Preparing All Wrong for an Italian Trip
I'm not going to the Amalfi Coast, but I'm drinking a lot of Limoncello
How does one prepare for a trip to Italy?
Maybe start with some radical honesty.
You will be eating and drinking with more abandon than usual. You say you’ll be walking around so many palazzos and ascending ancient steps, but will you? Isn’t it more likely that you’ll be sleeping in on a set of Frette sheets waiting for your cappuccino to be delivered, or hazily gazing out upon rolling Tuscan hills, moving little more than your forearm to bring a glass of Chianti to your lips?
Yeah.
My husband and I recently did some Italian trip preparation at home in New York at Ferrara, an iconic Italian bakery that has persevered in Little Italy since 1892. After our last crumb of cannoli, we started toward Grand Street. He spotted a bottle of Limoncello. “Let’s buy this!” I stood. I thought. “Nah. We don’t need it.”
A few days later, I felt a pang of regret and quickly got my hands on a bottle of Fabrizia Limoncello (and some of their Limoncello-laced cookies and cakes because I’ll surely be walking through all of those palazzos and climbing all of those steps).
For the uninitiated, Limoncello is an Italian liqueur made with lemon zest, vodka, sugar, and patience. Its provenance is the Amalfi Coast, where lemon groves are abundant. So for our upcoming journey across Cinque Terre, Tuscany and Sardinia, this doesn’t rightly qualify as preparation.
The coastal lands of Cinque Terre are known for the dessert wine Sciacchetrà. Tuscany, of course, for its world-class Chianti, Brunello, and Vino Nobile, while Sardinia is home to mirto, a liqueur made from myrtle plants that grow across that island. Drinking Limoncello to prepare for a trip to these regions is like bulking up on Kentucky bourbon ahead of a trip to Napa. It just doesn’t make sense.
Whatever. We wanted Limoncello.
We’ve been squeezing Sicilian lemons into wide glasses filled with ice and the perky yellow liqueur (and a splash of Prosecco for good measure). Drinking Limoncello might not be the most accurate or honest way of preparing for the Italian trip we’ve planned, but as the great playwright and Nobel laureate Luigi Pirandello once wrote, “Our spirits have their own private way of understanding each other.” He probably wasn’t talking about wines or liqueurs, but maybe he should have been.