L'Aquila

In the mountains of Abruzzo

I left San Marino on Sunday morning, taking the bus to Rimini and then heading south by train along the Adriatic coast to Pescara.  I had been on the first part of this route before, getting off the train at Marotta and spending two weeks woofing near Pergola, in the region of Le Marche.  This time I wanted to visit the Abbruzzo region.  One of my goals for the semester was to have visited (including visits in previous years) as many of Italy’s 20 regions as I could by the end of the semester: I finished with 17 out of 20. 

I was heading for L’Aquila, the capital of Abruzzo, and I would need to take three local trains (called Regionale in Italian) to get there.  I had no idea that the ticketing and check in system for these local trains has completely changed since I last used them several years ago.  I did see that my online ticket included a statement that “check in” is mandatory before getting on the train, and I noticed that the old stamp machines have been replaced with QR code readers. 

I spent at least ten minutes in the station trying to scan my QR code at every one of these machines, to no avail.  I got in line at the ticket counter, but it very quickly became clear that my train would be leaving before I got to the front of the line.  I gave up and got on the train, planning to check in at the first of my two connections.

I looked out the window at the coast, which at some points was surprisingly close to the train.

At Pescara, I only had a half hour before my next train.  I went straight to the ticket window line, and learned that it was now too late for me to check in for any of the three trains I am taking today: check in is done online, not using the machines in the station: I was supposed to tap the text that said “check in” before my first train, and since I didn’t, I will not be able to check in to any of the connections.  She advised me to speak to the “capo del treno,” the conductor, and explain what happened.  I did, and it was fine. 

I bought a sandwich in the train station with speck (smoked ham from northern Italy), arugula and cheese and ate that on the next train.  We left the coast and headed into the mountainous interior of Abruzzo.

I appreciate the cleanliness of train bathrooms in Italy, which are inexplicably on average many times cleaner than French ones.  I also love this feature that you can find in many Italian public bathrooms: the toilet seat is on a powerful spring, and it won’t stay down unless you sit on it.  This prevents the seat being sprinkled with pee by people who hover over it in a squatting position.  This specific toilet had the added convenience of a handle for pulling the seat down.

And since I’ve already started talking about toilets, I was surprised that two out of three stalls at the Rimini train station had squat toilets, called “Turkish toilets” by both the Italians and the French.  In case you have not used these before and need to one day, the correct method is to face the door of the stall, with your back to the wall.

My next stop was at Sulmona, with a two hour wait for my third train.  It would have been a 35 minute walk each way with my suitcase and backpack to go into town, so I stayed at the station and used the free wifi to grade student work on Canvas – the course management software where I post instructions and students post their assignments.  I bought two awful pastries and finished neither. 

The third train was my favorite, with old fashioned windows that opened.  Ideal for taking photos. 

It was getting dark by the time we approached L’Aquila, and I began to dread the 25 minute walk uphill that I knew was waiting for me on arrival, through narrow streets in a new city.  I had texted my Airbnb host the day before asking about busses, but not surprisingly there are none that run on Sunday evenings.  I chose what looked like the shortest route on google maps, but just as I started off I got a phone call from my host: he was just returning to the city after a day out and could pick me up at the station on his way home.  I was very relieved. 

He told me on the short drive that many streets in the city are closed due to reconstruction from the earthquake in 2009, 15 years ago.  That quake, the third major one in the city’s history, damaged most of the buildings: 60,000 of L’Aquila’s 72,000 residents were homeless after it happened.  I learned later that this was the third of three major, city destroying earthquakes in L’Aquila’s history.  The others occurred in 1350 and 1702.  The city was rebuilt each time because of its strategic location: in the Appenine mountains on a relatively flat former lake bed (this fact makes the earthquakes more destructive) and at a key midpoint on the ancient road from Florence to Naples. 

My host had spent the day hunting for mushrooms in the mountains around the city, but hadn’t found any: it’s been a drier than normal fall.  I asked him what he did for work and found out that he works for the Postal service.  By coincidence, I had just shown my students a well-known Italian comedy featuring the postal service the week before in class[1]; luckily he agreed that it’s a very funny film: full of cultural stereotypes, but many of them with some truth behind them. 

I remembered reading on the Airbnb site that my host’s apartment was in a 15^th century building, but I wasn’t prepared for the Renaissance beauty that I discovered.  We entered through a small cutout door in massive wooden portal, coming into a marble courtyard with a cistern in the middle, open to the night sky.   

My room was a on a kind of mezzanine, with its own bathroom and a door that locked at the bottom of the stairs.  I was impressed with the massive logs supporting the ceiling.

I had done some research on restaurants before my trip.  A reader asked how I do that, and the answer is that I mostly use google.  Larger cities like Bologna have an Eater 38 list, and that’s usually a good place to start.  After that, and with smaller cities, I just google for newspaper or magazine articles that recommend restaurants.  I also use Trip Advisor, filter for reviews that are only in the local language.  In Italy, for example, I trust restaurant ratings from Italians more than from visitors.  I read an academic paper on this subject once: the authors found that positive reviews on Trip Advisor were more related to distance from Saint Mark’s square in Venice than to the quality of the restaurant. 

Many restaurants in Italy are closed on Sundays and/or Mondays, so my choices were limited. My host recommended Arrosticini Divini for local cuisine.  I walked there first but they were full for the evening.  I made a reservation for the next day at lunch, and went to L’Opera for dinner instead. Walking there, I got a preview of the city center, famously built almost entirely using local white limestone.

The restaurant was austerely decorated with white walls, gray tablecloths, and very modern place settings.  Some of the décor was perplexing to me, like these empty frames and metal rings on the ceiling.

I had the impression that the chef is trying for a Michelin star, and why not.  Getting one drives more traffic to your restaurant, like El Califa de Léon in Mexico City: it was awarded the first ever star for a taco stand last month and has been overwhelmed with customers since.

The menu was organized in the French style, divided into appetizers, main dishes, and desserts, rather than the Italian categories (primi, secondi, contorni, etc.) described in detail in this post. There were only four to five choices in each category, which is always a good sign: it means that the dishes are being prepared to order, not partially prepared ahead of time or pulled out of the freezer and microwaved.  But for the first time in Italy, I found not many things that I wanted to order.  There were words that I had to look up: pasta con lumache turned out to be snails, and coratella d’agnello is the sauteed internal organs of lamb – lungs, liver, heart, kidneys, and so on.  I passed on both of those dishes.  There was also a dish described as pulled pork with ketchup.  I love pulled pork, but not with ketchup… I heard the waiter talking about the dish later with two other clients and it turns out that it’s not ketchup but a house made sauce that is much more interesting.  Too bad it wasn’t described that way on the menu.

I had marinated (raw) trout for my first course, and it was delicious, served with purple grapes, powdered purple cabbage, and something yellow and crunchy that I couldn’t identify. 

For the main course, cauliflower gratin: roasted cauliflower that was overcooked, a cheesy sauce, and a sprinkling of green powdered herbs.  It was not fantastic. 

It’s also unusual in “fine dining” restaurants like this to have the same plate design and the same basic plating for two different dishes. Yes, this one was turned horizontally when it was placed in front of me, but otherwise they are virtually identical in presentation.

For dessert I had a creamy licorice mousse that was also not wonderful, though it was beautifully presented.

My Airbnb included just the bedroom with no kitchen privileges, so I went out early the next morning in search of cappuccino.   I walked around the city and took photos, astounded by how much rebuilding was still going on 15 years after the earthquake.  Here is the central square, the Piazza del Duomo, with scaffolding on the cathedral.  And the small city is hosting a surprising number of cranes.

There are still piles of rubble in some streets, and hundreds of buildings that are being rebuilt seemingly from the inside out – I think the interior supporting structures are keeping the walls from falling in.

I spent a few more hours grading at the apartment, then walked to Arrosticini Divini for lunch.  Arrosticini are an Abbruzzan specialty: skewers of meat (usually mutton) and fat, cooked over charcoal.  They were traditionally the food of shepherds, and transhumance (driving flocks on foot up into the mountain pastures in the summer to graze) is still regularly practiced in Abbruzzo.  I didn’t take this photo, but it was on display in the city:

As usual, as an inveterate early riser and early arriver, I was the first person at the restaurant. I liked the decor and the quotes painted on the walls, including this one by Virginia Woolf (translated into Italian): “One can not think well, love well, sleep well if one has not dined well.”

I started my meal with a local pasta called chittara – named for the tool that is used to cut it.  The chittara is a wooden frame with thin steel parallel wires attached on the edges.  The wires look like guitar strings and chittara translates to “guitar” in English.  Spaghetti noodles are round, made by extrusion through round holes in bronze or Teflon dies, as described here.  Chittara noodles are flat rectangles, made by cutting the rolled out dough with the steel wires.  In this case, the pasta came with eggplant, red peppers, mushrooms, and pecorino (sheep) cheese. 

There were seven kinds of arrosticini on the menu. The first two were mutton, a more expensive “made by hand” option and a cheaper non-labeled option that I’m guessing was machine made. The next two options for sheep liver: regular or spicy. Since I hate liver, I easily skipped past those. The final three were chicken, Black Angus beef, and vegetarian. I ordered two of the traditional hand made mutton ones, two chicken, and one beef.  They came in this adorable pitcher: every table had one, most filled with many more skewers than mine.

I liked the mutton ones (top in the photo below) best – they were smoky and sizzling with fat, a little bit gamey but not too much.  The meat was most definitely mutton (adult sheep) and not lamb, but it was much tastier than the mutton I had in Mongolia. The other skewer on my plate is the Black Angus one, clearly not made by hand. You can also see the zucchini that I ordered for my contorno.

I finished my meal with one of the best desserts I had in Italy, a tiramisu with saffron, another local specialty.  

I walked to the train station and appreciated even more being picked up the evening before. Many roads were closed due to construction, including along the route that google had picked out for me.  It would have been a very frustrating experience in the dark. 

In all, I had a short but satisfying visit to L’Aquila.

Up next: We need to talk about Airbnb.

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[1] The film is called Benvenuti al Sud, and it’s an almost scene for scene remake of the very successful French comedy Bienvenu Chez les Ch’tis (briefly discussed in this post).  In both films, a worker is transferred against his wishes to the stereotypically “backward” part of the country (the Pas-de-Calais region in France, south of Naples in Italy) but slowly comes to love its people and culture.