At the end of October, we’re in northern Le Marche for truffles. The Roman poet Juvenal thought these pungent funghi were born from the strike of thunderbolts. That seems as good an explanation as any for the gnarly little jewels. Sant’Angelo in Vado is truffle central. On the final weekends of October and the first ones of November, they celebrate with music, food stands, and colorful markets lining the streets. Restaurants feature menus rich in truffle dishes and the town fluffs up for visitors by opening any closed churches and monuments.
ONLY AN HOUR out of Cortona, we’ve already crossed mountains, curving through unsettled land, climbs, sheer drops, and jagged horizons. Ever since I’ve lived in Italy, I’ve heard that Le Marche will be “the next Tuscany.” Le Marche (“the Borders”) certainly are as physically alluring: the varied landscape dotted with hilltop villages, noble historic towns, the 180-kilometer-long Adriatic coastline. Does any region of Italy have mediocre food? No. Everywhere, si mangia bene, one eats well. But the cooks of Le Marche excel. The food is robust, bountiful. As we drive, I’m dreaming of a salami made with figs, a duck stew, and vincisgrassi, a much-loved pasta layered with mushrooms, béchamel, and rich ragù. And a walnut cake dense with nuts, citrus flavors, and raisins. But, no, Le Marche have not become a fevered destination and these spiny mountains see to it that they won’t. Excepting the coast, it’s hard to get around in Le Marche.
Once over the rugged Apennines, we dip into the sweetest countryside imaginable—hummocky green hills with isolated farms. Tractors on the verge of tumbling sideways as they plow steep fields, overturn hard clods, and break them down into rich brown earth. What are they planting now? Cover crops? Winter wheat? Substitute oxen for the tractor and this scene has been playing for centuries.
Ed loves to drive, especially in Italy where you can speed and other drivers know what they’re doing. You rarely meet a duffer cruising the left lane at fifty miles per hour. He would be blown off the road. Here, we’re meandering; hardly anyone is out. It’s delightful to find yourself alone on winding back roads, some that run out of pavement. Even the GPS can give up and improvise, sending us through someone’s cow path marked PRIVATO to land on a gutted dirt road that finally leads to a pristine village.
DRIVING ALONG THE lush valley of the Metauro River, I see a road sign near the village of Làmoli: ABBAZIA SAN MICHELE ARCANGELO. One of Ed’s major talents is his ability to swerve into small roads when an intriguing glimpse of a tower or a sweet slice of landscape appears. We hop out in front of a seventh-century Benedictine abbey. Middle of nowhere, although in Italy you learn quickly that what you’d have thought “middle of nowhere” is a considerable somewhere. Often a small borgo existed since long before the Romans, and has stacked up a dizzying history along the lines of who begat whom, who begat and begat.
In Làmoli, since pilgrimage years fourteen centuries back, Archangel Michele’s inevitable lines have graced the lives of those who lived within the sound of its bells. For now, it’s all ours: wooden ceiling like the skeleton of a sailing ship. High oculus of white light, carved-out side windows, the silence of the arched interior, on whose columns muted remnants of frescoes remain.
The Romanesque, my favorite style for any church, keeps to a purity and human scale. The elemental lines seem closest to the spirit. This abbazia is plain as a pancake outside, and obviously restored, but the dark and quiet inside—we are all alone—calms and claims me. Dio, it’s cold. Must be frigid here in winter.
BLACK OR WHITE? We’ll go for either or both, but this is the season for the more prized tuber magnatum pico, the truffle currently selling for two thousand euros a kilo. That sounds, and is, outrageous but a kilo is more than two pounds of truffle. Fortunately, the taste is so prominent that a few quick and thin shavings over a mound of tagliatelle is enough to send that dish into the category of sublime.
Sant’Angelo in Vado since Roman times sits on the banks of the Metauro, a bucolic little river that, I read, in stormy times suddenly can turn vicious. “In Vado” means a place to ford the river. I can’t wait to see the recent excavation of a Roman villa but first I’d like to gaze on those toffee-colored little fists, the white truffles.
Sant’Angelo’s Piazza Umberto I is surrounded by a bell tower, proud civic buildings, and two churches. Chiesa di Santa Caterina delle Bastarde, Saint Catherine of the Bastards—odd name for this miniature church. Once an orphanage for females, the narrow interior is overwhelmed by looming oversize statues of the cardinal virtues and the church doctors, whereas the altar painting shows the martyrdom of Saint Catherine on the wheel. Must have scared the little girl “bastards.”
Nearby, San Filippo, a tiny, octagonal treasure box. I always admire the country Baroque, where the ambition for grandeur exceeded the budget. The creative builders constructed of wood what richer churches would make out of stone and marble. Skilled painters used their talent for faux, painting the swirl of marble’s white and cream and greens on wood. San Filippo is one of those, although plenty of gold was lavished on the square ceiling frescoed in gilded panels. Almost hidden on a side wall I find a tender Annunciation by Raffaellino del Colle. Of all the set religious subjects, the Annunciations appeal to me the most. She wears a pomegranate-colored dress, reading a book. Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to these paintings—Mary is often holding a book, or there are books nearby. Mary before she became who she became.
WE DIDN’T RESERVE but are late enough to secure a table at Trattoria Taddeo e Federico, where we succumb to the white truffle. Our server authoritatively tells us what to order. “You will be happy,” she assures us, and we believe her. Only two diners remain in the room; they surreptitiously feed their dog when the server exits. They look over at us, hoping we don’t mind. We don’t.
“What’s your dog’s name?” I ask. They are dressed in scruffy walking clothes, hoodies, and boots, a late-middle-aged couple both with straw-colored hair and ruddy cheeks.
“Pietro,” the woman says. As his name is called, the dog stands and looks hopeful. He’s carefully groomed, with thick, curly toffee-colored fur that invites petting.
“Oh, a truffle dog!” The Lagotto Romagnolo is my favorite kind of dog. Smart, adorable, so alert. Brown with white underbelly, Pietro looks at me with “I-speak-Italian” eyes. The breed goes way back: Lake dogs of Romagna, working dogs used for hunting and for water retrieval, now famous as keen searchers of truffles. “Is he finding truffles here?”
“No,” the man says, slipping Pietro a sliver of prosciutto. “We’re from Piacenza. He’s trained for black truffles and shows no interest in the white, only in digging up the ground.”
“Just the same trouble at home,” the woman adds. “They like to dig everywhere. Especially daffodil and tulip bulbs.” She looks at him fondly. “He’s terrible.” Tremendo is what she says, a word often applied to a rambunctious toddler.
I wish she were not saying this in front of Ed, as I’ve been lobbying to get this kind of dog.
As the server brings my tagliatelle and Ed’s passatelli, a super-size policeman comes in the door. Someone is parked illegally in the piazza. “My husband,” our boisterous server announces. “Isn’t he lucky to have a wife like me?” We agree and turn to admire bowls of steaming passatelli redolent of sliced truffles. Not truly a pasta, passatelli is a local favorite. The tender little cylinders are formed from bread crumbs, lemon, eggs, Parmigiano, and nutmeg. The batter is passed through a special press with holes, or a ricer or sieve. The little dumplings are poached, like gnocchi. I’ve tried making them twice, only to have them fall apart. These don’t. They’re in a bit of fragrant broth, with, yes, truffle slices crowning them.
We vow to come back for the truffle with red potato gnocchi, and paccheri alla carbonara. Paccheri, the big tubular pasta, is one of my favorites for ragù. The rolled and stuffed rabbit, rollè di coniglio farcito al tartufo bianco pregiato, sounds fine, too. Anything with the precious white truffle.
Pietro’s ears lift and he’s wagging his tail. Maybe if they fed him a few tastes, he’d get the idea. For us, with one bite, the action in the room fades and the pure experience of this simple and ancient flavor takes over. Musty, earthy, mysterious. If there’s ever an occasion for that overused word umami, this broth with passatelli is it.
We sometimes get summer black truffles in Tuscany and relish those days, though sometimes the texture resembles wood chips. These are both firm and tender. Order another portion? But the tasting platter arrives and all I want to do is stay in this room and eat—a fluffy omelet with truffles, polenta with truffles, crostini with fonduta of pecorino and truffles, a potato sformato. A blur of truffles. It’s over too soon. I’m almost expecting truffle dessert. Since we’re headlong into indulgence, we order another true taste of fall, the tortino di castagne con scaglie al cioccolato caldo, chestnut torte with melted chocolate.
Now that we’ve simmered down, and coffee is ordered, I wonder about the painted restaurant sign we saw outside the door of two gentlemen, Taddeo and Federico, namesakes of this restaurant. A note on the menu explains that the two Zuccari brothers, born in Sant’Angelo, were artists in the mid and late 1500s.
Over coffee, Ed reads to me. Taddeo had left for Rome by age fourteen, quickly establishing himself. He painted frescoes in the Villa Farnese. He died in his mid-thirties and was buried in the Pantheon, where his neighbor is Raphael. Federico was already working at the Vatican by age eighteen. He became famous, too, later painting in Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Florence’s duomo, Galleria Borghese, all over. He was a pupil of Correggio from Parma. His twenty drawings of brother Taddeo are at the Getty.
“Both brothers from this tiny and remote town. How did they make their way to Rome as boys? What was in the water?” I never stop marveling at the level of culture that has thrived in Italy for centuries, even in back-of-beyond corners.
“The father was an artist,” Ed says. “He must have wanted more for them and pushed them out the door.”
Three-thirty seems like a good time to finish lunch. We go in search of our car, which we parked somewhere. Then we recall, the magic phones will tell us where. Soon we won’t have to think at all. Just eat.
WE CHECK INTO a B & B just on the edge of Mercatello sul Metauro, only six kilometers from Sant’Angelo. Third floor of a simple house, small room, simply furnished with a wrought-iron bed. Cold. We’ve been on the move since dawn. We’d like to relax, prop up on pillows to read our Blue Guide to Le Marche, go over today’s photos, check messages. I mean cold. The shower is minuscule. One of those folding panel doors that slide open at the corner. You have to squeeze in sideways. We take turns freezing. Fortunately, the bed feels good and the fluffy white duvet soon warms. The radiator makes encouraging sounds.
HAVING DRIVEN SEVERAL hours, we want a nearby restaurant for tonight. At the recommendation of the B & B owner, we try Ristorante Pizzeria Barbara, just down the road toward Sant’Angelo. He calls for a table for us. Lucky he did. When we arrive, the very large, well-lit restaurant is totally packed with local families and groups. We are the only lone couple. Clearly, this is where to go on Friday night. Everyone visits from table to table, stopping to greet a dozen people as they enter and exit. The waitstaff knows everyone. We order a liter of house wine and survey the ample menu, finally deciding to try the pizza, since everyone else seems to have done just that. Here’s a sense of community. Here’s where you came after your first communion, for your first date, with your kids, with your grandchildren. One of those important neighborhood classics we all long for. Our place. Where we have our special corner. Where the young girl waiting tables is your dentist’s daughter. As flies on the wall, we participate in this weekend routine that everyone here knows so well. And the pizza is terrific. Margherita with sausage for me, capricciosa, chef’s fantasy, for Ed. Only a small slice of chocolate torte for dessert. No truffles tonight!
AT BREAKFAST IN a glass sunroom, the owners’ King Charles Spaniel keeps trying to leap to the buffet table. Two other guests, Francesco and Maria Grazia from Venice, sit with us. Over the dog’s antics we strike up a conversation and linger talking to them for a couple of hours. Maria Grazia owns a family palazzo in Mercatello. They’re here because it’s the Day of the Dead. She comes back every year, as Italians do all over Italy, to her hometown to decorate the family graves with flowers. They don’t stay in their palazzo in winter because it’s too cold. They must have a warmer room here than we do, though ours has heated to a bearable temperature. They’re working on repairs, enjoying visiting with family and friends. We swap photos on our phones, talk Venice, talk Tuscany, talk interesting places in Le Marche. I take notes of towns they know. But finally, Francesco says, “My life in Venice is a joke. I am from Naples and I must go to Naples every month. I fly. It’s close. I have to go because it is my reality.”
I’m always drawn to people who are indelibly bonded with a place. Maurizio, a Cortona friend from Naples, says that those who were born and lived there never can be satisfied with anywhere else. Francesco, case in point. Maria Grazia (Mary Grace, such a nice southern name) smiles indulgently. She’s heard it before. Instead, she is wed to Venice and to this small village in Le Marche.
WE RUSH BACK to Sant’Angleo to the Saturday morning market stalls, where not only truffle vendors are set up, but hundreds of stands selling clothing, vegetables, and every household item imaginable. I buy some shiny marroni, the most prized of the chestnuts. Score! Six euros a kilo. Bins are mounded with walnuts, the preferred Italian nut, and with nespole, which are a popular fruit. When I lived in Palo Alto, we had loquat (also called medlar) bushes that seemed always laden with fruit. Seeing them rot spurred me to make preserves, but as the fruit simmered, the color turned from translucent orange to gooey gray. I should give them another try. Sacks of red potatoes labeled La Patata di Sompiano are obviously a special local potato. Duly noted.
The weekend market weaves down a long street, branching into narrow side passageways, spilling out the gate and onward. It’s vast. As we walk by the cluster of truffle stands, we catch the unmistakable scent. Ed looks askance at the truffle-flavored olive oils on sale. Usually adding something to olive oil means the oil isn’t top quality. A few hunting dogs hang out around the truffle sellers but they aren’t the famous truffle sniffers. “What kind of dog is that? Does he have a good nose for truffles?” I ask one seller about his shaggy friend.
“Bravissimo,” he answers. “Un bastardo, il migliore.” A bastard, the best.
Signs on restaurants shout out today’s specials: pastas with white truffle, vitello al tartufo scorzone, beef with black truffles, and fagioli con cotiche, the robust dish of stuffed pig’s foot and white beans. Trippa and cinghiale, equally full of force: tripe and boar. Those guys manning the tractors out in the wheat fields will feast.
AFTER SOME TIME happily lost, we find the Romanesque complex Santa Maria dei Servi Extra Muros, outside the walls. There are thirteen altars from the seventeenth century (much younger than the walls themselves), each one donated by a local family. Imagine the competition! Many gifted painters never become household names, and here I see some of them, although I should have known Raffaellino del Colle, whose Annunciation I saw yesterday. I read about him last night. He’s prolific and marvelous, as in Madonna e Bambino con Santi, his work at one altar. A fluid style and colors that wash over you. We’re the only ones in the airy church, so the bored guard accompanies us to the museum wing, assuming the role of guide. From room to room, he points out what we shouldn’t miss, watching to see if we are as impressed as we should be.
We get to see one of Federico Zuccari’s paintings. I photograph close-up the exquisite hands on several of his saintly figures, and a young boy’s sweet face. He’s thoughtful and staring right at you. Could that be his brother Taddeo?
IN A PERFECTLY flat field on the edge of town, we find the Domus del Mito, House of Myth. This is mysterious. Archeologists in 1999 uncovered an intact mosaic floor of an A.D. first-century Roman house of one thousand square meters. How could it not have been found before? It lies barely under the ground level. Hasn’t anyone ever plowed this land? What else lies under the grass? The perfectly clear floor plan could be a good one for a house today. The mosaic designs in each room functioned like rugs. Stunning images of Bacchus, Acteon, Medusa, Neptune, some of them colored and others black and white. Then the subjects pivot from mythology. Here’s a hunting and fishing scene with an eel biting an octopus who catches a lobster, all surrounded by geometric patterns. Optical illusion patterns of diamonds and squares surround the central depictions. Of all the many mosaics I’ve seen in Italy, Greece, Spain, this is the most intimate and domestic; the most touching, because it’s easy to imagine the furnished house, the splashing of a fountain, the lives in the rooms.
BACK IN THE centro and waiting for lunch, when Ed stops for yet another espresso—how does he not fly into the sky?—I wander on along a narrow street. In a doorway, a blur of candlelight catches my eye and I look into a room just below street level. Stepping down, I find myself in a small cave-like space completely covered with photographs. Faces of people, or standing front and center, posed in their finery. All over the walls, framed or thumb-tacked or lying loose on the table. A memory room for the town. There’s a place to kneel, a metal stand where you can light a candle for someone dead. The bride whose eyes brim with life. The boy who fell down a well, the ones who went to war, grandmothers, all gone. Everyone. All the past equally over. And for those who remain, a space on the wall waits for them.
Over a flower-covered altar hangs crucified Christ, He who died for all these smiling faces. The scent of roses, carnations, waxy yellow begonias, blazing pink cyclamen, dried hydrangeas. Hot wax, dank air. Like burying your face in the hair of the young woman who has lifted off her hat.