182. More scenes

Market day

Whenever I’m in Italy, I try to schedule my time to hit at least one weekly market day, a feature of nearly all towns of any size.

So imagine my delight that in Torino, their Porta Palazzo, at more than an acre the largest in Europe, is in full force six days a week, featuring the usual abundance of fresh produce, cheeses, flowers, olives, meats and fish, prepared foods, baked goods, and endless booths of things like shoes, hardware, linens, and underwear.

Part of the market is a food hall called Mercato Centrale, whose website says in English, “Here, hamburgers are steadfast, gelato is gentle, wine is ambitious.” I didn’t go all the way to Italy to eat a steadfast hamburger, but I wish I had a month and a kitchen to make my way through the offerings, and I wouldn’t even touch a fraction.

Free art

If you’re not a museum person, but you want a bit of culture, no worries in Italy. Just walk into any church, and as long as you’re quiet and your shoulders are reasonably covered, you can get a good dose of art history for free.

If going into a church gives you the heebie-jeebies, stay outside and look around. The architecture and ornamentation, the piazzas, the colors of the stone, even the shops and their displays are all made with pleasing the eye in mind.

More food

When Americans think of Italian food, they tend to think in a few monolithic categories; things like pizza, pasta, maybe a few types of sandwiches on long bulky rolls. But the reality is that it varies widely by region, even town to town. So if you see something that looks interesting and unusual, best to grab it right then and there, because you’re not likely to find it ten miles down the road.

Torino, for example, is known for the beef of its fassone cattle, who live lives so pure and untouched by chemicals of any kind that their meat can be eaten raw without posing any danger. We went to a presentation about the fassone, and then ate the raw beef with a topping of shaved cheese.

But the best part of the presentation, which of course was in Italian, was the young man who came up to us and told us that he was a student of “event planning” at the local university and his homework was to translate for someone. Would we be willing? Yes!

Celebrating tennis

We chose Torino as a destination because the ATP men’s tennis championships were being held there. So the town was bedecked with tennis-related displays, and there was dancing and music in the streets.

We saw some great tennis, but sadly, not Sinner, the Italian. The crowd went wild whenever he played, and that would have been fun.