I learned a happy phrase in Italian: gnam, gnam, gnam— literally yum, yum, yum— on gourmet explorations from our Mediterranean cruise on Celebrity Beyond.
With dozens of shore excursions to choose from on this cruise along the coasts of France and Italy on Celebrity Beyond, the most exclusive of all are small group cuisine tours. Instead of all-day tours to the Cinque Terre, we opted for a small group morning excursion for tastings and cooking tips in artisanal restaurants and markets. And rather than hours in a bus for a full day in Florence or Pisa, that we’ve often visited in the past, we signed up for a visit to an historic Tuscan family farm that grows everything from the wheat for its pasta to truffles on its beautiful fields.
Celebrity’s tours made for memorable, personal experiences. A word of warning, though: skip breakfast or lunch before you head out because they do feed you on these food tours and may offer more wine in a morning than you might drink in an entire evening with your meals.
Rapallo—Pesto and goodies with Guido
The chalk board outside a shop aptly named Parla come Mangi, reads: “Welcome to our new friends from The Beyond.” No, it’s not the start of a séance, rather we’re here for an introduction to why Italian food always seems to taste so much better in Italy. Rotund shop owner Guido obviously loves indulging in his products and he greets us along with several assistants bearing baskets of wine, focaccia and cheeses. We sample them outside the food shop in a square in the seaside town of Rapallo, near Portofino, that’s dominated by the charming Chiosco della Musica. The classical bandshell with 12 columns supporting a dome features a ceiling painted with scenes honoring great historical composers.
Then the fun begins: a hands-on food prep lesson. Out come baskets of fragrant Ligurian basil picked fresh this morning and certified DOP Denominazione di Origine Protetta (literally Protected Designation of Origin), a certification that ensures that products in the region are locally grown and packaged. The brilliantly green and fragrant Ligurian basil leaves are plucked from their stalks and put into large marble mortars to be crushed to release their oil.
No blenders here. Kids in the group who volunteer are handed aprons to try their hands and patience. It’s strenuous work that can take 10 minutes of pummeling the leaves until they are pulverized into a paste. Then comes extra virgin olive oil crushed from olives grown along the Ligurian Riviera coast, some ground Parmigiano Reggiano and sheep’s milk Pecorino cheese, pine nuts, garlic and a dash of salt.
The result is Pesto Genovese, inspired by Genoa, the biggest city in Liguria, that’s about an hour from here. Spread on morsels of fresh bread the pesto is a savory treat along with a chilled local white wine. But we’re just getting started.
We walk through the store, past entire walls of wines from Liguria, Tuscany and Veneto, counters stacked high with cheeses and ceilings hanging with aged hams that will be sliced paper thin. Then it’s out the back entrance to a market square of vendors selling everything from cantaloupes to cherries picked that morning. Have we gone to food heaven?
In an adjacent pasta store, a skilled ravioli maker deftly slices a sheet of fresh dough into squares and dabs filling onto them so quickly that a machine couldn’t be automated to do it faster. It’s all in the wrists, they say, but years of doing this turns it into a performance.
Back to the shop where we’re offered a local red as Guido deftly slices a huge block of Parmigiano Reggiano into chunks that he drizzles with another Ligurian specialty, balsamico acetaia San Giacomo. It’s made by a centuries old process that cooks local Lambrusco and Trebbiano grapes over an open fire to reduce it to an essence that’s then aged in barrels of decreasing sizes and four different types of wood. The resulting nectar has a taste that is a magical addition to the tang of the Reggiano on this sunny morning.
There’s plenty of the luscious cheese to go around for the 20 in our group and we can accompany it with biscotti dipped in a Ligurian brandy. Inside the store are walls of wines made in such small batches that they never get exported outside the region. Wish we could take them all home to sample.
The experience inspires some of us to stop and check out the listings in the local real estate office. You could eat like this every day if you lived here. Of course you might end up the size of Guido. Thanks for the experience.
Super Tuscan—Everything’s fresh on this farm
You’ve heard of the 100-mile diet. How about the one-mile diet? It’s actually possible on the Vialto farm, a centuries old plot on a scenic country road between Livorno and Pisa. From the dock on the second day of Celebrity Beyond’s two-day stop in Livorno we take the same autoroute that took us to Florence the day before. But instead we exit after a 20 minute drive at the Pontedera turnoff for the road to Volterra, through a landscape lined with fields of sunflowers and grape vineyards.
Our group of two dozen are about to be treated to a lunch made with ingredients grown right on the 200-acre farm. The bus stops at the farm gate and we board a horse-drawn wagon to view fields of tomatoes, zucchinis and squashes and olive groves. They grow their own wheat to make their pasta, although they have a mill in a nearby town grind the flour. Surrounding the farm are stands of fast-growing poplar trees that are a sustainable source of pulp for paper but also serve as windbreaks and sources of shade while they’re growing.
The farm is designed to be self sufficient, explains the owner David Gastaldin, although they don’t graze livestock or make their own cheese. They even grow their own nutmeg and have two dogs skilled at sniffing out the local white truffles in a forest on the property.
The eager team of horses pick up speed as they near the ancient restored farm house. When the family bought the farm 20 years ago, “We restored the old farmhouse, that dates back to the sixteenth century,” he tells us. “We fixed every single stone, we repaired the ceiling. and the windows, we made everything safe and we were able to keep the original country atmosphere. We planted new trees and took care of the old ones,” David says. The farm team includes his wife Francesca and their three children: Vittoria, Alberto and Tommaso. They organize lunches, wine tastings, cooking classes and sell the farm’s products and wines on line.
Hope you’ve come hungry as the tables covered with traditional checkered cloths are set and family-sized platters of antipasto, prosciutto and aged cheeses are ready to be sampled with fresh bread straight from a wood-fired brick oven.
Then there’s a soup of chickpeas and spelt grown on the farm. The soup is a centerpiece of traditional peasant cuisine in Tuscany because it is a tasty, nutritious single dish that uses simple local ingredients, we’re told. It’s filling, but we’ve only just started. Then come fresh-made penne with meat sauce and a second vegetarian version with braised vegetables.
It’s all washed down with liberal flasks of reds and whites, made on the farm and there’s also a wonderful brandy you can use as a dip for home made biscotti.
David isn’t finished yet. After a final shot of brandy, he launches into a fairly credible rendition of the operatic classic O Sole Mio. It’s a perfect closing to the Tuscan farm experience: Che bella cosa ‘na jurnata ‘e sole: What a beautiful thing is a sunny day!
It couldn’t have been any more beautiful. But there’s more ahead. Now it’s back to Celebrity Beyond, where cocktails and a stunning sunset await.
Story by Wallace Immen, executive editor of The Cruisington Times
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