As seen in a random restaurant today.
Florence (Firenze)
Just your average weekday lunch.
The food was so-so, but how about the setting?!
Trattoria Cammillo
I’ve had the great pleasure of dining at Cammillo, the trattoria just south of the Ponte Santa Trinita, in Florence pretty much every time I’ve been in the city since my first trip to Italy in 1979.
It has never disappointed, not once. My first excursion there was with a date who wanted to impress, and impress he did. I never dine there without thinking of Eli. He was very gallant.
I love the location, the ambience and the history behind the restaurant almost as much as the food. The current owner’s grandfather, Camillo, opened the trattoria in 1945. When the first sign he ordered for his new restaurant arrived with his name misspelled, he couldn’t afford a new sign, so he kept it.
Under this misspelled sign, he blended Bolognese and Tuscan dishes for the construction crews who were at work rebuilding the bridges and palaces destroyed by the Nazis at the end of the war. Today the family farm in Tuscany provides the trattoria with many of the fresh ingredients used to prepare the dishes served.
Cammillo was where I first tasted bistecca fiorentina, grilled to absolute perfection and topped with freshly squeezed lemon juice. Once you try it, you can never go back!
It seems I’m not the only one who loves Cammillo. Mimi Sheraton, writer for the New York Times, wrote that she dined at Cammillo each time she visited Florence from 1953. Who can blame her?
Trattoria Cammillo
Borgo S. Jacopo 57/r
tel. 055 212427
The Lungarno Acciaiuoli (or, how many vowels can you actually put in the center of one word?).
On either side of the long, languid Arno River that bisects Florence from east to west, run parallel roads, called the Lungarni. These long roadways are, in typical Florentine fashion, divided up every few blocks or so, with various names.
Italy has a lot of history and Florence in particular has a lot of names to commemorate. The Lungarni passages provide a fertile field for memorializing important names. Here they are:
North shore (from the west):
Lungarno Amerigo Vespucci
Lungarno Corsini
Lungarno Acciaiuoli
Lungarno Archibusieri
Lungarno Anna Maria Luisa de ‘Medici
Lungarno General Armando Diaz
Lungarno delle Grazie
Lungarno della Zecca Vecchia
Lungarno William Galeazzo
Lungarno del Tempio
Lungarno Cristoforo Colombo
Lungarno Aldo Moro
South shore (from the west):
Lungarno Bruno Buozzi (Lastra a Signa)
Lungarno dei Pioppi
Lungarno del Pignone
Lungarno Santa Rosa
Lungarno Soderini
Lungarno Guicciardini
Lungarno Torrigiani
Lungarno Serristori
Lungarno Benvenuto Cellini
Lungarno Francesco Ferrucci
As you can see, a lot of names were used in naming the sections of the Lungarni!
It fills me with some kind strange pride to note that I’ve had the personal good fortune to live on three sections of the Lungarni thus far in this lifetime (who knows about other lifetimes? I can’t remember!): in the Oltrarno I had the pleasure of living for time on the Lungarno Serristori and later the Lungarno Torrigiani. I loved every minute of both locations. There is no better way of exploring a new area of the city than living in it for a while!
My focus today is on the North side of the river and on the section of the Lungarno on which I currently have the amazing luck to live. The prestigious Lungarno Acciaiuoli is the stretch of the north bank of the Arno River in Florence that runs from the Ponte Vecchio to the Ponte Santa Trinita. This area of Florence is among the most elegant areas in the city.
My short passage of the Lungarno ends at the east end at the storied Ponte Vecchio and overlooks, on its west end, the Torre Consorti, and one side of the Palazzo Spini-Feroni, home of the Salvatore Ferragamo palazzo and museum. It’s a tony avenue.
In olden times, this section of the Lungarno was called i cappellai or “the hatters,” after the Florentine hat makers who located their shops here.
Later, in the 19th C., two of the most important Florentine hotels were located here: the Grand Hotel Royal de l’Arno and the Hotel Royal de la Grande Bretagne. Charles Dickens, Henry James and many others stayed in these famous hotels. Sometimes, when I am walking around Florence on streets where I know for a fact that famous personalities from the past passed over, I imagine for a moment what it would be like to bump into, say Dante Alighieri or Charles Dickens walking around town. I’ve always had this sort of imagination.
Still standing from that era is the Hotel Berchielli, the ancient building that miraculously survived the landlines set by the retreating German army during WWII. This historic building has housed the Hotel Berchielli since 1890 and is among the most famous hotels in the center of Florence.
A marble plaque on the façade recalls the frequent stays of Romain Rolland, a distinguished literary critic and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915. Rolland chose the Hotel Berchielli as his Florentine residence.
ROMAIN ROLLAND
INSIGNE WRITER
AND ART CRITIC
sTAYed HERE
IN 1911
And while you may not be familiar with Rolland, I’m sure you know that guy named Pablo Picasso, who also, several decades later, took up residence in the hotel (fall of 1949).
Also marking the area is a plaque at Red All’84-86, of Palazzo Spini Feroni:
AVSPICIIS. ET. MVNIFICENTIA
Ferdinandi. III. M. D. ETR.
AEDIVM. SPINORVM. partem
ARCV. VIAE. IMPOSITO. FLVMINI. ANTEA. IMPENDENTEM
SERIOUS. PERICVLO. DILAPSVRAM
COMMVNE. FLORENTINORVM
A.D. CIVIVM. SECVRITATEM. ET. Maiorem. AMOENITATEM. LOCI
ONLY. AEQVANDAM. CVRAVIT
YEAR. MDCCCXXIII.
VEXILLIFERO. Iacobo. COMITE. Gvido
The translation is: “Under the auspices and through the munificence of Ferdinand III, Grand Duke of Tuscany, the City of Florence in the year 1823, being the standard-bearer Count Jacopo Guidi, demolished for safety of citizens, and greater beauty of the place, the part of the houses the Spini who first faced the river on a place at the turn of the bow away and threatened to collapse with grave danger. ”
(reference: Francesco Cesati, the great leader of the streets of Florence, Newton Compton Editori, Rome 2003).
From the Lungarno Acciaiuoli, the world of Florence’s history, culture and elegance are readily available.
On the Lungarno Acciaiuoli, looking towards east to Ponte Vecchio:
Looking from the embankment in the opposite direction, towards the west, one can admire the graceful Ponte Santa Trinita, about which I will be posting soon. This bridge is considered to be one of the most elegant and refined bridges in Italy in particular or in all of Europe. The line of arches that create the bridge, along with the white scrolls on the summit of each arch, and the four statues placed on the corners to represent the seasons, the bridge is one of a kind. Standing on the bridge provides a unique panorama or the lovely Arno through this area.
The Lungarno Acciaiuioli is considered, along with the current Lungarno Corsini, to be the most ancient road opened along the Arno river. This section of the Lungarni has a varied character, marked as it is by two building from the Middle Ages (the Consorti tower and Palazzo Spini Feroni), as well as restored buildings from the 19th-century and still others rebuilt in the 1950s and 60s with a modern character.
What a street!
Saving the best for last: Epiphany in Florence.
Updated 9 Feb 2017
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The best of all.
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More Epiphany.
Epiphany in Florence, 2017
Before the month of January slips entirely through my fingers, I want to get the rest of my Epiphany photos posted.
Here are the animals waiting patiently at the creche scene at the Duomo. They await the three Wise Men and their entourages, marking the end of the long, ceremonious cavalcade.
Once the Wise Men appear with their gifts, they are received by the magistrates of the city in a spectacular blending of church and state!
The gifts are taken to the living creche scene.
After all the enactment, the hundreds of balloons, something I doubt Mary and Joseph ever imagined let alone saw, are set free!
The entire day is a spectacle not to be missed! I am so glad I got to see it!
Win some, lose some. The tale of my baking disasters and successes in Italy.
So, I love to bake. The funny thing is that I am not much of a sweets eater, but I love to bake.
So, naturally, I’ve been experimenting in my new kitchen in Florence with baking. It has been a hoot and a half getting to know the baking aisles at my local grocery stores, where I can often be found reading the fine print on the back of boxes, doing my best to understand the complicated Italian language as it describes the mysteries found inside the box!
For example: what do you think this is?
From the picture on the box, you might think it is a cake mix. Ha ha! You’d be very wrong. It is potato flour/starch. Some of the recipes I’ve been playing with here require this completely new to me ingredient. I felt like a winner when I finally found it on a grocery store shelf.
Here’s the back of the box. I decided to make these ricotta muffins, muffin all ricotta, but turn the muffins into a torta or cake. I am still getting used to measuring grams rather than cups. You can see the ingredients list is:
125 g di ricotta fresca ricotta
80 g di zucchero sugar
70 g di farina 00 flour, ground to 00
50 g di fecola di patate potato flour/starch
50 g di burro butter
1 uovo egg
a mela rosso red apple (later we learn to slice thinly with skin on and lay a piece of apple inside the batter in each muffin cup)
mezza di bustina lievito per dolce 1/2 a packet of rising agent for sweets
mezzo limone 1/2 lemon (later in recipe we learn it is to be lemon peel)
pizzico di sale pinch of salt
zucchero a velo vanigliato vanilla-flavored powdered sugar
To the best of my ability to understand Italian baking products, below we have the equivalent of what we call baking powder in the United States. Only here it comes in packets and I share with you now what I’ve learned the hard way thus far (see below the picture).
Read the recipe very carefully! Because when the recipe says to use “mezza bustina di lievito per dolce” then you want to use 1/2 a packet.
I know this now, because I missed that adjective when I was baking my ricotta torta, and I wound up with a product that was completely overpowered by the taste of baking powder. Which is a nice way to say the cake tasted awful and I had to throw the whole thing out.
Fortunately, I am very patient with myself when it comes to baking (very unlike how I am when it comes to learning to speak Italian!!). I was not very upset to bake a cake and throw it away. :-(
Whenever I bake, I like to play around with the ingredients somewhat, and I think almost every confection tastes better with vanilla. I am accustomed to using a vanilla bean in the United States, or a high quality vanilla extract. I haven’t been able to find that here yet, although I am certain it exists.
What I have found is this weird product:
It is a consistency somewhere between an extract and a paste, and seems to be filled with millions of vanilla seeds, and it imparts a decent vanilla flavor to whatever I’m mixing up.
In addition, the product below is widely available in the baking aisle. It is a white powdered version of what must be imitation vanilla? The package says it imparts the “aroma per dolci di vanillina” or the “aroma for sweets of vanilla extract.”
Well, it does smell like vanilla but to me it doesn’t add much in the way of flavor to my baking. I will stick to the above estratto until I can find real vanilla here.
So, I can’t show you my finished ricotta torta, because I didn’t photograph it before I dumped it. But here I include a picture of a torta margherita I successfully achieved a while back.
The picture says it all! It was wonderful!
Win some, lose some. Questa è la vita.
I won’t stop trying!! :-))
P.S. I’m going to try again to make the ricotta torta this weekend for a classmate’s birthday on Monday. Wish me luck! I am undeterred.
The Medici
You’ll need an hour, but I promise it is well worth the time.
26 Gennaio 2017; homework and vitamin D
It’s a gorgeous day here in Firenze! Warm enough to sit on my terrace and do my homework!
I love living 4 stories up, at the top of the city. There is an entire community of us neighbors living high in the sky on our terraces. La vita e’ bella!
get back, lauretta! 
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