Let's face it... when I am in the US, this blog runs pretty dry. After all, a blog about Italy doesn't do too well when you are sitting at a computer in Florida. Well, that is soon to change.

On May 12, I'll be heading over again, and this time I will be there for 5 months straight. No back and forth this year like I have done the last few years. But the news gets a little better... I'm heading over there with some new high-tech toys for the blog (and the rest of the site).

I'll be bringing a new Canon Vixia HF-10 High Definition camera, as well as a new Gateway P-171XL FX with a full compliment of video editing software.

My intention is to get pretty serious with the videos this summer. I'll be doing very in depth video blogs for all of the towns we visit on tours, as well as all of the festivals and events. Considering that we already have 14 tours booked, there will be a great deal of material, so stay tuned.

See you soon!

For the first time, Soriano hosted the Tuscia in Jazz Festival.  This international festival had been held in nearby Ronciglione for the past five years, but apparently that town had complained about the noise and decided they didn’t want it anymore.  The festival promoter, Italo Leali, was faced with the chore of finding a new host last year.  According to Italo, he chose Soriano for several reasons:  It has very good access to Rome, Florence and Italy’s main freeway, it has enough restaurants and hotels to support such a large festival, it has the character and ambiance essential to such a festival, and it has appropriate venues (large piazza, etc) for such a festival.  For all intents and purposes, his reasons are in sync with my own reasons for promoting Soriano: Character, Beauty, Proximity and Infrastructure.

The festival was not at all what I had expected.  I honestly thought that it would be a cute little festival with a few nights of music, headed by some local Italian jazz musicians.  Instead, it turned out to be a major International event. 

Roughly 1,400 musicians from across the globe appeared in a series of concerts every night for nearly a full month.  Some were young musicians that came to learn in the workshops or participate in competition for the Jimmy Woode prize, and some were seasoned jazz musicians that saw this as a truly international event.  Some of the bigger names included Jimmy Woode's daughter, Shawnn Monteiro, Benny Golson, Joey De Francesco, Jimmy Cobb, Buster Williams, George Cables, Bobby Durham, Jesse Davis, Giorgio Rosciglione, Gegè Munari, Eddy Palermo, Piero Odorici, Massimo Faraò and John Kinnison.
Aside from the nightly concerts, every night after midnight, Soriano’s Rotezzia Pub, a large pub that is made from a series of connecting grottos and caverns, would host the nightly jam sessions.  Here, artists would get up and perform at random until daybreak every night.

In all, it is said that 70,000 spectators came to Soriano for the concerts.  In fact, Soriano reached critical mass by the second week, when there were no more rooms available and people were renting spare bedrooms out of desperation.  Word to the wise:  Reserve early if you plan to attend in 2008.

The festival built up to a single ‘main event’ night one Saturday, when Soriano hosted its ‘Notte Bianca’  (White Night).  On this night, all stores were open until 5:00 AM, street vendors were out all night, several outdoor taverns were erected to serve grilled sausages, pasta, etc., and six stages were setup all over town to host an all-night event with 40 concerts.

All in all, this was by far the most impressive event I have ever seen in Soriano.  I’m already counting the days till next year’s festival….  It was a huge success, and will be here for at least the next five years.

I’ve been back in Los Angeles for a week now, and last night we went to an Italian restaurant for dinner for the first time since I got back.  This may not seem like a big deal, but for us it is always a tragedy.

The restaurant was Pomodoro in Woodland Hills.  I don’t want to say it is a bad place by American standards.  Actually, it is one of the better chains.  It is just that I was in Italy having the real thing a week ago, and by those standards, even the best place in the states simply stinks.

To give you an example of what I mean, let me go back about a month.  I was having a mega craving for roasted chicken and roasted potatoes.  In the states, we would generally call it Tuscan chicken, since it is generally a central Italian thing.  In Soriano, there is a place that makes roasted chicken and potatoes that are to die for, and this craving I was having needed to be addressed.

We decided to go to a place called Rosti in Westlake Village.  It is a tiny chain of just 4 restaurants.  We had been there in the past many times, and it had always been good.  In fact, it has always been the closest thing to real central Italian food we had ever eaten in the states.  The problem was that I was craving the real thing, not the ‘closest thing’.  I had the memory of Italy in my head, not the memory of a cheap imitation of Italy.

So we go to Rosti and order Caprese, followed by roasted chicken and potatoes.

The Caprese was a disaster.  But t wasn’t their fault… it was ours.  We had the memory of the real thing.  Caprese is pretty simple… it is hard to mess up.  I mean, Mozzarella, Tomato, basil, and oil… How hard can it be?  The problem is that the tomatoes we get here in L.A. taste like water, not tomatoes.  The mozzarella is never fresh, and even at best, it has absolutely no flavor. So in the end, you get something that looks like Caprese, but tastes like nothing.

Then came the main course.  The plate looked awesome!  There were my potatoes and my roasted chicken… Yummmmm!!!  That is, until my knife hit the chicken.  It didn’t feel right.  When I tasted it, I suddenly frowned and wondered how they got the chicken flavor out of the chicken.  Then I tried the potatoes, and I could feel the effects of the microwave used to heat them in my mouth.  I was devastated.  It was like craving an In n’ Out burger and settling for a Big Mac.  The problem was that this is as good as it gets.  The only way to satisfy the craving was 8.000 miles away.  Why can’t we make decent Italian food here?

Actually, it is our own fault.  We live in a move ‘em in and move ‘em out country. It starts with the farmers and ends with your meal.  The farmers mass produce everything, having to make a bigger tomato that gets to the market faster so they can grow more tomatoes.  Technology gets us bigger and cheaper tomatoes faster than ever. The price of this is flavor.  The chicken ranchers are replaced by chicken ‘mills’ that pump them full of hormones, giving us bigger chickens than ever.  They are big and cheap, so who will notice that they don’t actually taste like chickens?  

As we walk into restaurants they take our orders as soon as possible and deliver us our food as quickly as possible.  We mistake this for good and fast service, but it isn’t that at all.  In fact, they want us in and out quickly so they can get reuse your table as many times as possible that evening.  But food just doesn’t cook that fast, now does it?  So they have to precook as much as possible.  They can’t waste the time and energy to make things from scratch, so they buy the majority of what you eat in frozen form from a huge distributor.  Food is prepped quickly and reheated so that they can use fewer people in the kitchen with higher efficiency, all the while getting your order to you in lightning speed. 

The process is beautiful, and the only thing you lose along the way is flavor.   But even that is ok, since we are preconditioned to think that is the way it is supposed to be.

Then we wonder why the Italian food is so much better in Italy.  Go figure!