When Life Hands You Amalfi Lemons…

Admittedly, Italy was never at the top of my list in terms of travel.  There were plenty of other places in Europe, Asia, and the southern hemisphere that I wanted to see, and I’m well aware that I’ve only got a limited amount of time on this earth and cannot possibly get to everything I want to see – especially if I repeat trips to much-beloved locations (such as Japan, India, Hong Kong…).  But Italy has always been at the top of Christian’s travel list – he has Italian heritage and loves the food, so it was automatically on our short list of possible destinations once travel became an option again after COVID lockdown.

It wasn’t until we started watching Stanley Tucci’s “Searching for Italy” [1] and then James May’s “Our Man in Italy” [2] in quick succession that the country won me over.  In all honesty, it wasn’t that hard of a sell.  I do believe it was after the first episode of Stanley’s show – the Amalfi Coast – that I asked Christian how soon we were going.  Despite my love of Italian art (I did a research project on the Sistine Chapel ceiling for a humanities class in college) and music (I named my violin Antonio in high school), it was really the food that caught my attention (if you couldn’t tell after four blog posts in a row featuring classic Italian recipes).

Flexibility and Realistic Expectations

I’ve written extensively over the past few weeks about our desire to travel in a way that gave us the freedom to explore at our own pace, which is why I would frequently laugh whenever someone asked if we had gone with a tour group on our journey. We wanted anything but a cookie cutter experience, but we know that forging our own path on a vacation (or in life) comes with a high risk / high reward situation.  I am aware that there are people who don’t want that out of a vacation, and that’s fine – how you recharge your batteries is an individual situation, and if that means sitting on a beach and doing nothing for a week, you do you.  

But for people who want to spend vacation time going out, exploring, and pushing themselves outside their comfort zones, our increasingly digital world has made it easier and easier to do that.  While I probably could have done a lot more research and gotten us even less touristy and more authentic experiences lined up for our two weeks on vacation, I had very little prep time outside of 30 minutes of Duolingo every day for the three months from when we booked our flights until we stepped on the plane to Rome.  Nevertheless, even the minimal time I spent finding us lodging landed us in places far more interesting than a hotel chain.

One thing that made the process of finding hotels particularly easy (which was something not available when I was traveling throughout Southeast Asia 15 years ago) was the ability to filter hotel attributes on booking websites.  For example, Booking.com [3] (which is what I used – full disclosure) lets you filter properties not only by rating and price (which are much more common factors) but also by sustainability practices and property type, such as bed and breakfasts, farm stays, and apartments.  That alone helped us avoid hotel chains and support independent hotels and family farms that likely have far less cachet or name recognition.

Humor and Grace

Of course, you can still wind up with a dud of a hotel or a restaurant, but online ratings are a protection against that.  In fact, Christian spent a lot of time checking reviews on Google, while my personal preference was just to ask for recommendations from locals.  It’s important to remember, however, that Google reviews are subjective, and locals don’t necessarily know what you’re looking for.  In those cases, it’s important to remain flexible and laugh when something doesn’t work out like you thought it would.  The place we had one of the biggest such laughs (at least in retrospect) was on the Amalfi Coast. The breathtaking scenery of terraced hillsides climbing up from the Mediterranean has served as a backdrop for many movies, and we were very excited for our stay at a sustainable lemon farm with one amazing view.  

Unfortunately, we had some trouble finding the place, and what initially seemed like a drivable road on the map turned out to be a very long staircase, much like what we have in hilly Pittsburgh.  I told Christian to wait at the car with his heavy bag while I scoped out how far away our B&B was.  Unsure of the exact location, and not seeing signage anywhere, I actually turned around about 10 steps before I would have seen the doorway and returned to double-check the address and instructions, which were on Christian’s phone (because only he bought a SIM card – I wanted to be disconnected).  On my second attempt, I found the door after about 200 steps, but once we checked into our room, I realized we hadn’t fed the parking meter.  I probably did about 1000 steps that night, and boy was I out of shape!

Once the meter was fed, and we had both collapsed in our room, hoping to rest up before our much-anticipated dinner at one of Stanley Tucci’s favorite restaurants,[4] we realized that I had made a gross miscalculation on distance, and the restaurant was a 90-minute drive away.  We had neither the desire for a drive that long nor the ability to get there in time unless we left that moment.  I called the restaurant and asked if we could move our reservation to the following night, and they obliged.  In fact, that change worked out much better with our plans the following day, and we instead spent that first evening at a nearby bar, chatting with locals about their upcoming chestnut festival.  It was fun, unexpected, and not something we could have planned if we wanted to.

Gratitude and Acceptance

I feel like our experience in Italy was as amazing as it was, not because we filled it with things we were “supposed to do,” but rather because we left our schedule and ourselves open to new experiences. We each had things we wanted to see and do, and while we did much of them together, there was no expectation that we do everything as a couple.  In fact, at the halfway point of the trip on the farm in Tuscany, we spent a day completely apart, and it was a lovely opportunity for each of us to do something we were passionate about within the limited time available. I hiked out to the medieval ruins at Castelvecchio, and Christian drove up to Modena to see the Pagani, Lamborghini, and Ferrari museums.  

Christian may be the best travel companion I have ever known, but I am still grateful for some solo time I have when I travel.  It gives me time to decompress, set my own schedule and priorities, and fully immerse myself in a place without worrying about someone else’s experience.  It also makes the time I spend with Christian that much richer when we come back together and talk about what we did that day.  But this example is not a great one because on our own that day, we each almost met with demise: I almost fell off a mountainside (alone, without cell service, in unfamiliar territory) trying to get a good picture of medieval ruins, and he caught COVID from a sick American couple at a car museum.

He didn’t become symptomatic until about five days later, on the penultimate day of our trip, and he took a rapid test as soon as he started to suspect what it might be.  We spent the afternoon canceling our last few reservations and finding him a hotel room where he could wait it out.  I tested negative three times in the subsequent 18 hours, meaning that I boarded our flight out the next day.  Despite the fact that I wanted to stay, it made no logical sense – I couldn’t do anything to help him, and if I got sick, that would extend the timeline even more.  

Despite his assurances that going home was the right thing to do, I was an absolute wreck.  The fact that I had to find my way back to the airport and return a rental car without a working phone or credit card was nothing next to the fact that I imagined I was leaving my husband to die alone in a foreign country.  In all reality, being up on his boosters, he had quite an easy week of eating amazing Italian food and watching Netflix in his hotel room – he was fine; I was not.  The only thing I could do for my own mental health as I made my way from Rome, to Helsinki, to New York, to Bethlehem, to Pittsburgh was focus not on my fears of what might happen, but rather on my gratitude for the amazing time we had together, knowing that whatever happened, it was out of my hands.

Christian returned home a week later, thoroughly bored and ready to see people again. And I somehow never tested positive for COVID.  We still laugh about what a ridiculous, frenzied finish we had to the trip, grateful for the almost perfect experience it was and fully aware that things could have gone a lot worse at the end.  Despite what was a horrible situation in the moment, I can really look back on that trip and be amazed at how many incredible experiences we had – most of which were unplanned and just came about by allowing things to unfold as they did and by taking joy in small, mundane things as we noticed them.  We didn’t try to create a perfect trip, and I think we were ultimately happier for it.

Recipe: Spaghetti alla Nerano

One small source of joy – though I’m not sure it counts as small, since we planned a whole section of the trip around it – was a plate of pasta.  It’s hard to remember exactly when we decided to go to Italy, but it very well could have been after watching Stanley Tucci eat the zucchini pasta that is now even referred to on recipe websites as “That Zucchini Spaghetti Stanley Tucci Loves” [5] or “Stanley Tucci Zucchini Pasta Recipe.”[6]  In fact, it is called Spaghetti alla Nerano, Nerano being a town just uphill from the restaurant featured on the show, the restaurant that graciously moved our reservations to the following night way back at the beginning of our trip.

Since we’ve been trying to recreate amazing meals from our vacation over the past few months, this was the one of the last big endeavors we had yet to tackle.  And since we’ve been trying to spend more quality time together these days, this week brought us a massive pan full of Spaghetti alla Nerano.  Fair warning: unsurprisingly, no two recipes online are the same, and the “official” recipe as told to a reporter by the restaurant’s chef [7] is markedly different from what they tell Stanley on the show.  What I finally pulled together was an amalgamation of several recipes I found online, with video guidance from an Italian mom on YouTube.[8]

Ingredients for 4 (American-sized) servings:

• 1 lb spaghetti
• 2 c sunflower oil
• 2 Tbs olive oil
• 2.5 lbs zucchini (the smaller the better)
• 3 Tbs butter
• 3.5 oz grated parmesan & romano (blend to your liking)
• A few leaves fresh basil
• Salt & pepper

The night before, slice the zucchini thinly and heat the sunflower oil over medium-high heat.  Fry the zucchini in batches until golden, then remove them from the oil and drain on paper towels, lightly salt them and store in the fridge overnight.  When the oil cools, seal it in a container and put it in the garbage – do not pour it down your drain.

On dinner night, heat the pasta water while preparing the sauce.  Reheat the zucchini slices in olive oil in a large pan.  Once the pasta water boils, salt it and add the spaghetti.  Add some pasta water to the grated cheese and mix to make it creamy and easier to blend into the sauce.  When the pasta has been boiling for two minutes less than the package instructions, transfer it from the water to the pan.  Add pasta water to the pan by half cups at a time and continue to stir.  Add the cheese and the butter.  Keep stirring and add more pasta water as needed until the spaghetti is cooked to your desired firmness. (Al dente in Italy is downright crunchy by American standards.)  Add salt and pepper to taste, as well as some sliced basil on top.

We each ordered a plate of this pasta at the restaurant, and while I enjoyed some kind of lemony confection, Christian ordered another plate for dessert – it really was that good.  Since we may never get back there again, I’m glad I have this recipe in my pocket… and the incredible memories that go with it.

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Do you have an oft-told travel story about when things didn’t go as expected?  Do you have a favorite dish tied to a specific destination?  I’d love to hear about it below.
Thanks for reading!

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[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11852724/

[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11302324/episodes?season=2&ref_=tt_eps_sn_2

[3] https://www.booking.com/

[4] https://www.hotelloscoglio.com/en/restaurant

[5] https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/285205/that-zucchini-spaghetti-stanley-tucci-loves-spaghetti-alla-nerano/

[6] https://www.foodiecrush.com/stanley-tucci-zucchini-pasta-recipe/

[7] https://sirenuse.it/en/journal/recipes/lo-scoglio-spaghetti-zucchine-amore/

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hVWdSajW0k

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