Teatro alla Scala, Milan

We went last night to La Scala to see Il barbiere di Siviglia by Gioachino Rossini. The cast included Juan Diego Florez as Count Almaviva, Alessandro Corbelli as Dr. Bartolo, Joyce Didonato as Rosina and Franco Vassallo as Figaro.

Beautiful, clear voices for a light opera. The conductor was a young fellow Michele Mariotti, the production is 40 years old and was a creation of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle.
Will remembered it from seeing this production many moons ago.

One great scene is when Basilio, a priest, a role sung by Alexander Tsymbalyuk, explains to Bartolo how they will get rid of Lindoro aka Count Almaviva, is shadow on the back drop grows and grows and becomes comical and terrifying all at once. Finally Bartolo takes away the oil lamps so the shadow will go away, so afraid he is of it.
At one point the show stopped after an aria by Juan Diego Flores who received 5 minutes of thunderous applause by the audience who were demanding an encore. La Scala theatre has been completely rebuilt, it is very beautiful to look at.

Ballroom, bar area

La Scala auditorium

We went to a little café called Il Salotto in the Galleria Vittotio Emanuelle II after the show, the food was quite good, very nice waiters, we had a Risoto Milanese, saffron and chicken stock and a Milanese veal cotelette (chop) not the usual scaloppini, lightly breaded and fried, very good.

We slept very well, tired as we were, it had been a long day but what fun. I have to say that all these years traveling with Mr. Will is always fun, he knows how to make a trip interesting.

Sunday

This week all museums in Rome are free. It also coincides with the anniversary of the Eternal City, the theme this year is ''Rome Emotions without end''. So I went to one of my favorite museums in Rome on Sunday, the Massimo on Piazza Cinquecento (500) in front of the Termini Central Train Station.

The Massimo is one of those must see museums in Rome. It concentrates on the Julio-Claudian Dynasty who basically launched imperial Rome. It has per example the dining room of Empress Livia, wife of Augustus from her country Villa at Prima Porta with its exquisite painted walls of a sumptuous garden with trees, flowers, fruits and birds. The colours alone are vibrant and shows the high quality of the art work, you have to imagine what it must have been like when the paint was still fresh with its glossy finish. There was also a special exhibit of antique gold and silver dinner ware from Morgantina in Sicily. Again very fine art work, elegant and refined from the house of a rich merchant. Morgantina was totally destroyed on the orders of Augustus in 35 BC because the city sided with Carthage against Rome. There was also a second special exhibit of funerary dinner ware used during a funeral wake. The various pieces were decorative painted marble to decorate the area of the Mausoleum used by the family for their banquet in honor of the deceased.

Then after this visit, I decided to walk around and ended up at the Barberini Palace, once the seat of the famous Florentine Family which gave us Pope Urban VIII.
Maffeo Barberini, was pope from 1623 to 1644. He was the last pope to expand the papal territory by force of arms, and was a prominent patron of the arts and reformer of Church missions. However, the massive debts incurred during his papacy greatly weakened his successors, who were unable to maintain the papacy's longstanding political and military influence in Europe. He was also involved in a controversy with Galileo and his theory on heliocentrism during his reign.

The Palace is enormous and contains mostly religious works of art by great artists of the Renaissance, of note the famous painting of King Henry VIII by Holbein. The Barberini Pope is famous because he pillaged the Pantheon, removing all the bronze in the temple to make cannons and to also built the great Baldaquino above the main Altar in St-Peter's Basilica. The Romans of the time said, What the Barbarians did not destroy, the Barberini did. The coat of Arms of the Barberini is 3 bees, though the story goes that they use to be horse flies until Maffeo became Pope and changed it to the more noble bees.

Then I came home to discover that our visitors who were to come from Canada could not come because of the Volcanic ash and that Rome airport was partially closed. In fact the Pope was in Malta for the weekend and it was not all together sure he could fly back to Rome on Sunday night. Well this only meant more Veal Saltinboca for dinner and strawberries for dessert.

Food Holiday

On Sunday morning we drove to Riano just 20 minutes outside Rome, we went to Wendy Holloway's B&B located on a hill which has an amazing panoramic view of the Lazio Province and Rome in the distance, truly breath taking. Wendy has been living in Italy for 25 years and for the last 10 years has developed her business which is called ''Flavor of Italy'' see her wonderful website at www.flavorofitaly.com

It is a very easy drive from Rome on the Flaminia, you can also take the metro and then transfer to the regional train, getting off at Montebello, no more than 25 minutes from Piazza Flaminia in central Rome.
The Canadian Club of Rome had organized a cooking class for Sunday morning, Wendy thought up the menu and it was fun and wonderful.

We made several dishes, fresh anchovies, a wonderful little white fish marinated in orange juice, red and yellow roasted bell peppers in a sauce of anchovies, capers and olive oil, fresh pasta ravioli with a stuffing of ricotta and zest of lemon, the sauce was a light butter and cream with lemon zest, Salmon steaks Sicilian style, which is sweet and sour sauce, raisins and balsamic vinegar, Risotto with chanterelles mushrooms and mild Italian sausage meat, and a fig torte. She picks hundred of figs off her trees and then removes the stem and simply freezes them during the winter, so she can use them in recipes and they are as delicious as if just picked off the tree. We had a nice white wine from the Lazio region to accompany.

Each one of us made one dish and others then help out or observed with Chef Wendy encouraging us along.
Will and I have done many cooking courses around the world, the most memorable being in Vietnam 3 years ago in different cities, Hanoi, Hue, Hoi An, Saigon, and also in Thailand. It is always nice to learn how to do a dish and to learn the different flavors and mix of ingredients. You learn to appreciate the culture of the country, not just by visiting sites but also how food mixes with the culture and what is important to the people. Rice in Asia is very important as bread is in Western culture, olives to the Greeks and olive oil to the Italians, dates to the Arabs. You gain a better appreciation all around.

Will is good at making pasta and he made the ravioli. The anchovies though most people think that it is a salty unpleasant fish is in fact if fresh, a very nice white fish and very good grilled or eaten as we did marinated. The caper and anchovy sauce I made for the roasted peppers, I washed the salt off the capers and simply added them in the blender to the olive oil and anchovies.

Pasta has a range of cooking time from 8 minutes for raviolis and spaghetti to 12 minutes for bigger pasta like fettuchini, of course in Italy all pasta is cooked aldente (to your teeth), which is the way we like it now.

We are planning to return to ''Flavor of Italy'' B&B on 31 January for a weekend of cooking classes and olive oil tasting.