is a very effective one, plus it has the great River Rhine for a nice boat ride and the soaring cathedral where you can say your prayers.
 
Back in the UK, the night before the op, I prepared dinner for my three sons. A massive platter of tagliatelle with great parmesan and a ragu made of pork and beef, lots of different Romagnolo sausages, good olive oil, garlic, tomatoes carrots and celery. I’d made a great applecake with clotted cream for pudding. Bed early because I wasn’t allowed to eat for 8 hours before the op which was set for 8am the next morning.
 
10 hours after the operation had started, I was awake, feeling horrid and minus a lot of my offal. Thanks to the brilliant and very fit surgeon (apparently, he hadn’t had a pee for the whole 9-hour op) I was up and about within a couple of days and out of hospital in 10 days.
 
That’s not to say I didn’t have my near-death experience. The High Dependency Unit where I was taken to after the operation was my nightmare. No natural light completely disoriented me and soon I was having a migraine, unable to feel my legs, unable to see or hear and unable to pass anything in my body due to the lack of plumbing. “Well here it is” I thought as I descended into numbness and nausea. But I wasn’t allowed out of the world yet.
 
It took longer than I thought to get better enough to drive longish distances but by February I was ready to drive to Italy and back to Longiano for my birthday party.
 
So, off Pam and I set out in the trusty old VW Golf. First stop a fabulous lunch in a forest manor Michelin restaurant near Calais, ready to rock, great food finally. We spent the night in Auxerre – one of my first visits when I was a kid and, although a historic and pretty city never in danger of being overloaded with tourists. The next night after driving through the Alps, we were in Italy, just outside of Ravenna and the village of San Pancrazio.
 
Of course I should have realised! I was here the year before last, and in Saint Pancrazy in Slovenia – everything comes in threes – the third was my own pancreas getting wonky!
 
But here in San Pancrazio was the very rococo hotel Villa Roncuzzi run by a friend, an ex-art dealer and it was stuffed full of pictures, statues and mosaics. Plus all of my family, each a work of art in them- selves and well up for a weekend party!
 
Patrizia, the owner, had asked if we wanted a dinner on the eve of my birthday. As my family were arriving from all over and many of them on late flights, I’d said “just a plate of pasta – maybe.”
 
In the event just a plate of perfect tagliatelle with ragu was produced. After a plate of mixed hors d’oeuvres and before a plate of fillet steak and another bowl of Zuppa Inglese. All of this was accompanied by copious amounts of wine. How nice I thought. But far, far too much to feed a bunch who weren’t hungry.

The idea was that the next day we would have lunch in Longiano all together and I’d been looking forward to it for at least a year. For a big lunch – we’d settled on starting at midday and finishing at 6pm – we would all need a good rest – so early to bed.
 
My birthday dawned bright and cold and after a stamina-giving full-on breakfast we were off to Longiano. So about forty of us sat down for lunch at the superb Dei Cantoni restaurant – all my family plus Angelo and his long-suffering wife Marian and Sandra who’d come from Amsterdam with her daughter. Plus there was a goodly bunch of my Italian friends. I’d discussed the menu with my friends Danilo and Teresa who owned the restaurant and we had decided to do only local specialities plus vegetarian for my sister, her daughter and my eldest grandchild. Anyway, I knew it was going to be good.
 
And just like the magnificent long banquets I remembered from my childhood in Belgium our lunch would be a relaxed affair including walks around, playing outside, informal fun and very long.
 
And we started with a walk. Longiano’s councillor in charge of the arts and culture Cristina Minotti and the tourism manager Emiliano Ceredi met us and gave us a nice tour – up to the picturesque medieval castle, down to the beautiful picturesque theatre, into the quirky museum of cast iron, before we repaired for lunch.
 
We started with great platters of antipasto. Some with tender artichokes deep fried in the lightest of light batters, local pork sausage with a mustard sauce and grilled porcini mushrooms with rocket and parmesan; others with great speciality local prosciutto, salami and Squacquerone (the freshest of fresh local cream cheese) served with local sea salt and caramelised figs and, of course fresh, warm Piadina flatbread. Naturally there were also crostini – some with toppings of vegetables and cheese, others topped with roasted Tomino cheese and yet others with delicious sweet/bitter fresh herb salads.
 
Then came the pasta – all freshly made that morning. Just two! But a magnificent pair – the first – Cappellacci stuffed with Ricotta and Raveggiolo cheeses and topped with fresh local porcini mushrooms and baby tomatoes. The second was baby potato gnocchi with a cream sauce of local strong pit-fermented cheese and bacon.
 
And now for the main courses! Rabbit cooked in casserole with lemon and olive; grilled beef with sun dried tomatoes and truffles; rare breed local pork with roast potatoes and caramelised balsamic.
 
And, of course, there was room for the millefeuille birthday cake stuffed with cream and strawberries and laden with icing sugar – and candles.
 
All was washed down with great local wines, soft drinks for the kids and water for everybody (including me!).
 
The kids were happy, there was a playground outside and plenty of pop within. At six-ish we raised ourselves to our feet, made more speeches and toasts and then we were on our way back to Villa Roncuzzi.
Where dinner and yet another celebration was awaiting!
 
My pleas for just a little plate of pasta had fallen on deaf ears and we arrived for a massive banquet just a couple of hours after we had already eaten one.
 
I’m very proud of my family. Seeing what was about to happen, they just sat down and ate. Another four courses with wine to go with them. And then the whole event took on a surreal aspect. Alfredo, Patrizia’s friend, had arrived from Rimini with what he suggested was very special wine. So, he stood up and talked about it to the whole table for what seemed like hours – in Italian, because he spoke not a word of English. He was only stopped by Maestro Carnevali – an older gent dressed up to the nines with his suitcase full of Ocarinas plus a couple of saxophones. He was to do his act which involved playing a tune on each of his many instruments.
 
And, although Maestro Carnevali was quite happy to go into the history of ocarinas, I’m not.
We trotted off to bed defeated by the food and the hospitality.
 
One of the guests at my birthday lunch had been Dominique Morroli who happened to be the PR officer at San Marino. Lively, lovely Dominique had come to my lunch with important news – tomorrow was to be a kids’ carnival in San Marino – for St Valentine’s Day.
 
San Marino was to be the first stop and the main event on the day after my birthday lunch.
We made our way to the little republic’s main square up the top of its mountain where Dominique was waiting for us with the regulation goodies. Masks, hats, swords and balloons (after all it was a carnival) were distributed to all! Everybody had a great time swordfighting, chucking things around and generally wrecking the decorations that San Marino had put up everywhere for the occasion. Lots of photos were taken and all that activity got the better of us so it was time for a splendid lunch.
 
A stroll up and down the mountain before we went off to Cesena for gelato and a wander around the town’s picture-perfect square and a visit to the castle (the scene of my meeting with Dani and Chiara before I got ill). Naturally now Dani was with us all so she gave us a tour before our big dinner in the amazing Malatesta castle.
 
What a wonderful few days for a birthday – and the sun shone – there was even a bit of picturesque snow!
 
They all went home happy. And Pam and I stayed for a few more days.
 
And I stayed for even more days before I drove off to somewhere I’d been going to each year for nearly four decades – ITB Berlin – the biggest travel trade show in the world.

Episodes:
Episode 1 Romagna Mia
Episode 2 Meeting the most powerful woman in the world
Episode 3 The adventure continues
Episode 4 More food and fun
Episode 5 Mona Lisa Mussolini and marvellous meals
Episode 6 Paradise in a bowl

 TO BE CONTINUED...
and more about Romagna at www.BestofRomagna.com

To enjoy the whole 241 page book full of Italian adventures you can buy  "You Lucky People" from Amazon.

INTERESTED IN TOURISM? TUNE IN TO MY IN-DEPTH INTERVIEWS WITH TOP GLOBAL TOURISM PEOPLE ON BATH RADIO

AND GET DETAILS ABOUT MY ANNUAL SUSTAINABLE TOURISM REPORT HERE

EPISODE 6
THE STORY SO FAR:

I'd gone back to Romagna with my old friend Angelo and after 40 years we had not only discovered Ravenna but been enchanted by it!

The mosaics, the history, the atmosphere, the food, the fun and the gelatos had us captivated!

And I went on to continue my adventure in Romagna, But now to learn much more about this strange and wonderful place.

And more that I hadn’t known about were Christmas in San Marino, Passatelli and Tonino Guerra - and getting kidnapped to the Magic Mountain!



Now apart from bringing me loads of excursion money in the 1980s, San Marino is something very special. Like Cinzia said, it’s historic, atmospheric, duty free, another country and it’s up its own mountain – Mount Titano, plus of course its economy depends on tourists.

Something I profited from royally for at least 10 years was Christmas (Christmas markets and festive holidays to be precise) so I know a big Christmas-time opportunity when I see one and San Marino is a big Christmas opportunity.

In San Marino, they call it the ‘Christmas of Marvels’ and I high- lighted it in the magazine. Christmas markets, Christmas events, nativity scenes, Christmas lights, Christmas music and Christmas shops wound themselves all around San Marino’s ever-upward cobbled streets already dotted with boutique shopping opportunities. And it was all in very good taste and not too expensive as most tax had been taken off. Nearly at the top of the mountain Santa Claus had set up his headquarters served by hundreds of elves. Altogether a great story and one that I thought would run and run.

Naturally the magazine had great write-ups on hotels and vine- yards – and restaurants and food. Basically it was a fun set of stories about somewhere very special and quite mysterious and extremely packed with history and food and wine.

Which all reminds me of the supreme Romagna soul-food, a simple but sublime concoction made of left-overs. That’s what they tell you! Obviously, you’ve got some stale bread in your kitchen, some hard, left-over parmesan, a lemon or two that are past their best and a few herbs and spices plus an egg or two? With this you can make Passatelli.

Just make breadcrumbs out of the stale bread and grate the parmesan finely, mix these two ingredients together with the lemon zest, add some nutmeg and other spices and bind the whole lot together with the eggs. In Romagna you’re probably talking about a couple of dozen eggs – just to give you an idea about proportions!

Simple, right? And cheap – that’s the Passatelli mix, but you’re going to have to make a stock to put it in. They say you should get a big pot. Why a big pot? Well you’re going to have to put a big capon chicken into it plus big lumps – a few kilos of beef or pork. You are going to boil all this with herbs for at least a day. A day? Well, you want to make the richest perfect broth don’t you?

The rest is simple. Take the boiled meat out of the broth – put it on one side for your second course for which you’ll make a cold Bearnaise-type sauce.  Now you’re ready to make sensational simple heartwarming Passatelli.

Bring the rich broth to the boil and use a potato ricer to squeeze strands of the Passatelli into it. Serve from a big steaming tureen. It is paradise in a bowl.

The magazine got rave reviews from all the locals that read it. Even though it didn’t get mass circulation like I had thought, I loved the place and the magazine so much, I carried on producing them. After all, the fascinating in-depth stories and glorious pictures must be a powerful way of marketing tourism and giving it massive value-added, mustn’t they?

Anyway, I was enjoying being a writer, editor and publisher of a magazine that local people loved! And I loved travelling around, finding out stuff, meeting fans and eating great food.

So I carried blithely on and produced another couple of editions. It was hard work, it was costly. I couldn’t get anyone to support it financially and I was running out of cash and credit. I had hoped that the magazines and the website would at least generate enquiries, but they didn’t.

I thought that the Best of Romagna number 2 was better than number 1. It was chock-full of even more fascinating stories and great pictures.

The first time I had arrived in Ravenna, which started this whole process was 21 March 2012. This was the day that Tonino Guerra died. It’s surprising that more people haven’t heard about this amazing man. Tonino Guerra was the writing partner of fellow Romagnolo Federico Fellini on his Oscar-winning film ‘Amarcord’. This was just one of his achievements – amongst over forty other great classic films including ‘Blow Up’ and ‘Ginger and Fred’. Guerra was also a prolific poet in the Romagnolo language and a phenomenally good artist and mosaicist. He brought the Dalai Lama to his retirement home, the hilltop castle town of Pennabilli where he tirelessly worked to create museums and festivals. But above all this man, imprisoned by the Nazis for his partisan work, was a true Romagnolo with a passion for food and wine enjoyment and argument.

I got introduced to Tonino Guerra’s life and work at a restaurant that he had founded in the town of his birth – Santarcangelo di Romagna. On a research trip for an article in the second magazine this is where I think I discovered the real heart and soul of Romagna.

The restaurant is called La Sangiovesa after the rich red wine that is redolent of the area. It is an insight into the way the Romagnolo spirit works.

Guerra’s partner in the restaurant was a publisher – Maggioli, his family had a big palace in the centre of Santarcangelo, complete with a maze of catacombs that were used to store wine. And this is where the restaurant was to be. The idea was to celebrate the best of Romagnolo food and wine and hospitality and naturally it had to be done better than well.

The restaurant was to be the showplace, but the ‘tenuta’ was to be the workplace. Maggioli also owned a big farm – Tenuta Saiano at the bottom of Monte Bello. Here the food for the restaurant was grown or raised. Here were the capons for the broth, the donkeys for the stew, the posh pigs for the grills and of course the beef. Naturally great cheeses were to be made and naturally there was a vineyard for beautiful Sangiovese wines. Everything would be perfect.

And in the showplace restaurant, of course they started with the design. Rural but serious! Tonino even went to Austria to study heating stoves and came back with an idea he put into practice – stun- ning mosaic stoves everywhere.

The advantage of being a Romagnolo is that you know exactly how good food is made, so in the Sangiovesa there are four important stations. As you enter the restaurant (actually “Osteria”) you see the great boards of cold meats, cheese and jam starters, then the piadina station where ladies make the delicious flatbread. The next station you see is the pasta station where more staff create pasta from scratch with flour and eggs, rolling pins and knives. The next station is for desserts, gelatos and dessert wines where great cakes and puddings are created. And finally, on your way out you’ll encounter the cash station and shop where you can buy anything you would like to take home with you!

Then you eat! Any meal starts with great platters of perfect cold hams from every part of the pig, superb cheeses and delightful confec- tions of figs and apricots. Naturally freshly-made pasta follows, then there is a main course of meat and vegetables. Trencherman’s food! Followed by perfect desserts – cheesecakes, applecakes, trifles and more. Then perfect coffee! And great wines throughout.

That sort of committment to good meticulous cooking and quality and management of food requires passion – and that’s what Romagnolos like Tonino Guerra have a lot of.

So, in the magazine there was a big story about Tonino Guerra and his creations plus a bunch of other tough Romagnolo men and women. The list included the robber barons who owned Santarcangelo among other places – the Malatesta family, Mussolini the Romagnolo who grabbed power and ruled with a rod of iron and lots more.

Then my September came and everything started to close down in Marina di Ravenna. It was the end of the season. I wondered what I should do.

I was having my car cleaned by the beach and the man who was doing it asked what my profession was. “I write” I said “So do I” replied Alessandro. Turns out that he was an off-duty drummer and songwriter for a Romagnolo hard rock outfit and he invited me to a performance in Cesena’s medieval castle. How could I refuse?

The band wasn’t scheduled to play until midnight so I was looking for a little sustenance. “ Where do you come from?” “Can I help you?” said my very new friend Chiara, who found me food and introduced me to her friend Daniela. I had been picked up in the very nicest way. The next day they took me to see ‘their’ Romagna.

We started off in Cesena, then off to see the source of the River Tiber, Rome’s great river which naturally Mussolini had claimed for his own Romagna and moved the border. You can do that sort if thing if you’re a dictator! Then we went off into the mountains for lunch in Sarsina – a fabulous pilgrimage site where the priest exorcised my demons by placing a metal collar around my throat. Then it was off to see Daniela’s mountain home before dinner.

Up another mountain – Montecodruzzo – we had a staggeringly good dinner provided by the local farmer in his restaurant with sensa- tional panoramic views stretching all the way to Tuscany.

“Where will I go now Marina di Ravenna is closing down” I said “Longiano” said they.
Within a few days Chiara and Daniela had taken me to Longiano for lunch and to meet the locals and within a few more I’d got a stun- ning aparrment there.

Daniela had a little local advantage as she had worked in the local castle art collection, which is another Romagnolo story in itself.

Local poet Tito Balestra was yet another typical Romagnolo man, passionate, argumentative, chauvinistic, above all lovable, apparently. He had a lot of friends, did Tito, in the years before and after the second world war. Friends like top artists and art dealers and they all gave him gifts – arty gifts. Hence the local castle art collection with great Italian painters represented plus work from artists like Degas and Goya. Wow.

Then one morning I’m working in my apartment and I get a horrible pain in my stomach. I rang the local doctor, Luciano Guidi he came to see me and gave me a jab–“How much do I owe you?”Said I “Nothing” says he. By that night an ambulance has collected me to take me to Cesena Hospital. “I’m sorry” says the lovely doctor “You have pancreatitis”.

For the three weeks I was in hospital, every day I had a visit from Chiara or Daniela or both. Each time they came to see me they wore different attractive costumes – very jolly. And their families came too, Daniella’s mum worked in the hospital. And my family came, and Pam and, naturally Angelo.

And then I was on my way home to Longiano for a week or so showing Pam Romagna and then I was on my way home to the UK.

Back in Bath for Christmas, I was pretty sure that my Romagna adventure was over. Nobody in the hospital had found out what had caused my pancreatitis so that was fairly high on my agenda. Plus, I had sustainable tourism reports to write.

So, a few months of ordinary work and then a couple of interesting events were lined up. I’d been invited to speak in five places – three of which I was in two minds about – Grozny, Ürümqi and Rostov Veliky the other two I was in only one mind about – Grenada and Hasselt.

Why worry about having doubts? Two minds sometimes work.

TO BE CONTINUED...
and more about Romagna at www.BestofRomagna.com

To enjoy the whole 241 page book full of Italian adventures you can buy  "You Lucky People" from Amazon.

EPISODE 5
THE STORY SO FAR:

I'd gone back to Romagna with my old friend Angelo and after 40 years we had not only discovered Ravenna but been enchanted by it!

The mosaics, the history, the atmosphere, the food, the fun and the gelatos had us captivated!

And I went on to continue my adventure in Romagna, But now to learn much more about this strange and wonderful place.

Ever heard of Pellegrino Artusi?  If not, like me you have some wonderful eating, drinking and living to do in the warm company of the father of Italian home cooking.

In 1891, at the tender age of 70, Pellegrino Artusi, a rich travelling Florence-based merchant got his final refusal from yet another publisher. This energetic gentleman’s life’s work was to travel the length and breadth of Italy prior to unification and collect authentic local home recipes from all over soon-to-be Italy. And, of course, each recipe had both a story and a taste!

Obviously Artusi had a passion for food and his ambition was to share his carefully annotated recipes with... everybody.

Anyway, Artusi, not deterred by the publishers’ refusals, went ahead, self-published his first volume of 475 recipes called “Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well”, and, of course it quickly sold out. 122 years later it is still one of Italy’s best-selling books and has never been out of print.

Artusi had travelled throughout the Italian peninsula. He became familiar with many of the regions and their culinary traditions, and he began collecting recipes that later became the foundation of his book. Family wealth enabled him to retire at the age of 45 and he devoted himself to his passions, culture and cuisine.

Born in Romagna in the town of Forlimpopoli, this successful fabric merchant and bon viveur had moved to Florence as a young man. Luckily for us, because when Italy was unified in 1861 only 2.5% of the country’s population could speak Italian. So the book, written in Italian was a unifying force in itself – speading opportunities and understanding together with fabulous food.

And it’s no wonder that the book has been so successful, Artusi himself was leery of books about cooking. In his preface he says, “Beware of books that deal with this art: most of them are inaccurate or incomprehensible, especially the Italian ones. The French are a little better. But from either, the very most you will glean are a few notions, useful only if you already know the art.”

He considered his book a teaching manual, “To practise using this manual, one simply needs to know how to hold a wooden spoon,” he wrote. “The best teacher is experience. Yet even lacking this, with a guide such as mine, and devotion to your labours, you should be able, I hope, to put something decent together.”

But, most importantly, and typically, – in his 14th edition he says this “Finally, I should not like my interest in gastronomy to give me the reputation of a gourmand or glutton. I object to any such dishonour- able imputation, for I am neither. I love the good and the beautiful wherever I find them, and hate to see anyone squander, as they say, God’s bounty. Amen”

He saw 15 editions published before his death in 1911 at the age of 90. Originally containing 475 recipes, the last edition of the book contained 790 recipes.

Casa Artusi where Cinzia took me for dinner was established in 2007. It is a tribute to the man who singlehandedly put Italian home cooking on the culinary map. Housed in a renovated monastery and church in his birthplace of Forlimpopoli, Casa Artusi has a restaurant, a culinary school, library, meeting space, art exhibits and museum. It is a place to read, learn, practice, taste and appreciate the treasure that is Italian home cooking.

In the restaurant – l’Osteria – Cinzia and I ate magnificently. They serve traditional, regional dishes and prepare some of Artusi’s recipes, depending on the season – all at incredibly low prices. The wine cellar has over 200 different kinds of wine from the region. And then, of course, she gave me the tour including the sensational 16th-century chapel – the whole establishment is set in an ancient convent complete with serene cloisters.

Finally she took me to the heart of the foundation – the cookery school. Here they offer home cooks day classes with some of the area’s best chefs. These lucky people get to work with ‘Mariettes’, experienced and trained local home cooks named after Artusi’s helper of whom he said, “. . .Mariette is both a good cook, and a decent, honest person. . .”.

I vowed to be back for a special occasion Forlimpopoli holds an annual gastronomic event dedicated to Artusi, The Festa Artusiana. For over a week every night between 7pm and midnight, Casa Artusi and the historical center of the town came alive with music and events as a “city of taste.” Streets, alleys, courtyards and squares, named after types of food – fruit, veg, gelato, sweets, throng with happy crowds.

The next time I returned to Romagna that year, Cinzia had a task for me. She had spent months researching two important places in the area and I was to be her guinea pig. She would guide me around and I was to comment on her English language, how easy it was for me to understand her and how interesting it all was – I was to tell her the truth – no holds barred. Obviously it wasn’t going to be all work and no play – we would have some fun too.

We started in Faenza with a poetry reading. Romagnolo poetry is great stuff – even if you can’t understand the dialect – you get the expressions and the tone of voice. The idea was that the poetry would be translated into English too, and Cinzia had decided that would be great for me – and it was! The Welsh lady who translated really put her heart and soul into the task and the crowd was lovely – they all wanted to talk to us in their version of English.

And then, after a superb dinner, we wandered around Faenza’s cobbled streets and vast, rich piazzas. And Cinzia told me the story of this lovely city.

By the 16th century Faenza was one of the richest cities in Europe, creating a product that simply every royal court in the world wanted. You could call Faenza ‘Ceramic City’ and it lent its name to the richest of porcelain – Majolica or Faience ware, some of the most sumptuously decorated and most colourful that ever existed. And ceramics are, even now, everywhere in this city – artisan factories, talented designers, great displays, beautiful ceramics are even plastered on houses. And Faenza is clever, ever up with the times: the ceramic museum houses stunning ceramic pieces by current artists as well as those illustrating the fashions in art and style over the last five hundred years.

Now every year there is a massive exhibition of ceramics that takes over the city ‘Argila’ or clay!
And, with rich architecture and lively, lovely tiny piazzas and a thriving Café Culture the city is a delight.

Then we took on somewhere a bit different – San Marino. A little more challenging because Cinzia had decided to take me all around this mountaintop republic by foot! Up and down, down and up we went – with Cinzia guiding and talking and pointing and making sure that I was listening and looking in the right direction everywhere.

I’ve always known that San Marino was special – certainly from my days bringing a thousand happy travellers a week to nearby Rimini. Special? Very special and extremely profitable. Mountaintop republic, short coachride, stunning views, castles, passport stamp from another country, duty-free branded shopping – a classic excursion opportunity. A thousand passengers a week who would all pay a tenner to go up the mountain meant ten grand a week in excursion revenue plus commis- sions on shop sales – yummee!

Anyway, this was different and even more rewarding – Cinzia doing her speciality was taking me back twenty centuries or so to the time of Saint Marinus the mountaintop hermit saint. I even crawled into his cave-lair sleeping place and saw his silver death mask. Of course he had a story and Cinzia knew it. He was a stonemason from Dalmatia who worked with his mate Leo – they both found moun- tains, performed miracles and created sects – Leo created San Leo on one Romagna mountain and Marinus created San Marino on the other. Marinus was rather more independently-minded and hence San Marino asks nothing of anyone – its motto ‘Liberty’

It’s beautiful, atmospheric and quirky – serene San Leo was promised for another time. By the time dinner – the usual sensational food – was over I was exhausted and then on my way back to the UK.
My adventures in Romagna, I thought were over, just seven months seemed like a lifetime after they had begun. But by now I was hooked. “I wanna go to the Veneto” moaned Angelo! “We’ve got an invite to the Po Valley. Rovigo – the fabulous waterlands where they’ve got this amazing rice. I wanted to sell cruises down the river there. They’ll feed us wonderful food – you won’t believe it. “And we’ll go on a boat” Angelo enthused. “And if we’re lucky they’ll put us up at a place like that Tenuta Castel Venezze – remember?”

So, we went on another adventure. I filled my car up with a month’s worth of stuff. The plan was to go to Italy via the South of France resort of Arles (where Van Gogh painted all those great pictures) then we’d stop at one of Angelo’s mates’ hotels on the Med then swing around Ravenna and have lunch with Cinzia. Whizz across to the Veneto and then come back to Ravenna for a few days or weeks, whatever.

The trip was a doddle, we wizzed down to Arles, which was amazing. There was a lot of Van Gogh stuff everywhere and some very good restaurants, plus we stayed in a glorious hotel cheap – I’ve still got the posh key to prove it. Dinner was superb – both Angelo and I have a penchant for classic old fashioned fishy French cuisine so we feasted on soupe de poisson and bouillabaise to our heart’s content.

The next day we were in Italy and on our way back to Ravenna for supper with Cinzia. Or not – she declined our invitation. It was as though we were back on home territory that night staying in the Casa Masoli 16th century city palace B&B.

Massive rooms with enormous four-poster beds, good antique furniture, dressing rooms, posh bathrooms and big libraries. What more could we want? Well we weren’t going to get that but we did breakfast well on ham and cheese and eggs, good bread and butter, fresh local fruit and home made pastries and cakes and great coffee and superb blood orange juice.

Chat, walk, coffee and time for lunch with Cinzia. There’s a Venetian restaurant in Ravenna and, homesick maybe, Angelo wanted to go there – at least we could sit outside as we ate our Venetian specialities like liver and onions and cold veal.

Cinzia said that if I wanted to stay longer there was a massive Mussolini-era Colonnia by the sea in Marina di Ravenna. These colonnias were all along the coast, built by Mussolini in the classic brutalist art deco style to give kids and workers free seaside holidays, they have now either disappeared or, like this one been made into blocks of apartments.

As we left Ravenna on our way along the coast to the Veneto we popped into this colonnia and I haggled for a flat for a month. We dumped a load of my stuff out of the car giving Angelo a bit of room to move and we were off to see the Po valley.

Obviously, the Po valley is full of water. We’d been invited there by a company which wanted to hire out boats for people to enjoy water- borne holidays. Like many people in the industry they were giving us an experience in the hope that we would promote them. Seemed a good idea, at least it wasn’t mass tourism and local people were involved.

“We’ve been here before” said Angelo when we arrived at our accommodation for the night. “Yes – the Castel Venezze – fab” I replied.

I remembered the village down the road, San Martino where everyone downed tools and stopped work at six in the evening to dance in the town square – delightful.

TO BE CONTINUED...
and more about Romagna at www.BestofRomagna.com

To enjoy the whole 241 page book full of Italian adventures you can buy  "You Lucky People" from Amazon.

To enjoy the whole 241 page book full of Italian adventures you can buy "You Lucky People" from Amazon.


0 Comments And again... I returned to Romagna12/31/2020
0 Comments

 

THE STORY SO FAR:

I'd gone back to Romagna with my old friend Angelo and after 40 years we had not only discovered Ravenna but been enchanted by it!

The mosaics, the history, the atmosphere, the food, the fun and the gelatos had us captivated!

And I went on to continue my adventure in Romagna, still entranced by the 5th century Roman Empress Galla Placidia. But now to learn much more about the strange and wonderful place that was her seat of power - Romagna

Galla Placidia was followed by more colourful rulers, in particular the Gothic hero Theodoric who shepherded half a million of his people over the Alps to populate the area. This powerful man built more palaces and basilicas, this time in the Northern Arian style. And then, gradually Ravenna slid back into obscurity.
 
Cinzia guided me around the city. Every time I returned there was something to see. She took me to the fabulous basilicas, some dark and haunted like the church of San Vitale decorated with astonishing mosaics depicting the dynamic emperor Justinian, writer of western law, and his seductive dancing-girl wife Teodora. She took me to the museums and art galleries, ex-monastries and churches, and she took me to the extraordinary basilica of Sant’Appolinare in Classe. This massive edifice with its glittering mosaics seemed like it lived in a land of light, delicately reflecting all the glory of its 1600 years.
 
Then, when the visits and the delightful tours seemed to be over, I came back to Ravenna so Cinzia could show me what happened after Ravenna’s power lapsed. She took me to see the tomb of Dante Alighieri and showed me her favourite basilica just by it – the 7th-century basilica of San Francesco. This classic basilica had something very special – goldfish swimming in the crypt.
 
The sea had receded from Ravenna – denuding the city of its canals and natural moat. Then it was no longer an island and robbed of the massive natural protection of the sea, it was invincible no longer and slowly it has begun to sink.
 
This is nowhere more evident than in the mosaic-floored crypt of San Francesco. Now it is full of water and is the home to a family of goldfish.
 
Back to the tomb of Dante, Cinzia proudly told me the story of the greatest Italian writer ever – she was besotted with one of his tales, the ill-fated romance of Francesca and Paolo which took place close to Ravenna. Poor dears, they both ended up in Hell!
 
Dante had been exiled by Florence in 1302 and had wandered the country making trouble before being taken in by the Polenta family near Ravenna where he died of malaria in 1321. He was buried by the Francescan monks.
 
Naturally as Dante was a Florentine, and one of the world’s great poets, the Florentines wanted Dante’s remains in their city. Knowing that they would stop at nothing, the Franciscan monks hid Dante’s coffin. For the last nearly 800 years, the Florentines have tried to get back what’s left of their star poet but with no success. Dante Alighieri was pardoned by Florence in 2008!
 
Carrying on the literary theme, Cinzia led me to Ravenna’s ‘Street of Poets’. The via Mazzini is a lovely long cobbled pedestrian street which winds through the pretty 18th century part of Ravenna. At the time most of the street’s palaces, houses and shops were created, Ravenna was a magnet for rich and educated Grand Tour visitors from all over the world. They came to imbue themselves with the magic, history and art of this then-iconic, city.

Following in Dante’s footsteps came Oscar Wilde and Sigmund Freud, Alfred Lord Byron and TS Eliot, Henry James and Herman Hesse and all up this lovely street there were small placards with their comments about Ravenna.
 
As it happened, Cinzia was very fond of Lord Byron who came to Ravenna and seduced Teresa Countess Guiccioli, the wife of a rich Ravenna merchant. Appropriately Byron was writing the first five cantos of Don Juan at the time.
 
Following on the Byron theme, Cinzia decided to take me to Bagnacavallo the little country town where Byron had his love-nest. Rather more than pretty, Bagnacavallo has a spectacular miniature 17th-century perfect oval piazza, a street of love, and the ancient convent where Byron unceremoniously dumped his two-year-old daughter Allegra. She died there at the age of five. Sad I thought; romantic thought Cinzia.
 
Now we’d moved our centre of interest outside of Ravenna, Cinzia decided to take me for two meals in two very different and very special places.
 
The Adriatic coast municipality of Cervia had been an ancient salt city with enormous salt-pan lakes, owned by the Popes. In the 18th century they built an elegant new model town and port to house their vastly wealthy salt businesses and the people running it.

We walked around the colourful port and into the ‘New’ model town with its piazzas and porticos, its salt market and salt museum, its delightful 18th century theatre and its art-stuffed cathedral. By now, naturally we were hungry and it was just a short walk to a sublime beach-side restaurant.
 
And I was introduced to Strozzapreti. Made of just flour and water (no eggs) these short lengths of pasta twisted as though a priests thin neck were between your fingers – “Strangled Priest” pasta is something very special and totally fabulous with a sauce of fresh fish created by someone who truly knows. Even more fabulous if you’re eating it in a classic restaurant on the beach and your bare feet are twisting with enjoyment in the warm sand – as Cinzia’s were. A long lunch, even more delicious fresh fish and we took a walk along the beach towards the glitzy part.
 
In the 19th century seaside tourism developed as a health-giving activity and Cervia’s beaches and its vast pine woods came into use to welcome visitors.
 
Obviously the pinewoods, the lovely beach and the historic town (and the sublime food and wine all around) were attractive to visitors. By the time Cervia had a railway station, visitors were arriving from as far away as rich, fashionable Milan and a few Milanese took interest in the lovely area.
 
Then, at the beginning of the 20th century an agreement was reached between Cervia and the Maffei Family from Milan who bought a large piece of Cervia’s land by the sea. On this land, they built villas, parks and gardens to transform the area into a superb Art Deco holiday resort. It would be called Milano Marittima (Milan by the Sea).

The man chosen to lead the development was Milanese painter Giuseppe Palanti who had been influenced by Ebenezer Howard (the force behind the Garden City movement – thought to represent the perfect blend of city and nature).
 
In 1913 the Garden City Society built the first three cottages and the following year four more, including Giuseppe Palanti’s villa. All these cottages were in the heart of the pinewoods and in Liberty style (Italian Art Nouveau). In a few years Milano Marittima became a smart new middle-class beach resort within Cervia’s municipality.
 
The beneficial effects of Cervia’s health spa have been known for centuries and the centre has been visited by many people over the years. “Selva e Mare” – ‘forests and sea’ was the first theme used to publicize the spa at the start of the century and today is still considered the winning formula of the city.
 
Cinzia loved it. “Selva e Mare” plus fashion, elegance and food certainly did it for her!
And she loved something else about Cervia – flamingos – thousands of them. Like most of Romagna’s coast, the area around Cervia was waterland – just a few hundred years ago it was mainly seawater and now it is mainly land. Hence the vast salt-lakes, and hence the flamingos and all kinds of other water birds, but mainly flamingos, beautiful graceful flamingos. As the area around Cervia is a massive natural park, it is kept natural and protected. The environment is pretty much untouched – great pine forests, vast amounts of water, great empty beaches, paradise for flamingos.
 
I came back to Romagna for the last performance of the Ravenna Festival and we arrived in the sultry July evening heat at the massive San Giacomo palace, the seat of the power players in Ravenna – the Rasponi family.
 
“Can I tell you something” said Cinzia Pasi conpiratorially, as she waylaid Cinzia and I at the gate “They are making a factory here” “It is going to ruin our beautiful area – have a leaflet” “Do you want to see the mayor, it’s his project – he’s standing there”.
 
To be honest, in the balmy evening with a hundred or so people sitting on the grass and enjoying fabulous world music – it didn’t seem appropriate to stand and demonstrate or talk to the mayor.
 
So, we queued up at the trestle table and waited while three delightful local people laboriously wrote out tickets for a couple of ice creams – we paid our 2 euros and went to the bar to be served. Who cared about the global financial crisis, the possibility that a factory would be built. We’d got our gelatos, the musicians were drumming and singing and playing weird stringed instruments and the bureaucratically-bought ice cream tasted good. The crowd was happy and everything in Italy was in its place.
 
The concert ended late and after happily getting lost in the grounds of the old Rasponi palace, church and art gallery complex (there was always a great art gallery!) we made our way back to another Rasponi establishment – the Palazzo Baldini.

With its air of peace, understanding and plenty, you couldn’t find a more sublime place to sleep.
To be honest, you wouldn’t have marked out our hosts as medieval barons. At the Palazzo Baldini, Filipo (a veterinary surgeon) is a young impeccable, well-travelled ‘Front of House’ and his mother (a Baldini by birth) and his father aided by two inspired chefs look after the hospitality in depth.
 
It was quickly clear that just everything has been chosen with the best possible taste. From the superb white-sheeted beds, through the thoughtfully-restored and now glazed air vents in the drying-room to the miraculous ravioli, the taste, visual and culinary, is simply perfect.
 
And these Baldinis don’t stand on formality. For breakfast mother brings out a tray of melt-in-the-mouth just-baked cookies and father asks if we’d like some fresh fruit.
 
He reappears two minutes later with peaches, apricots and nectarines still warm from the sun and just plucked from the trees. With a little perfect espresso, it’s the breakfast from heaven.
 
And while dad grabs more fruit for us to take away, mum gives the tour of the garden – sample ripe figs, see the goats and chicken and rabbits gambolling and forget about the fact they’re going to be lunch!
 
It’s time for coffee. Hastily grabbing our bags and gratefully accepting a box of at least 10kg of fresh fruit (“for the journey!”) we leave to have morning coffee in Bagnacavallo, the tiny astonishing marvel of Italian medieval architecture, slumbering in the morning sun. Lord Byron must have loved it.
 
Now it really is time for lunch, up in a hilltop historic vineyard city, why not? Bertinoro has history. When the Empress Galla Placidia arrived, touring her area, they offered her wine. In fact they offered her a cup of the sublime Albana wine of which they are justly very proud and was the first wine in Italy to have a DOCG accreditation.
 
Savouring the terracotta beaker of delicious wine, she said (in Latin obviously) “This wine is so good it should be drunk in gold” Hence the city’s name – Bert in Oro (drunk in gold in Romagnolo dialect).
 
Since then, for over fifteen centuries the locals have been perfecting their wine-making craft and the city became rich and powerful. The archbishop’s castle dominates all the lands around and was once the fiefdom of Frederick Barbarossa. Now the locals just specialise in wine – and food, of course.
 
Perched on the side of its grand square, with astonishing views, Bertinoro’s best restaurant has an enormous wine museum and unbelievably good food. Because it’s at least fifteen kilometres away from the sea, it specialises in meat rather than fish. Like many Romagna restaurants it serves wonderful tagliatelli made fresh each morning and it’s served with very special ‘Ragu’ sauce. This sauce is the pride of every chef and normally includes chopped local pork and beef and many delicious secret ingredients. Sublime! It’s normally followed by an enormous plate of selected grilled meats including sausage, liver, chops, ribs, “Castrato” lamb, steaks and patties. Enough!
Finally Cinzia thought that my food education was in need of refreshment so she took me to the Via Emilia city of Forlimpopoli to learn from Pellegrino Artusi. Ever heard of Pellegrino Artusi? I hadn’t!

TO BE CONTINUED...

To enjoy the whole 241 page book full of Italian adventures - either you can buy  "You Lucky People" from Amazon or to buy it with a free copy of the 2021 Sustainable Tourism Report (value £100) CLICK HERE

and more about Romagna at www.BestofRomagna.com


0 Comments Meeting the most powerful woman in the western world12/28/2020
0 Comments

 
You Lucky People
Episode 2
Empress Galla Placidia




THE STORY SO FAR:

I'd gone back to Romagna with my old friend Angelo and after 40 years we had not only discovered Ravenna but been enchanted by it!

The mosaics, the history, the atmosphere, the food, the fun and the gelatos had us captivated!

And that was it except for one thing, maybe it was the time-travelling, maybe it was the Ravenna air, but somehow my life had opened up to exciting but dangerous possibilities and I could see uncharted territory. I was, of course, blythely unaware of this, happily having an enjoyable trip but deep inside me my internal imp was doing pressups.
 
How did the rest happen? I really haven’t a clue. Suffice it to say that none of my fail-safe devices worked and I was to be drawn so far out of my comfort zone that my life was to be in danger far quicker than I could imagine.
 
Anyway, Cinzia the guide didn’t come with us to Venice. But Angelo and I, as ever, had a great time. The Venetians had pulled out their stops for us and we were staying in an unknown ex-military island in the lagoon – fascinating and just a couple of stops from Piazza San Marco on the waterbus. We went to see his mates and his favourite places, we ate great food, we popped down to the Lido, we walked and we boated around.
 
But, as I thought about the mosaics - gradually, imperceptably, a virtual bridge was being built between me and Ravenna – into the land where time took on a new identity and was to shake me to my roots.
 
Some new ideas from a new and rather strange person were creeping into my life and altering my perceptions.
 
Every day for the next two months, I set to finding out more about Ravenna, now the contested capital of Romagna, once capital of the Roman Empire, a very strange place indeed, but totally, utterly, dangerously fascinating.
 
Cinzia now became my guide. Somehow her words and her sweet enthusiasm bridged the gap between 21st-century Britain and 5th-century Ravenna taking me back a couple of millennia to Classe, the Ravenna suburb where she lived.
 
And soon enough I was there, physically in Ravenna. And that year I kept coming back to enjoy a bit of deft guided time-travelling with Cinzia. She would pick me up at the airport in her little ecocar and take me places. We’d see extraordinary things and eat extraordinary meals, stay in extraordinary places and then she’d dump me at the airport to go home. I would write an article for each visit and I was finding it more and more addictive.

Clearly, Romagna was a potent mix of everything I loved. Romagna? What the hell is Romagna?
 
A classic Roman strategy in conquered territories was to build roads through them and cities in them, so when they advanced north east of Rome first, they built a classic new city with all mod cons on the Adriatic coast called Ariminum (today’s Rimini). Naturally they built a nice new road from Rome to connect. It was called the Via Flaminia. What to do next?

In a kind of tacking move, they built a road from Ariminum towards more conquered territory in the north west. They called the road the Via Emilia and it followed the line of the Apennines towards the other sea coast – the Med’.
 
They now controlled a territory bounded by the mountains in the south and north (the alps) and seas in the west and the east, in the middle there was an astonishingly fertile plain watered by the powerful Po river.
 
Roman generals at the time had one big problem – providing pensions for their retiring soldiers, particularly if there wasn’t too much booty to go around. In these cases, generals often just captured some land and gave it away in nice retirement packages to soldiers as a working pension.
 
This method had a double benefit – not only were ex-soldiers looked after, but also the presence of soldiers added a bit of security. Naturally it was not a good idea to settle retired soldiers too close to overcrowded Rome.
 
So as soon as returning troops got through the Alps it seemed a good idea to find pension plots quick. What about that fertile land on the plain? Perfect! Before you could say Marcus Aurelius it was full of Roman soldiers living on pension plots. In other words, it became the land of the Romans or  ́Romagna’!
 
Romagna had a few pretty strong selling points. It was close to the Adriatic (lots of seafood and lots of trade with the east). It was sandwiched between the Alps and the Apennines (lots of safety). It was astonishingly fertile (lots of great food). It had great transport options (two major Roman roads and the sea).
 
So for the centuries after the Romans arrived and it got called Romagna, it became a rich, elegant and important place.
 
First, arriving over the Alps from Gallic conquests, Julius Caesar used his first major stopping place, the then-walled island city of Ravenna, to gather his troops and make his journey over the Rubicon to take Rome and become emperor.
 
Although Caesar’s campaign ended in his famous assassination, one thing was not lost on his adopted son and later emperor. Augustus recognised the invincibility of Ravenna and created one of the empire’s biggest ports and massive fleets in the city which then became a major international city-port.
 
By the time Ravenna became imperial capital of Rome it was surrounded by riches. The Via Emilia was like a glorious necklace dotted with sumptuous art cities from Ariminum to Bologna; the fertile plains were producing fabulous harvests and the hills and mountains were alive with vineyards. The scene was set to create one of the world’s great cities of art, resplendent with mosaic-stuffed basilicas. An astoundingly colourful mix of Italy and Byzantium.

In later centuries Romagna’s riches brought warlords to the green hills and the fat cities. The Borgias, the Malatestas, the Estes, the Montefeltros  brought violence, commissioned art and castles and people like Leonardo da Vinci and Dante to work in the area.
 
And even later Romagna became a pilgrimage place for artists, writers, connoisseurs and cognoscenti. Shelley and Byron, Freud and Jung, Versace and Armani, JRR Tolkien and Oscar Wilde amongst thousands of famous others trekked to Romagna to experience its colourful, world legacy treasure chest. And then they stopped coming, the second world war had allowed them to forget and for Romagna to drop off the Grand Tour itineraries.
 
By the time I arrived the treasure of Romagna had been forgotten for at least half a century. Now I was on a voyage of discovery, starting with Ravenna itself. Cinzia was determined to help me experience simply everything.
 
And we started with a meal, naturally. In a beach restaurant right on the Adriatic we ate a massive feast of fish. Simple dishes, spaghetti with juicy clams followed by a heap of mixed perfectly grilled fish.
 
Wonderful fresh fare with dozens of diners enthusiastically piling into their dishes, eating with knowledge and gusto. With the warm sea breeze, the scent of great food wafting from the kitchen and Cinzia, proud of her region’s food, tucking in with relish, I felt at home.
 
History is strange and extremely partial. Like many kids at school I was taught quite a lot of history involving Britain. I was lucky also to learn some Latin and I knew a bit about Rome and about ancient Greece. After school and during my work I was lucky enough to learn a bit more about our past. Travelling around the Silk Road had informed me a bit about one massive gap in my understanding; the Roman empire post 300 AD was to be another quite amazing untold story. Cinzia had decided to hold my hand, guide me on this exciting journey of discovery and show me everything she had. She was to become my teacher, my guide, my interpreter, and my muse as she gradually unveiled Romagna to me.
 
Again and again I returned to see and hear and taste its tempting tale – to savour this massive experience to its fullest. And every time I returned, door after door opened and veil after veil was lifted as I discovered Romagna’s unbelievable story.
 
OK I knew a bit about Romagna already... but now I was taken to the depths of the 5th century AD and Galla Placidia. Obviously Cinzia was besotted with her. But actually, who was this unknown lady? Cinzia explained...
 
Galla Placidia was born in Greece – Thessaloniki actually, the daughter of the soon-to-be Theodosius the Great emperor of Rome – so power from her father’s side. But her mother’s line may actually have been a little more tough. Her gran was the gloriously beautiful and powerful Justina who seduced and married emperor Valentinian and gave birth to the equally beautiful Galla who as a teenager, in turn, seduced Theodosius.
 
Beautiful, tough and powerful like her female antecedents, when Galla Placidia was given the title of ‘Most Noble Child’ and her own household and income, she looked set for a life of power and glory. But it was not quite as simple as that. First her mum died, then her dad was killed and shortly after the whole of her fiancé’s family was slaughtered for trying to grab power. Galla Placidia was living in Milan then and she naturally decided to flee.
 
She chose Rome as her safe spot, but unfortunately it was under seige by Barbarians when she arrived and she was captured by Ataulf, king of the Goths who wanted to hold her hostage for ransom. Naturally a big price would be demanded for such a high-grade prisoner.
 
Who knows how she did it, but Ataulf fell head over heels in love with Galla Placidia and decided to forego the ransom and take the girl. Their marriage was consummated in Forli and they had a massive wedding ceremony in Narbonne (the then capital of the Gothic lands) surrounded by many fortunes of captured booty. Galla Placidia became Queen Consort of the Goths. One of her wedding presents – a hundred handsome slaves each bearing massive platters of priceless jewels and gold looted from Rome!
 
So, loved-up and happy for once, there is yet another turn in her tale. Taking a bath in Barcelona, Ataulf was slaughtered by a rival who proceeded to kill the king’s ex-wife and his six children. Galla Placidia was again used as a ransom but not before she had been marched in front of her husband’s murderer.
 
Her half-brother Honorius had a cunning plan. Now he was in charge of the empire, he would ransom Galla, his half-sister, whom he had designs on, marry her off to his friend, the soldier Constantius, and while he was away in battle, Honorius would have her all to himself. So in 417 Constantius married Galla Placidia then off he went to fight.

It didn’t quite work out like that. Honorius moved everyone to Ravenna from Milan and to get the ménage a trois working properly he made Constantius joint emperor – so when Galla Placidia married she became Empress Consort in the Western Roman Empire then she had his two children Justa and Valentinian then of course Constantius died!
 
By now Constantius had become the real power behind Honorius’ throne and Galla Placidia’s protector. Knowing that she was in danger without his protection and fearful of the anger of the Ravenna population at her perceived incest with her brother, Galla Placidia fled to Constantinople with her children.
 
Mind you, by now Constantinople was about as safe as Rome had been when Galla Placidia had fled there. The Eastern (and most important) capital of the Roman Empire was pretty much under seige by Atilla the Hun. There was sufficient danger for a wall to be built to secure Constantine’s beautiful new city.
 
Then her half-brother Honorius died. In Constantinople with her half-nephew Emperor Theodosius, Galla Placidia decided to make a bid for power for her son Valentinian.
 
In the meantime local civil servant Johannes had seized power in Ravenna and was negotiating to become emperor.
 
After getting Theodosius’ support for Valentinian to be child emperor plus an army and a fleet of ships, Galla Placidia left the Bosphorus to take ‘impregnable’ Ravenna. She went by land with a small army and her captain Ardaburius went by sea.
 
Ardaburius and two of his galleys were captured by forces loyal to Johannes and were held prisoners in Ravenna. The top grade prisoner was allowed the freedom of walking the court and streets of Ravenna during his captivity. He took advantage of this privilege to get the city gates open to let in his troops. Johannes was taken and his right hand cut off; he was then mounted on a donkey and paraded through the streets, and finally beheaded in the city’s main hippodrome.
 
All Galla Placidia had to do was to make peace with the Goths waiting for spoils and she was in! Now she was Empress Consort on behalf of her 3-year-old son. Real power at last!
 
Thus began Ravenna’s age of Roman glory. Now not just a port, it was Imperial capital of Rome – and its empress – twice married, twice widowed, twice ransomed, humiliated and bartered now glorious Galla Placidia.
 
In 425 she started a building campaign that is evident even now, nearly 1600 years later. She built beautiful basilicas, commissioned glistening mosaics, started to create glorious Ravenna. Beautiful, rich, powerful, opulent, impregnable, global, stuffed full of Byzantine treasure, Rome’s window on the east was also full of intrigue, deca- dence and seedy goings-on.
 
Galla Placidia, though, was empress at a time when the whole world was in chaos. The city of Rome had fallen, the known world was full of millions of refugees due to famines.

Whole peoples were roaming the world to find fat territories to ravage and plunder. In China there were massive famines, hunger and death; in Europe malaria had reached the hitherto cold northern countries. Atilla the Hun and his vicious tribes having been bribed to go by Theodosius, were on their way to Italy. Rome’s western empire had fallen apart, the Vandals had reached North Africa, and closer to Ravenna the lands were full of Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Barbarians, and many other tribes who relished the opportunity to ravish the great city.
 
It’s lucky for her that Galla Placidia was a woman of steel forged in conquest and defeat.

TO BE CONTINUED...

To enjoy the whole 241 page book full of Italian adventures - either you can buy  "You Lucky People" from Amazon

or to buy it with a free copy of the 2021 Sustainable Tourism Report (value £100) CLICK HERE

and more about Romagna at www.BestofRomagna.com


0 Comments My Italian Adventure12/24/2020
0 Comments

 
You Lucky People
Episode 1
Romagna Mia


 It all had seemed harmless enough to start with. We two old geezers, Angelo and I, had known each other well for more than half a century by now. We’d both been in the travel business for all of that time. I’d blagged a trip for us to Emilia Romagna on the basis that we’d write an article on the destination’s green credentials.

As it happened, we were eminently well qualified for the task. We both knew the travel industry like the backs of our hands; I’d been writing about tourism sustainability for more than 20 years and Angelo was still a travel industry politician. 

Although he was a bit biased towards the Veneto (he was a Venetian, after all!) we both loved and knew Italy from top to bottom and side to side, having worked there and travelled around together and apart for nearly half a century.

And Emilia Romagna wasn’t just picked out from a hat. With its well-earned reputation for incredible local food and drink, its community-based offbeat left-wing politics and its reverence for regional culture and history – I felt it was set to be a real star in the green tourism world.

Anyway, Angelo had been banging on at me about the delights of green bike-city Ferrara, and I had been desperate to see the extraordinary mosaics in Ravenna for at least forty years. We’d both been to Bologna – the region’s capital – many times and we knew just what an impossibility finding a bad meal was in this red city. So, if the rest of the region was up to the same mark, we would be in for a real feast.

Angelo was detailed to negotiate details with his friends at the Italian tourist board and before you could say Parmesan, Parma Ham or Balsamic Vinegar we were off to the home of all these and much more.

In Bologna we stayed in a ‘Right-on’ B&B – actually a big apart- ment in an enormous palace, with 4 letting rooms run by a youthful crowd of home-knitted organic-eating students.
As soon as we pressed the apartment’s bell and entered the massive doors into the old stone courtyard, we got the picture. We checked into a quirky green apartment in a Bologna palace – now a student co-operative and got ready to eat Bolognese lentils.

Here, student kitsch met massive medieval walls and a sustainable ethos – what the guiding co-operative called “respect for nature, values of organic, energy conservation and sustainability”. We got the picture.

Not an ancient stone had been left unturned to demonstrate the organic, low-impact products in this funky establishment right in the heart of Bologna’s medieval student quarter.

For the rest of the evening Angelo and I wandered what seemed like all the atmospheric medieval city’s 38km of porticos and dozens of squares pursuing our Bolognese hobby - searching for a bad meal – no luck, happily.

We walked and ate with the benefit of Angelo’s Michelin Italy and a little deft questioning of locals. The highlight of the visit for Angelo was eating Culatello di Zibello – possibly the rarest ham in Italy. “What’s the difference with normal Culatello” says Angelo “Five kilometres” replied the waiter. For me, it was the Mostarda – pickled sweet fruit – hot and sweet and delicious all at the same time.

Next on the itinerary was Ferrara. Here we stayed in a chintzy B&B in the old Ghetto, we cycled around to eat and we went to Venetian- style Commachio to see the eel-fishing industry and eel-canning factory. The poster of Sophia Loren, hands above her head exposing her little tufts of underarm hair attested to the date (circa 1954), of the film it promoted – La Donna del Fiume – and reminded me of the passion of my youth. Canned eel, though? Not to my, or Angelo’s taste.

But something quite strange happened to our perceptions in Ferrara. Lucrezia Borgia. 

Our local guide took us to where she was resting still looked after by nuns. And revered. They were all talking about her as though she were still alive “Poor maligned, misunder- stood Lady Lucia”, they said. She’d certainly had a tough life – married off many times, little opportunity for her real love and a life of kindness and charity – quite different from the ‘Femme Fatale’ she has been depicted as – but still alive? Maybe it’s the Italian penchant for the present tense, I thought.

Anyway things got a lot better when we arrived in Ravenna. A pretty ocal tour guide, Cinzia, met us at the station and walked us to our B&B. Well, palace in the city wall, to be more precise. Both of us had massive suites, mine included a dressing room, a library an enormous bathroom plus a vast, enormous four-poster bed of which more later.

So with Angelo and I happily settled in our palace lodging suites, Cinzia proceeded to show us around.

Ravenna is a very strange place both very dead and nearly alive at the same time. Thinking about it now gives me the shivers. But you’ve got to see it. In the world of undiscovered amazing places it’s a must.

So we tottered out of the palace with Cinzia and down the road to the mausoleum by way of a very dark, very old basilica.

Let me explain; Ravenna’s times of glory and global power were twofold – the first at the height of the Roman Empire’s power and the second just as Rome was losing its grip. So, for about 500 years, Ravenna was THE place to be. 

A pivotal eastern backdoor to the warring western world where East met West met North met South. Or in other words Byzantium came face to face with Rome confronting the Goths fighting the Vandals. And in the 5th century AD Ravenna became really, really hot.

Cinzia took us by our hands and led us there... right into Ravenna 465 AD. In the Basilica of San Vitale we met Theodora the dancing girl mascot of the charioteers who became empress in a love match with Emperor Justinian. Inside what seemed like an enormous Byzan- tine domed dark blue jewel box we met the empress Galla Placidia in this, her mausoleum. Here this shockingly powerful woman created her own final resting place festooned with deeply coloured mosaics glistening to us now as though they were made and polished yesterday or, indeed today.

The sheer opulence of it all made us blink. And then, as Cinzia carefully brought us out to the present day we blinked again. Time travel is hungry work. “Lunch” said Angelo “Will you join us, Cinzia?”

So we all had a nice lunch together after our time-travelling and Cinzia told us that it was her birthday tomorrow “Great,” says Angelo “You can put on a miniskirt to show off your beautiful legs – I know they’re beautiful – and you can join us for dinner too.” God knows what he was doing but at the moment he seemed to be on a roll.

Cinzia was nice enough, tall and slim and very attractive in a Russian ikon or Modigliani kind of way with a touch of the Mona Lisas but she seemed to be rather sweet, and a little tame to tell the truth. Anyway, now we’d got behind the task of getting Cinzia out for dinner there was no going back. The die was cast and the first step of my challenging future made.

Our afternoon was spent innocently enough tasting sublime olive oil up in a Venetian conquered village on the brow of a hill with soaring castles and a microclimate, you’ve guessed it, absolutely perfect for growing the top variety of olives. And wine, as it happens, and honey, and lots of other good things.

Why? Because the hill is actually made of gypsum. Anywhere else they may have knocked it down and sold it as aggregate – but not in Romagna. If you can grow good stuff on it, grow it.

So Brisighella was fabulous and so was the olive oil – plus we’d learnt a new skill. Olive oil tasting was obviously an art in itself – and, according to Cinzia we were naturals.

We were in good spirits on the way back to Ravenna, undaunted by Cinzia’s decision to join us only for dessert and a coffee that evening.
But she did turn up in a mini-skirt, at least, and posed for photo- graphs with us at the hotel door. And wrote her email address on a restaurant napkin for me – another step as it was to turn out.

The next day we were to leave for Angelo’s beloved Venice and the magic of Ravenna could have stopped there, except for the fact that I’d already asked Cinzia to join us. “No problem” he said “Could be a bit of fun” obviously relishing the thought of having double the audience.

And that was it except for one thing, maybe it was the time-travelling, maybe it was the Ravenna air, but somehow my life had opened up to exciting but dangerous possibilities and I could see uncharted territory. I was, of course, blythely unaware of this, happily having an enjoyable trip but deep inside me my internal imp was doing pressups.

To be continued... TWICE A WEEK

To enjoy the whole 241 page book full of adventures - either you can buy  "You Lucky People" from Amazon
or buy it with a free copy of the 2021 Sustainable Tourism Report (value £100) HERE

0 Comments Don’t look down. Look up - here is a taste of the great things to come12/22/2020
0 Comments

 

2020 was total rubbish for EVERYONE in the travel industry but 2021 already has the look of being totally full of opportunities.

Sustainable Tourism will open millions of local doors and will jingle cash tills everywhere. And it will provide good quality well paid fulfilling employment and training for millions.

New Investment money will flow in from well heeled sources eager to be associated with the transformation of quality destinations.

Multifarious new levels of tourism, profitability, creativity and fulfilment will be unearthed by the driving new Experience Economy.

The Carbon Market will unharness trillions of dollars for good causes whilst reigning in our ridiculous waste and emissions.

And just imagine the power that Virtual Tourism will bring - creativity and billions more than the amazing gaming industry.

Do you want all these wonderful things? Yes or no?

I’ll be writing about all these individual opportunities more fully in the days and weeks to come.

And if you are still in the travel industry at the beginning of this new 2021 all I can say is “You Lucky People”

You can read all about it free at your leisure. Just buy a copy of my amazing story  in the travel industry “You Lucky People” and get a copy of the 2021 Sustainable Tourism Report (value £100) free. You can choose one of three special editions - Travel Agent, Destination or Student.

Valere Tjolle

Ps did you know that over 99% of outbound tourists go to less than 1% of destinations? No overcrowding there eh?

PPs did you know that destination based curated experience operators like Best of Romagna are the future?

0 Comments NEW: Sustainable Tourism Report 202112/8/2020
0 Comments

 
17th Annual Report soon to be released 50% earlybird discount available now


One of the events that affected me most last year was an art exhibition called ‘Tour Operator’ created by Italian artist Massimo Sansavini. All the works of art on display were made of bits of the boats which carried refugees to Sicily. Each artwork had a web page attached showing how big the boat was, how many refugees it carried and how many died in transit.

More than anything it showed me how inextricably travel - the business of dreams - is related to the real world.

In the real world... the pandemic is still not under control, populist authoritarian regimes are spreading like wildfire, LBGTQ, women, minorities of all kinds are still discriminated against, there are still over 26 million refugees, human rights and workers’ rights are consistently infringed in tourism, over 40 million human beings are still held in some kind of modern slavery... and a climate disaster is already upon us.

Although the writing has been on the wall for nearly forty years, the global travel and tourism industry, with notable exceptions, has paid little but lip service to sustainability until now.

Now it’s all change.

There are three forces that have the power to change the global travel and tourism industry dramatically - the market, big money and cohesive powerful global government action.

In 2021 these forces will be in a dynamic conjunction.

The market has already indicated that sustainable tourism will be number one; Governments are lining up behind the Paris Accord on Climate Change outbidding each other in emissions reductions and many trillions are now in a burgeoning global Carbon Market.

The timeline has been painful but it looks like, finally, sustainability and tourism may merge to form a truly durable activity.

This will create enormous changes.

As the global carbon market grows - now powered by a group of people led by ex Bank of England Governor Mark Carney - finally the airlines will have to ditch toothless CORSIA for a tough financial solution. As far as emissions are concerned (and airlines represent 80% of travel emissions) they will have to cut their cloth to fit their flights.

All the forecasts now show that the market will require sustainable tourism practices from season 2021. Clients will look for valid confirmation that their suppliers are actually practising what they preach - they have had enough of fake news - they will not tolerate greenwash.

And now it looks like a change of direction is taking place and the USA will rejoin the Paris Accord - this will mean that our global vision will change.

Destinations will attract massive new funding from global institutions seeking to promote their sustainability credentials. This will enable them to fulfil visitor demand for sustainable local initiatives - in particular food and drink, artisan and produce related. The Experience Economy will change our destinations for the better and offer locals quality employment opportunities creating places that are good to live in and to visit.

Visitors will get a healthier, wider, more fulfilling experiences.

But watch out for China - their trillion dollar Silk Road - now the One Belt One Road infrastructure project may change tourism in a less beautiful way.

We’ve got a long way to go but we could still get there if we choose not to treat our clients as numbers.

I’ve asked some friends to help us understand the plethora of information and projections that are swirling around us confusing 2021. So report subscribers will be treated to six big podcasts. Each a full thirty minute interview with a globally important, powerful and informed individual. Each with a big story. People I’ve known for years.


In the 2021 Sustainable Tourism Report you’ll read something of tourism’s past, a little of its present and a lot of its potential future.

That’s largely because 2020 held very little present - that had been taken by COVID 19 and governments’ measures against it. Something like 90% of tourism activity wiped out.

In the report we deal with with the subjects that will certainly be of critical importance in 2021 and those that will present the biggest, most sustainable opportunities.

Best to understand them now!

Sustainable Tourism is the 38-year-old big issue of 2021 the subject embodies everything that is really important about tourism. We’ve been writing about it specifically for over 20 years. The issue hasn’t changed but it is more important than ever as is sustainable tourism’s dark side - Greenwash and Fairwash - we published the definitive report 10 years ago. This cynical meretricious practice hadn’t changed either, except to get more malicious.

Now we’re in the grips of the pandemic which has stopped tourism and its side effects, but not for long. Maybe its time for something different, less harmful and more fulfilling, can Virtual Tourism help? Can the Experience Economy make holidays both more sustainable and more fulfilling - plus more truly profitable?

What dangers are there on the horizon? Is China’s Silk Road a massive tourism takeover or an opportunity and the Carbon Market is it trillion dollar greenwash or a massive opportunity?

Finally, in this report we explore truly new and amazing structural and financial opportunities for Destinations and the delectable opportunity that Food Tourism presents.


Plus for the first time each report subscription includes six exclusive 30 minute informative podcast interviews, each an in depth talk with a truly powerful global tourism executive. The World Bank and IFC; the GSTC, Green Destinations; ITB, SunX, and one of the world’s top sustainable destinations - they are all there.

I hope you enjoy. More importantly I know this report will inform your actions.

You can get an single user earlybird subscription now for £50/€55/$65
Or a multiple user one now for £100/€110/$130

To find out more click HERE

Valere Tjolle

Valere Tjolle was for 15 years the sustainable tourism editor for TravelMole.com, the world's largest global online community for the travel and tourism industry. He is now an independent commentator and CEO of Tourism Vision.

As principal of TotemTourism for the last 18 years Valere has specialized in the ethical development and marketing of sustainable tourism projects.
Projects have included tourism developments in Africa, USA, UK and Eastern Europe for clients as diverse as the European Union, the World Bank, UNWTO, UNEP, the Department for International Development and local and international travel and tourism entrepreneurs.

Valere has published the Sustainable Tourism Report Suite since its inception in 2003.

0 Comments Virtual tourism may be the travel and tourism industry’s saviour10/22/2020
0 Comments

 

Intellectual property could make destinations rich without harming their precious tourism assets.

An alternative world has appeared through the looking glass…

With any luck, an enormous battle will take place after the lockdowns - you need to take your side now.

Now we all have a little taste of things to come. Covid-19 has, quite literally, changed our entire world. Generously distributed by global airlines at no extra cost, carriers of the virus spread it to every corner of the globe.

And suddenly... The fact that people are now travelling much less has let us all have a peep into another possible world. The air we breathe is much better, there is much less noise, fewer planes in the sky, carbon emissions have dramatically decreased. We hear the birds once again and are reminded that nature can, and will, take care of itself – even if it means that the human race will be exterminated.

The fact is that in travel terms here we are again in 1992 - the clock has been put back to the year of the Earth Summit with 500 million international passengers a year. Even then we were worried that tourism was overheating.

Global mass homogeneous tourism may not be the cause but is, without doubt, a symptom of a way of living that is doing tremendous damage to environments, to human beings, to our cultures and our societies.

Shortly we will have a critical choice to make if our governments begin attempting to put an incredibly expensive sticking plaster on an unsustainable system that was never fit for purpose.

If so, they will use cynical meretricious phrases like “full employment” and “tourism for our economic development”. They will assert that “air travel builds economies and transcends borders” that “tourism brings massive opportunities for all”

And they will be right. Tourism has the opportunity to do all these things and more.

But, over the last 40 years or more, however many tourists travel, however big the tourism economy, however many hotels have been built or apartments let - the vast majority of tourism-related jobs have been rubbish, the vast majority of destination communities have had terrible deals.

Soon it will be time to build a new travel and tourism industry. An industry that may use the term ‘sustainable’ - not just as a buzz word, but one that implies responsibility in business practice, quality training and employment, sustainable tourism economies and businesses, social integrity, cultural and environmental respect, resilient sustainable destinations. Places that are good to live in first and good to visit second.

All that means destination communities that have actual ownership of their tourism assets and have the power to manage them.

Let us not forget the powerful brands that generate tourists like "Montmartre", "Paris", "da Vinci". "Times Square", "Thailand", "Venice" "stunning beaches", "wonderful climates", "New York". These and more represent the brands' massive power to attract visitors. Who owns the moral and intellectual rights to these brands and their images that serve airlines, tour operators, OTAs so well for free?

Virtual tourism could have answers, reducing actual travellers to lower numbers and higher prices and giving others the possibility of fundamentally understanding the destination they wish to visit through Virtual Reality.

Just imagine a confluence of the $ mega trillion gaming industry, the amazing Google Arts and Culture  the augmented reality that TUI are now pioneering

Together they may change the world of tourism.

Valere Tjolle

It's all in the 2021 Sustainable Tourism Report due to be published on 5 November. Price £200
A few review copies will be available for subscription now for £50 - a saving of 80% Subscribe HERE

0 Comments You may think that Airbnb is here to stay. Think again.10/13/2020
1 Comment

 

The one thing that the last 20 years has taught us is that change is the order of each day.

The internet has a powerful hold on the travel and tourism industry since 1998.

First it was Lastminute.com, then Booking.com then Tripadvisor, now Airbnb. They came, they flew and finally they landed, no longer the taste of today.

At their root, the big booking engines depend on big exposure on the internet. And how do they get it? They pay. For instance it is said that Booking holdings paid nearly $4 billion to Google last year. That is a lot of money. It only needs a bit of a a challenge to their earnings and trouble is on the horizon. You may say “Look at how much they’re worth” that is just the moneymen betting on the future - and as soon as emotion changes - phew it’s disappeared. Even Airbnb with their valuation of an amazing $40billion and Booking’s $70billion valuation could both disappear.

And what are the principle needs that they addressed:

• Cut-price upmarket holidays/stays
• Accommodation needing market exposure

As they say “The money is in the future” Tracking and fulfilling public needs has always been a rewarding experience - that’s the way today’s ‘Unicorns’ have been born.

So what will be the holiday needs of tomorrow?

More experience, more safety less cost.

Experiences themselves can include a variety of destination suppliers (eg windsurfing/local meals/cycle trips/excursions), or could be supplied by one customer-oriented resort hotel. From the client’s point of view booking pre-travel can save precious holiday time and money.

OTAs, although they wish to extend their client’s spend, have so far failed to get the best quality destination experiences. Understandable as they have over 80,000 destinations and locality is not easy to compute.

Looks like there may be an opportunity for a set of well curated destination sites.

But how would they work?

Read about it in the Sustainable Tourism Report 2021 on offer at 75% reduction for review copy subscribers..

1 Comment Our future existence is in danger, not just tourism10/6/2020
1 Comment

 

But there are loads of massive amazing fulfilling rays of hope if we choose to take them.

Where are we now?

In 1992 it looked as though we were on a trajectory that could save us all and help to make the world a better place. The post cold war Rio Earth Summit brought together 178 nations and 117 heads of state to address the issues of the environment and our relationship with it. The world seemed to recognise that we had a global problem that could only be solved globally but also with local commitment, participation and activity.

We recognised that if we carried on consuming at the then current level there would be little left for our succeeding generations- our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. Something had to be done and the concept of sustainable development was adopted. Not a strange buzzword - just the simple principle of handing over to our next generation more than we had started with, were it business, culture, environment or society. This was to take the form of committments by all of us as individuals and consequently would have global effects.

Thus Agenda 21 was born as outreach “Global to Local” together with a number of other sustainability issues such as major companies producing ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ accounts to show how much they were using as well as how much they were making. By then international tourism was already at 500 million international travellers a year and looking as though it was burning through far too much precious resources. It was natural that there was to be an Agenda 21 section for tourism. The agreement was formalised at a side event of the Johannesburg Earth Summit in 2002. The Responsible Tourism Charter was born in Cape Town as a result of this event.

From then on tourism was on a sustainability path although still growing dramatically - by 2002 it had grown to 700 million international travellers per annum.

Nonetheless the major tourism players were still vaunting their ‘Green’ credentials. And in 2008 a major World Economic Forum event was held in Davos. ‘Climate Change and Tourism’  set out the challenges were tourism to increase dramatically and unsustainably - international passenger figures by then were nearing a billion a year.

Then, in 2009 the UN Climate Change Conference (COP15) was held in Copenhagen, attended by 120 heads of state who pretty much achieved nothing except stasis. Actually, there was no real progress or agreement until COP21 in 2015.

During this time the world economy was being shaken by the banking crisis but nevertheless, tourism carried on growing.

The UN tourism sustainability process, indeed any form of global agreement had by now become suborned by organisations all over the world that wanted to make a quick buck out of tourism; and populist anti agreement individuals, organisations and governments seizing power. Do not underestimate the naysaying power of right wing anarchists, led by the voice of post war Russian emigre author Ayn Rand opposed to any order in today’s disordered world. Even now Agenda 21 is seen by them as a method of disempowering people rather than a globally agreed path to harmonious living.

So, post financial crisis, without any limits in place, tourism grew dramatically and the results were major tourist cities and prime natural sights experiencing massive destructive unsustainable overtourism.

Then ... STOP! A pandemic - Covid 19 - brought tourism numbers back to those of 1992.

That’s where we are now. So what are the massive rays of hope?

Well, there are massive and sustainable accommodation rays of hope that really fit the situation; there are enormous financial rays of hope that will further sustainability and will make lots of money; there are lots and lots of little green shoot opportunities that will provide sustainable incomes and make the world a better place ... all while the plutocrats squabble about what’s left of our destructive black industries.

It's all in the 2021 Sustainable Tourism Report due to be published on 5 November. Price £200
A few review copies will be available for subscription now for £40 - a saving of 80% Subscribe HERE

THE STORY SO FAR:

I'd gone back to Romagna with my old friend Angelo and after 40 years we had not only discovered Ravenna but been enchanted by it!

The mosaics, the history, the atmosphere, the food, the fun and the gelatos had us captivated!

And I went on to continue my adventure in Romagna, But now to learn much more about this strange and wonderful place.

AND NOW TO MAGAZINE PRODUCTION!

But first an excursion to Angelo's Veneto.

I remembered the village down the road, San Martino where everyone downed tools and stopped work at six in the evening to dance in the town square – delightful.

Our accommodation was superb. Since we’d stayed before, they had cashed in on cookery classes led by the manager’s mum, the Contessa. All over the world TV cookery programmes had started to get big audiences. Masterchef, for instance was getting millions of viewers from Australia to Italy. Other cookery programmes are becoming a staple on the TV menu. There are often so many viewers who wish to try the recipes that supermarkets stock up in advance with specialist ingredients.

Just when Angelo and I arrived the cookery craze was beginning to offer opportunities for posh struggling old hotels.

No more so than around Italy’s fertile Po Delta where hotels and agriturismo establishments were learning new ways to reap the harvest of wonderful produce and of high-spending quality tourism by creating cookery classes.

Veneto, extending from the Dolomites to the Adriatic Sea, is one of the richest provinces in Italy – full of culture and history and jam-packed with absolutely sensational food and wine.

There is an astonishing range of vegetables. Veneto has no less than seven with DOP protection and richness of waters (the sea, the lagoons, the lakes, the rivers) also gives local people an ample supply of fish stocks. As far as meats are concerned, there is also an amazing variety. The lagoons around also produce superb rice.

And the wines are no less wonderful – Just think of Soave, Valpo- licella, Amarone, Bardolino, Garganega , Prosecco, Pinot Grigio, amongst dozens more, particularly great whites, fabulous reds.
Hence there is a huge range of recipes and preparations in the kitchen. Great specialities, world-renowned foods.

Castel Venezze’s family were determined to collect their bit of the opportunity and become leaders in high quality cooking holidays. In a superb setting, hands-on cooking lessons were now being run by the Countess Maria Giustiniani in the kitchens at the castle. As the estate was set in thousands of acres of woodland, green fields and kitchen gardens they really had something special to offer. The idea was that here, under the steady eye of Contessa Maria, a special menu would be created every day culled from their own local earth.

It was a simple next step for guests to experience the bounty of this rich soil with their own hands and cook it themselves. Hence the Tenuta Castel Venezze cookery classes.

The countess is more than happy to help guests cook and with the aid of a qualified sommelier, and assist them to put together a simply amazing lunch.

A typical day’s cooking could include a whole sumptuous meal with wine. After gathering required herbs and vegetables on the estate, participants would repair to the estate’s kitchens where, under the instruction of Contessa Maria, they prepare a seasonal lunch, usually consisting of a risotto, a typical meat or fish dish (depending on the best ingredients) and a dessert. The created, hopefully superb, lunch will be eaten with local wines. During the day participants also learn about the Veneto’s fabulous history of cuisine.

After lunch there would be time for a walk on the estate before beginning the fine eating process again in the evening with an aperitif and an excellent dinner created again with the best of local produce.

Good enough for Angelo and me then. And after a nice sleep in yet another four-poster, we had our big local breakfast in the awesome dining hall. Today we were off on the river.

There can’t be many more tranquil experiences than slowly negotiating a beautiful Italian river towards lunch.

As it happened lunch was to be something very special indeed. Something neither of us had tasted before, something sublime. Obviously we were in rice field country so it had to be risotto, but what more local and totally deliciously appropriate than eel risotto. Maybe it’s something about the oil in the eel but the dish is a truimph. Angelo couldn’t stop talking about it all the way back to the colonnia in Marina di Ravenna.

The next day we went off for lunch in the little port of Marina di Ravenna. A fish lunch, naturally.

Astonishing. The port has a street full of fishmongers that are also restaurants. So we got starters of pickled fish – little octopus, anchovies, Branzino, clams, shrimp, squid and cuttlefish and prawns – the lot. Then spaghetti alla bottarga (with mullet eggs) delicious. Naturally Adriatic fritto misto followed and grilled fish too. And then he was gone – Angelo was on his way home leaving me in my Mussolini apartment.

I had decided exactly what I was going to do. I would research Romagna myself and I would write a magazine about the place. I thought people would love it.

Of course, I’d published magazines in the past. I’d even owned and run a weekly newspaper, so I knew how it worked. A massive saving was that I didn’t have to print it. I could do it all online.
But first I had a job to do on the other side of the Adriatic.

By now I had an assistant – Jasmine – a highly-educated tourism academic who wanted to work with me. She edited my Sustainable Tourism Reports and produced a report analysis for me on cynical attitudes to tourism sustainability called the ‘Greenwash Report’ Together we created something called the Integrated Tourism Development Initiative and a beautiful part of Slovenia was to be my first project. Slovenj Gradec and Misilnja were two communities in the Styrian part of Slovakia, practically on the border of Austria and just by the European City of Culture – Maribor. They were beautiful, historic and fascinating and they had no tourism.

We had convinced them that we could help. The idea was that tourism is not just about visitors coming and looking at things. Tourism can involve the whole business community at one level or the other – and can benefit them. That’s why the initiative uses the word ‘integration’. If tourism could be used by the butcher, the baker, the farmer etc., they should be involved in creating and developing the tourism project. Plus they could bring more ideas and more commitment.

So, we got a two-day workshop organised which Jasmine and I were to jointly moderate and enthuse, but first we had to learn by travelling around and seeing the opportunities on the spot.

Something new for me. We got to a ‘Tourist Farm’ and they asked us to take our shoes off. Not when we got to the farmhouse, but when we got to the land. Soil and grass between our toes, we entered the farmhouse for a little ‘refreshment’ actually a fabulous treat of local (well, from the farm actually) fresh, organic, sublime delicious food. Apparently there were dozens like this charging ridiculously little money for a comforting wholesome break.

From the healthily organic to the light fantastic. Off we went to a pretty little airport. Here we were to have a taste of ‘sport flying’, well actually I was! Up, up and away I went with Damian Cehner (not the 666 one) and got to fly his dinky little plane. His company Aviofun owned the airport and did fun things like selling parachute jumps; luckily I wasn’t on the jump!

Finally, I visited the magic triangle. Very special! The Magical Triangle of the Mislinja Valley embodied three spiritual points that are related to the mythology of the old Slavs. The top point is at the place where the church of St. Pankraty stands, from where one can see the two other points, the church of St George and the church of St Mary. Within this triangle there is a special mythological story, which includes archeology and mythology. It was a beautiful but a strange place where it is said that all growing things receive extra energy. The idea was to research and create a tourism programme around the area which would help heal visitors’ minds, bodies and spirits.

I was fascinated – I’d only ever heard of St Pankraty before in terms of St Pancras station in London!
In the following days we created four local groups at an intensive tourism workshop to visualize these projects and put them into action. The idea was that local residents would benefit from more tourists coming to sky dive at the Slovenj Gradj sport airport and to enjoy great local hospitality and the natural world on special farm and forest stays. The visitors would also be able to experience health-giving relaxation in Mislinja valley’s magic triangle and to try specially branded holidays and locally produced goods.

I really loved the place, the people the food and the potent spirituality and thought it was just a matter of time before it would be a really successful little destination.

Back in Romagna, for the next few months I’d go out and around every day getting stories and pictures and then I’d come back to the collonnia and write them up.

The first edition came out! Wow. Certainly, the cover was a knockout – a picture of a smiling Romagnola girl eating an enormous piadina, that perfectly circular, particularly Romagnolo flatbread which locals lust after – particularly when it’s filled with fresh local cheese, prosciutto crudo and rocket!

By now, of course, I’d learnt a lot about the Romagna food and wine, and why piadina (now designated a special DOC product) was so important.

At its heart, piadina is simple, unpretentious unleavened flatbread, but every restaurant in Romagna serves it and competes with all the others as to its quality. It is a simple mix of flour and water, a little salt and strutto (lard) or olive oil. After being flattened it is baked on an earthenware telia, usually made in one specific place – historic hilltop Franciscan Montetiffi. It is always served hot. Given its simplicity there should be little difference between one piadina and another yet there is. Simply everybody has their way to make the very best from humble homes to grand restaurants and your piadina will always be delicious. It is Romagnolo soul food, like passatelli in brodo. OK, I’ll tell you about passatelli after I’ve told you about the magazine!

It was 48 pages full of stuff about fascinating places that I’d visited and researched. Of course, I went back to Brisighella – the gypsum hill that grew the extraordinarily delicious olives. Naturally I revisited Bertinoro the hilltop wine village where they discovered and cherished the sublime golden Albana wine.

But there were some things that I just hadn’t known about after these many visits, that featured in the magazine. Take Mona Lisa and Mussolini for instance.

There was a time in Romagna that borders were fairly fluid between neighbouring regions like Marche and Tuscany. Artists attracted by superb scenery and rich commissions used to work for local warlords like the Malatestas from Romagna, the Montefeltros from Marche and the Borgias from Florence. The artists liked to use the most atmospheric and classically beautiful scenery, in this respect many preferred Romagna backgrounds. One particular artist is now known to have done so – Piero della Francesca and it is likely that Leonardo da Vinci did too. Now it is possible not only to see pictures by these great artists but see the backdrops that they used too – the sensational and quite magical countryside of Romagna.

And just down the road, on the Via Emilia, is the city of Forli, also very artistic but in a very different way. Mussolini (probably the most important warlord that Romagna ever produced) was born in a village close to Forli – Predappio. The village, by the way, is even now a big-time pilgrimage site. Yes, there are many people who still revere Mussolini. Anyway, the biggest shrine to the regime and that era is Forli itself.

The city is chock-full of what I call brutalist art deco. Well naturally Mussolini was the local lad made good and he made sure that everybody knew it. The Forli masterwork is its railway station and the wide triumphal way that leads from it. Down the route there are massive buildings for railway workers to live in, a university, a flying school with amazing mosaics and other iconic architecture. And that’s not all, Forli’s public buildings are also massive emblems to ‘Il Duce’. I was lucky to be involved with a controversial programme to use these and other totalitarian regime buildings throughout Europe as a gruesome art project.

But the architecture that always chills me in Forli is the ancient town square – the Piazza Saffi. The square’s most visible totem is the eagle, it is everywhere, on buildings and on street furniture. The eagles that freeze my stomach are at the top of each lamppost which were also adorned by the bodies of hanged partisans during the war. After the war, of course, from the lampposts hung collaborators.

And another thing that I hadn’t known about was Christmas in San Marino.

TO BE CONTINUED...
and more about Romagna at www.BestofRomagna.com

To enjoy the whole 241 page book full of Italian adventures you can buy  "You Lucky People" from Amazon.

THE STORY SO FAR:

I'd gone back to Romagna with my old friend Angelo and after 40 years we had not only discovered Ravenna but been enchanted by it!

The mosaics, the history, the atmosphere, the food, the fun and the gelatos had us captivated!

And I went on to continue my adventure in Romagna, But now to learn much more about this strange and wonderful place.

Ever heard of Pellegrino Artusi?  If not, like me you have some wonderful eating, drinking and living to do in the warm company of the father of Italian home cooking.

In 1891, at the tender age of 70, Pellegrino Artusi, a rich travelling Florence-based merchant got his final refusal from yet another publisher. This energetic gentleman’s life’s work was to travel the length and breadth of Italy prior to unification and collect authentic local home recipes from all over soon-to-be Italy. And, of course, each recipe had both a story and a taste!

Obviously Artusi had a passion for food and his ambition was to share his carefully annotated recipes with... everybody.

Anyway, Artusi, not deterred by the publishers’ refusals, went ahead, self-published his first volume of 475 recipes called “Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well”, and, of course it quickly sold out. 122 years later it is still one of Italy’s best-selling books and has never been out of print.

Artusi had travelled throughout the Italian peninsula. He became familiar with many of the regions and their culinary traditions, and he began collecting recipes that later became the foundation of his book. Family wealth enabled him to retire at the age of 45 and he devoted himself to his passions, culture and cuisine.

Born in Romagna in the town of Forlimpopoli, this successful fabric merchant and bon viveur had moved to Florence as a young man. Luckily for us, because when Italy was unified in 1861 only 2.5% of the country’s population could speak Italian. So the book, written in Italian was a unifying force in itself – speading opportunities and understanding together with fabulous food.

And it’s no wonder that the book has been so successful, Artusi himself was leery of books about cooking. In his preface he says, “Beware of books that deal with this art: most of them are inaccurate or incomprehensible, especially the Italian ones. The French are a little better. But from either, the very most you will glean are a few notions, useful only if you already know the art.”

He considered his book a teaching manual, “To practise using this manual, one simply needs to know how to hold a wooden spoon,” he wrote. “The best teacher is experience. Yet even lacking this, with a guide such as mine, and devotion to your labours, you should be able, I hope, to put something decent together.”

But, most importantly, and typically, – in his 14th edition he says this “Finally, I should not like my interest in gastronomy to give me the reputation of a gourmand or glutton. I object to any such dishonour- able imputation, for I am neither. I love the good and the beautiful wherever I find them, and hate to see anyone squander, as they say, God’s bounty. Amen”

He saw 15 editions published before his death in 1911 at the age of 90. Originally containing 475 recipes, the last edition of the book contained 790 recipes.

Casa Artusi where Cinzia took me for dinner was established in 2007. It is a tribute to the man who singlehandedly put Italian home cooking on the culinary map. Housed in a renovated monastery and church in his birthplace of Forlimpopoli, Casa Artusi has a restaurant, a culinary school, library, meeting space, art exhibits and museum. It is a place to read, learn, practice, taste and appreciate the treasure that is Italian home cooking.

In the restaurant – l’Osteria – Cinzia and I ate magnificently. They serve traditional, regional dishes and prepare some of Artusi’s recipes, depending on the season – all at incredibly low prices. The wine cellar has over 200 different kinds of wine from the region. And then, of course, she gave me the tour including the sensational 16th-century chapel – the whole establishment is set in an ancient convent complete with serene cloisters.

Finally she took me to the heart of the foundation – the cookery school. Here they offer home cooks day classes with some of the area’s best chefs. These lucky people get to work with ‘Mariettes’, experienced and trained local home cooks named after Artusi’s helper of whom he said, “. . .Mariette is both a good cook, and a decent, honest person. . .”.

I vowed to be back for a special occasion Forlimpopoli holds an annual gastronomic event dedicated to Artusi, The Festa Artusiana. For over a week every night between 7pm and midnight, Casa Artusi and the historical center of the town came alive with music and events as a “city of taste.” Streets, alleys, courtyards and squares, named after types of food – fruit, veg, gelato, sweets, throng with happy crowds.

The next time I returned to Romagna that year, Cinzia had a task for me. She had spent months researching two important places in the area and I was to be her guinea pig. She would guide me around and I was to comment on her English language, how easy it was for me to understand her and how interesting it all was – I was to tell her the truth – no holds barred. Obviously it wasn’t going to be all work and no play – we would have some fun too.

We started in Faenza with a poetry reading. Romagnolo poetry is great stuff – even if you can’t understand the dialect – you get the expressions and the tone of voice. The idea was that the poetry would be translated into English too, and Cinzia had decided that would be great for me – and it was! The Welsh lady who translated really put her heart and soul into the task and the crowd was lovely – they all wanted to talk to us in their version of English.

And then, after a superb dinner, we wandered around Faenza’s cobbled streets and vast, rich piazzas. And Cinzia told me the story of this lovely city.

By the 16th century Faenza was one of the richest cities in Europe, creating a product that simply every royal court in the world wanted. You could call Faenza ‘Ceramic City’ and it lent its name to the richest of porcelain – Majolica or Faience ware, some of the most sumptuously decorated and most colourful that ever existed. And ceramics are, even now, everywhere in this city – artisan factories, talented designers, great displays, beautiful ceramics are even plastered on houses. And Faenza is clever, ever up with the times: the ceramic museum houses stunning ceramic pieces by current artists as well as those illustrating the fashions in art and style over the last five hundred years.

Now every year there is a massive exhibition of ceramics that takes over the city ‘Argila’ or clay!
And, with rich architecture and lively, lovely tiny piazzas and a thriving Café Culture the city is a delight.

Then we took on somewhere a bit different – San Marino. A little more challenging because Cinzia had decided to take me all around this mountaintop republic by foot! Up and down, down and up we went – with Cinzia guiding and talking and pointing and making sure that I was listening and looking in the right direction everywhere.

I’ve always known that San Marino was special – certainly from my days bringing a thousand happy travellers a week to nearby Rimini. Special? Very special and extremely profitable. Mountaintop republic, short coachride, stunning views, castles, passport stamp from another country, duty-free branded shopping – a classic excursion opportunity. A thousand passengers a week who would all pay a tenner to go up the mountain meant ten grand a week in excursion revenue plus commis- sions on shop sales – yummee!

Anyway, this was different and even more rewarding – Cinzia doing her speciality was taking me back twenty centuries or so to the time of Saint Marinus the mountaintop hermit saint. I even crawled into his cave-lair sleeping place and saw his silver death mask. Of course he had a story and Cinzia knew it. He was a stonemason from Dalmatia who worked with his mate Leo – they both found moun- tains, performed miracles and created sects – Leo created San Leo on one Romagna mountain and Marinus created San Marino on the other. Marinus was rather more independently-minded and hence San Marino asks nothing of anyone – its motto ‘Liberty’

It’s beautiful, atmospheric and quirky – serene San Leo was promised for another time. By the time dinner – the usual sensational food – was over I was exhausted and then on my way back to the UK.
My adventures in Romagna, I thought were over, just seven months seemed like a lifetime after they had begun. But by now I was hooked. “I wanna go to the Veneto” moaned Angelo! “We’ve got an invite to the Po Valley. Rovigo – the fabulous waterlands where they’ve got this amazing rice. I wanted to sell cruises down the river there. They’ll feed us wonderful food – you won’t believe it. “And we’ll go on a boat” Angelo enthused. “And if we’re lucky they’ll put us up at a place like that Tenuta Castel Venezze – remember?”

So, we went on another adventure. I filled my car up with a month’s worth of stuff. The plan was to go to Italy via the South of France resort of Arles (where Van Gogh painted all those great pictures) then we’d stop at one of Angelo’s mates’ hotels on the Med then swing around Ravenna and have lunch with Cinzia. Whizz across to the Veneto and then come back to Ravenna for a few days or weeks, whatever.

The trip was a doddle, we wizzed down to Arles, which was amazing. There was a lot of Van Gogh stuff everywhere and some very good restaurants, plus we stayed in a glorious hotel cheap – I’ve still got the posh key to prove it. Dinner was superb – both Angelo and I have a penchant for classic old fashioned fishy French cuisine so we feasted on soupe de poisson and bouillabaise to our heart’s content.

The next day we were in Italy and on our way back to Ravenna for supper with Cinzia. Or not – she declined our invitation. It was as though we were back on home territory that night staying in the Casa Masoli 16th century city palace B&B.

Massive rooms with enormous four-poster beds, good antique furniture, dressing rooms, posh bathrooms and big libraries. What more could we want? Well we weren’t going to get that but we did breakfast well on ham and cheese and eggs, good bread and butter, fresh local fruit and home made pastries and cakes and great coffee and superb blood orange juice.

Chat, walk, coffee and time for lunch with Cinzia. There’s a Venetian restaurant in Ravenna and, homesick maybe, Angelo wanted to go there – at least we could sit outside as we ate our Venetian specialities like liver and onions and cold veal.

Cinzia said that if I wanted to stay longer there was a massive Mussolini-era Colonnia by the sea in Marina di Ravenna. These colonnias were all along the coast, built by Mussolini in the classic brutalist art deco style to give kids and workers free seaside holidays, they have now either disappeared or, like this one been made into blocks of apartments.

As we left Ravenna on our way along the coast to the Veneto we popped into this colonnia and I haggled for a flat for a month. We dumped a load of my stuff out of the car giving Angelo a bit of room to move and we were off to see the Po valley.

Obviously, the Po valley is full of water. We’d been invited there by a company which wanted to hire out boats for people to enjoy water- borne holidays. Like many people in the industry they were giving us an experience in the hope that we would promote them. Seemed a good idea, at least it wasn’t mass tourism and local people were involved.

“We’ve been here before” said Angelo when we arrived at our accommodation for the night. “Yes – the Castel Venezze – fab” I replied.

I remembered the village down the road, San Martino where everyone downed tools and stopped work at six in the evening to dance in the town square – delightful.

TO BE CONTINUED...
and more about Romagna at www.BestofRomagna.com

To enjoy the whole 241 page book full of Italian adventures you can buy  "You Lucky People" from Amazon.