Day 6

The camera ran out of batteries today so I was unable to take pictures of the bazaar near the train station. Italy is the land of shoes, watches, wallets, and women's clothes. The deals on wallets were great but all of the Italian men's wallets are too big, and they have change purses inside them. This makes sense when you have a 2 Euro coin.


I had lunch with a friend of mine from Caltech, Marco Casari. A year or so ago, I ran into Marco at Purdue, now at Bologna. Before that, I bumped into him in Trento. I wonder where he (and I) will go next.

Marco took me to a place that specializes in organic, slow food. All of the slow food has a little slow food logo next to it. Ironically, service at this place was the fastest in Italy. Anyway, wonderful spot, and Marco pointed out a famous bakery on the way out. Win win.

Marco introduced me to an Italian soft drink called Chinotta that uses the burnt leaves of a plant introduced from China about 600 years ago. This is one of the many new local products that Italians have reintroduced. It's an "anti Coca Cola" It was pretty good. It has sort of a light cola taste.


For lunch, I played it safe and had a traditional ragu (mmm). a salad of fresh local greens, and then a ricotta cheese dessert resting in a shallow pool of some sort of grape reduction (that's the best they could do for me in the translation). I'd call it some sort of mix of port, plum sauce, and grape juice. The picture above shows me eating this dish. Note the speed at which the ricotta is headed down the hatch!

The best part though was seeing Marco. He's a lovely person. Very happy. His research is going well and he's back home in Italy. I'm very happy for him. It was so nice to see a familiar face.
I went out to a jazz club Friday night, a huge cavern like place that had a fair share of tourists -- good preparation for tomorrow's trip to Florence. I had a fabulous seafood gnocchi preceded by a spinich and olive bruschetta. The Joe Farnsworth Residency (``all the way from New York City'') was amazing. Joe turns out to be Pharoh Sanders regular drummer. Was he genius? I'd put him more in the category of hardest working drummer in jazz. The guy brought his sticks.