In the early 1960s, there were only a few international advertising agencies in Milan. Perhaps just four or five, I don’t remember exactly. The creative people working there hung out together. Victor has always been a solitary man, and this was his first, and remains his only, experience of participating in a comitiva, a peer group. We formed a boisterous eating club—wives were automatically admitted—that met one or two evenings a week to sit at a long table at the Torre di Pisa, one of the Tuscan trattorias that were popular in Milan. Torre di Pisa, which is in the elegant Brera museum and art gallery district, eventually became fashionable and very expensive, but we were there before Italy’s explosive rise in cost of living. In those years, the restaurant was easygoing and so absurdly cheap that it could have cost us more to eat at home. It was also very, very good. Nostalgia may be softening the memory, but it seems to me that at the Torre we ate some of the best food we have ever had. It was simple and sincere, real food produced by cooks who had not yet learned to call themselves chefs, who wouldn’t have known the meaning of “creative cuisine.” Unlike Milanese cooking, which can be ponderous and laborious to prepare, the Tuscan dishes at Torre di Pisa were fresh and light-handed: fagioli sgranati, boiled, fresh cannellini beans, served lukewarm with olive oil and cracked black pepper; magnificent soups, such as a black cabbage and bean ribollita; vegetable frittatas, of which the most memorable, with artichokes, started Victor on eating eggs for the first time; juicy veal roasts; chicken fricassees that Victor passed on; steaks and pork sausages from a charcoal grill; crisp fried vegetables; terrific salads that we dressed ourselves with beautiful, dense olive oil and fragrant, bracing, genuine red wine vinegar—that phony, sticky balsamic stuff that has replaced good vinegar on many tables was fortunately not yet widely known. Uncounted fiaschi of Chianti kept coming to the table throughout the evening, followed at the end by cantucci—homemade almond cookies—and vin santo. What good times those were, bibulous, gluttonous, funny, young, comradely, and delicious times.
Victor had not been working a year when Total, BBD&O’s gasoline client, asked the agency to remove him from their account. The people at Total did not believe him qualified to handle gasoline advertising. He didn’t have a car; he never drove; he was then, and still is, mechanically ignorant; he was not at home with, as they put it, “Italian car culture.” They may have been right. A year or two later, Victor would have the satisfaction of handling a hugely successful print and television campaign for Esso, as Exxon is called internationally. He would also be introduced to the mysteries of Italian car culture through a little Lancia sports car of his own. But all that was yet to come. The here and now of it was that he had been fired. It was a stunning blow for Victor. For a day or two, he was comatose. One of our pals at the eating club was the copy chief at Lintas, the in-house agency for Unilever, the giant soap and food conglomerate. When he heard the news, he asked Victor to come to Lintas, where there was an opening for a writer to assume creative responsibility for the company’s dishwashing detergent, one of their key brands. In less than a week, Victor was working again.
Shortly after Victor started at Lintas, two fellows from J. Walter Thompson rang our doorbell. “We know that Victor has just started at Lintas, but we badly need an experienced copywriter at the agency, and we could make him very happy at Thompson. Please have him call us,” they said. It happened that Victor was not enthusiastic about working for Unilever. The atmosphere was industrial and cold, and he was bored by the product to which he had been assigned. He hadn’t been at Lintas a week when he accepted an offer from Thompson. At Thompson, Victor found an American art director who became his chum and with whom he had an immensely satisfactory working relationship. It did not compensate, however, for the contentious discussions he had with the general manager of the agency, a foppish, patronizing Englishman given to wearing his handkerchief tucked inside the end of his shirtsleeve. They argued over Victor’s creative proposals, which the manager would praise effusively at first, but then recast to his own satisfaction. After a few weeks, the American art director left to take a job at McCann-Erickson. Victor lost no time in joining him, his fourth job in not as many months.
With every move, Victor’s salary had improved. His last move, to McCann, which gave every sign of being the final one, allowed us to take a very good apartment to which we had our furniture sent. It was a large, modern flat in one of the well-made postwar buildings that replaced older structures bombed during the war. It was exceptionally well-finished, with marble floors and bathrooms, fine woodwork, and real plaster walls. It had an air-conditioning system I have not seen elsewhere. During the summer, cold water ran through pipes laid under the floors. It didn’t produce the nipping briskness of the conditioned air we are used to in the States, and there was no thermostat with which we could control it, but the temperature was pleasant and felt natural. The kitchen was large and bright but, except for the sink, completely bare, as is the custom in Italy. We had beautiful teak cabinets made and put in German appliances. Our cooktop and oven were Gaggenau, which, more than thirty years later, is what I put into my Florida kitchen. There was also a room for a housekeeper, whom I would later bring up from one of the small farm towns near Cesenatico. The last one to work for me in Italy, Lucia, would join us in New York when, a few years later, we returned to the States, and she eventually became my first assistant in the cooking class I taught at home.
After a year and a half with his grandparents, our son could join us at last to stay in a room of his own. There was even a vast terrace that we kept unencumbered so that he could freely run his bicycle on it. It was wonderful having Giuliano with me. His reactions to being in Italy were sometimes so unexpected. When we had first arrived, I had taken him to a toy shop to let him choose some replacements for the ones that we had left behind in New York. I presently became aware that he was paying more attention to the conversations of the people in the store than to the toys. “Mamma,” he said after a little while, “tutti parlano italiano!” (“Everyone is speaking Italian!”) To him, Italian was the language we used at home, whereas English was what others spoke outside. A year after coming up to Milan, I enrolled him in our neighborhood’s public elementary school, and I lost no time getting him the mandatory uniform of Italian grammar school children, a black smock with a huge blue bow. He looked so adorable!
Our building took all of one side of a small, hidden street close to Piazza del Duomo, Milan’s main square. It was within walking distance of McCann-Erickson, and two of the blocks that Victor walked every day on his way to work, Via Spadari and Via Speronari, I walked every day, too. It would be closer to the truth to say that I camped there. Those two blocks may be responsible for the tight focus on cooking that my life has had since. Italy’s celebrated food shop, Peck, was the most prominent presence on Via Spadari, a blazing, stellar presence, and huddling close to it, across from it, and over on the next block were several other smaller shops, each purveying a single category of food: La Pescheria, the fish market, displayed the country’s freshest and most varied selection of fish and crustaceans. It was not unusual for one of the clerks to have to retrieve some of the moleche, the soft-shell crabs, that had crawled out of their baskets, hoping to escape their fate. At La Bottega del Formaggio, the cheese shop, large wheels of cheese were stacked to the ceiling, and dozens of small ones were piled on marble tables and counters: little round, soft tume from Piedmont; the gamut of pecorini from Tuscany and Sardinia, young and milky to aged and straw yellow or chalky white; squacquarone, the day-old farmer’s cheese spreading out in a bowl; a snowy mountain peak of mascarpone; mysterious cheeses cloaking their identities within layers of leaves. The scents in the cheese shop made my head spin, and my heart ached when I eventually left with the choices I had made, because of all the others I had to leave behind. La Bottega del Maiale, the pork butcher, sold fresh cuts of Emilia-Romagna’s savory hogs and extraordinary salami, sausages, prosciutti, cotechini, zamponi, all the cured or smoked spec
ialties of Italy’s unparalleled charcuterie. L’Ortolano, the greengrocer, sold produce of incomparable freshness and flavor.
In the 1960s, the Peck store was a food lover’s fantasy brought to life. Every day it produced a vast array of prepared dishes: i ripieni, the aromatically stuffed vegetables of the Riviera; vitello tonnato, cold sliced poached veal marinated with tuna sauce; roasted meats; insalata russa, the shrimp and diced vegetables salad known as “Russian” because it has beets; various seafood salads; whole steamed, baked, grilled, or fried fishes; suckling pig. No jam or condiment was too obscure to be on its shelves. It housed a fully stocked wine shop. Peck had a butcher from Tuscany, Vasco, who could do what I think only he was capable of. If you have ever made fegato alla veneziana, Venetian sautéed liver and onions, you know how hard it is to find the perfectly even, thin slices you should be using. Cutting thin and even slices from liver is only slightly less difficult than cutting them from a block of Jell-O. Vasco, however, could put a whole calf’s liver on his block and cut slice after flawless slice of unvarying thinness, with the fluid and unhesitating motion with which you or I might peel Post-it notes from a pad.
When I first started to cook after arriving in New York, not even a year into married life, it was as though I were telling a story I had heard as a little girl in another land. To judge how closely my tale corresponded to the original, I had nothing but my memory and my cookbook. I was not acquainted with any other recently arrived Italians who might have been able to corroborate some of my culinary recollections. The so-called Italian food I found in New York at that time—spaghetti and meatballs; machine-made ravioli with pungent, dark tomato sauce; manicotti; lobster fra diavolo; veal parmesan or alla francese—resembled only occasionally in name, but never in appearance, taste, or intentions, what I had known at home.
On returning to Italy, eating at simple trattorias, shopping the markets, bringing home ingredients whose flavors, in 1950-ish New York, had existed largely in my imagination, I had the confirmation I had longed for: My story was not a fairy tale I had invented; its characters, the components of my cooking, were real. An unleashed enthusiasm for cooking took over my thoughts. I wanted to look at every single ingredient I saw on market stalls and in stores, I wanted to talk cooking with the woman selling vegetables, with the fishmonger, with the butcher, with the grocer. I wanted to go to restaurants and taste everything. I would run home, having bought more food than any small family could eat, and I cooked for the happiness of it, for my husband, for my son, for myself.
Victor’s career at McCann-Erickson was moving fast. As the chief of a small staff of copywriters, he was involved in preparing proposals and campaigns for all the agency’s clients, a roster that contained some of America’s iconic companies: Exxon, Coca-Cola, Gillette. When McCann’s T.V. producer left, Victor took his place. The agency sent him to workshops in Munich and London for a rapid immersion in creative commercial television.
At that time, Italy had just three television channels, owned by the state. Mr. Berlusconi and his private channels were still several years away. The government was sensitive to ideological pressures from the left, and while it sought the profits that selling space for commercials would bring, it wasn’t ready yet for unrestricted commercial exploitation of public airtime. They compromised by devising a one-minute-thirty-second format called carosello, thirty seconds of which could be used for a commercial at the end of one minute of pure entertainment. Victor devised his caroselli so that there was a smooth and memorable connection between the two parts, even though the product was, perforce, kept out of the noncommercial section. Some of Italy’s gifted movie directors made caroselli, turning the entertainment portion into fast-moving, tightly cut miniature films. Several caroselli were shown together in a program broadcast early in the evening, before children went to bed. In those early days of Italian television, it was the most popular thing on the air.
Most of McCann’s filming took place in Rome, under Victor’s supervision. He fell in love with Rome, with its relaxed life, with the soft radiance of its golden light, its sunny winters, the umbrella pines, the fountains, the antiquities, the beautiful streets, the magnificent river, and by no means least, the delicious food that, in those years, you could have in almost any restaurant that you dropped into. He was happy with what he had achieved in Milan, but he had never felt tenderness for the city. It was hard-driving, homely, grim, treeless, and still encumbered by some of the rubble from the war. Rome had the Tiber. Milan had the Naviglio, a canal that had become a squalid ditch, partially paved over and driven underground. Rome was Italian, warm, and Mediterranean; Milan was Teutonic, cold, and gray. Nor was he deeply attached to our apartment. He appreciated its comforts and its location, but it was too new for Victor. “It has no history,” he would say. It was a wasted opportunity, he thought, to live in Italy, the country with more history per square foot than any other, and live in a place with no past.
At the end of a season of filming, the director on one of the sets took Victor aside and asked, “How would you like to live in Rome?” “What do you have in mind?” Victor replied. “A friend of mine is planning to open a studio equipped to produce the best commercials in Italy, and he has asked me to find out whether you would be interested in becoming its creative director.” That is how, exactly four years after arriving in Milan, we happened to leave the apartment and the neighborhood where I thought I could be settling down for life, to move to the Eternal City, which soon proved to be anything but that for us.
“IF NERO HAD lived here,” I was saying to the real estate agent, “he would have had a terrific view of Rome burning.” We were on the altana—the roof terrace—of a Roman palazzo, open to the four points of the compass and high enough above the city to let one’s eye wander over the cupolas, the rooftop gardens, the parks, the Spanish Steps, the pattern of streets emptying into squares like so many streams spilling into ponds, which form the most brilliant of urban tapestries. Stacked directly below the altana were the other two tiers of the apartment that became our Roman aerie.
Our new domicile had been carved out of the uppermost corner of Palazzo Ruspoli, a massive pile in the Florentine style erected in the sixteenth century on the most central street corner in Rome, one block down from Piazza di Spagna. The Ruspolis, a large and princely Roman family, moved into it more than four hundred years ago and have been living in it ever since. The palazzo’s celebrated architectural feature is a broad staircase of one hundred steps, each one hewn from a single magnificent block of marble. You breathe grandeur with every step you take. Victor liked to climb it to the first landing and then take the candy box of an elevator the rest of the way up to our apartment. He also enjoyed swinging open the enormous wooden front doors and driving his little Lancia into the old columned courtyard, where he had a reserved space alongside those of the princes.
We ate out often when we lived in Rome. The food was deeply satisfying; so was the check, and so was the social rhythm. It was not unusual for friends to organize a midnight spaghettata, straddling the end of one day and the beginning of another with bowls of spaghetti alla puttanesca or alla carrettiera, or more often perhaps, bucatini all’Amatriciana. The food I ate in Rome threw light on an inbred regional cooking style that was new to me. The difference from Milan was startling. Milan had opened its arms, or more precisely its workplaces, to immigrants from Italy’s less industrious regions, as well as to professional people from over the border. Its own professional and entrepreneurial class traveled more than any other in the country. The city’s approach to food was consequently cosmopolitan, easily drawn to traditions other than its own. Few were the restaurants where, aside from the ubiquitous risotto, osso buco, and breaded veal cutlet, you would be offered an excursion through the byways of domestic Milanese cuisine. The most popular establishments were Tuscan, while immigrants from the south were to open trattorias that featured the specialties of Apulia, Naples, and Sicily.
Even though Rome was
the capital of the nation and the beneficiary of millennia of history, at the time we lived there it was essentially a glorious provincial town where the dishes of the restaurants—as well as the ingredients sold in its markets—were not radically different from those you might have found in the home
Rome, 1966. Some of the one hundred marble steps of the staircase at Palazzo Ruspoli
kitchens of their patrons. We did have a few Tuscan trattorias—one of them, Fontanella Borghese, was down the street from the palazzo—but they did not rise to the level of those in Milan. And we had a few Bolognese restaurants, of which one, in Piazza del Popolo, was famous. But none of these stole the hearts, or rather the palates, of Roman eaters who knew that what they really wanted was the cooking on which they had been raised.
Once we had safely moved in, my first thought was to see what was in the food shops and the markets. Around the corner from the palazzo there was the kind of greengrocer we call a primizaro. Primizie in Italian are the earliest, and by extension, the finest and sweetest-tasting fruits and vegetables. L’Ortolano, our Milanese greengrocer, had splendid produce, but that of the Roman primizaro surpassed it in appearance, in flavor, and by a vast margin, in price. It was worth it, however, and I regret that ill-placed frugality prevented me from getting more of my produce there.
We are hugely fond of good green beans. If they are at their best, I don’t bother making a sauce. I just boil them until done, neither crunchy nor mushy, usually less than seven minutes, and toss them, while still warm, with red wine vinegar, then with salt and olive oil. I remember a time my mother had come to visit and I had bought a kilo of the primizaro’s green beans. They were so fresh that they glistened and so firm, they snapped as sharply as dry twigs. They were perfectly formed and slender; a kilo of them made a daunting-looking mound on the kitchen table. “I have never seen such beautiful beans,” said my mother. “Shall I trim them for you?” “Grazie,” I said, wondering whether she realized what she was letting herself in for. My mother was many endearing things, but long-suffering was not one of them. By the time she finished snapping off both ends of the last bean in that formidable heap, the drain on her patience had been such that her hands were shaking as though palsied, and so was her voice as she cried, “Mai più!” (“Never again!”) “The next time you buy a kilo of such beans, get someone else to trim their little ends off!”
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