Blog of the Morning Calm

Weird & Wonderful: Italy

Weird and Wonderful is back with an ecletic collection of oddities found on our trip to Italy, starting with Chinese Ronnie Corbett.

Chinese Ronnie Corbett

Arsenal 'til I die

Attractive statues

Sexual preducker

World's largest fusbol table!

Some really tiny, intricate furtiture

This is one hench horse. Must be on steroids!

Marzipan delights!

Very bizarre mannequin in a sex shop

Don't jump!

A wall of chewing gum

Katie's namesake boat

Disabled lake access - never seen this before

A ship after my own heart

There's a lot more of these to come! We love 'em!

Paolo printed us a photo of this bus stop to helps us find it. I guess we look that stupid.

How lovely.

Emilia Romagna - home to a delicious collection of things!

Sean Connery Private Investigator...

What a cute railing

Mamma mia pizzeria!!

I'm a Pacman!

Jesus Christ!

Very cute post/bread delivery box

Poor Billy No-Legs

Say cheese!

Funky door knob

Like something out of the Labyrinth

Yup, more road signs!

Interesting war monument in Rome

The beauty of scaffolding!

These Romulus Remus statues were EVERYWHERE

Coolest policemen ever!

Oh Italy, you delicious beast. It's been a few years but I can still remember how you taste. We ate so much and it was pretty much all fantastic, so I'm going to keep the words to a minimum and let the pictures do most of the talking. But trust me, this one is definitely worth reading all the way through.

First let's take a look at some of the classics - ice cream, pizza and pasta - oh my!

The gelato was outstanding. And we definitely ate enough to speak with some confidence on the matter. And of course, mint choc chip featured almost daily!

This may look like a pizza, but it's actually a ham omelette, baked inside a ring of dough. Dave was more than a little impressed.

This HUGE calzone was for one person...luckily that one person was Dave!

Seafood might not be a groundbreaking pizza topping but when the clams are still in their shells, it does present an unexpected challenge.

We couldn't go to Bologna without having bolognese! It came with tagliatelle rather than spaghetti, and was pretty darn delicious. Best I've ever had? I can't be sure about that one, as it was a favourite of mine for quite some time so I've eaten a fair few bowls of the stuff over the years. But it was scrumptious.

Dave ate this spooky looking squid-ink pasta with seafood and loved it. It's not often you get the opportunity to eat black food, and it amused me greatly that it turned the inside of his mouth black!

This next one is a little weird - bigoli, which is like a thick spaghetti, with a ragu made from...donkey meat! To be honest, everything tastes so good in Italy that I'd eat doormat ragu if it was a local delicacy!

The final pasta dish I want to show you are these three, plump, shiny, beautiful raviolis. Truly delicious - so rich and flavoursome.

Right, now it's time for some other, less "obvious" tantalising tongue-ticklers...man, I am salivating so much writing this!

PANINIS! Did you know that 'panini' is actually plural? So it's one panino, two panini...but when they're this tasty, who's ordering one at a time?! I can honestly say that this was one of the best sandwiches I've ever had. The taste-memory has faded with time but I can distinctly remember a flavour of fennel in the salami, which went beautifully with the roasted aubergines.

This simple looking dish was deceptively delicious. The beans were tender and well seasoned, and the meat was well cooked but both of these were completely forgettable once we tried the main attraction - BONE MARROW! I think this was the first time I had tried this heavenly nectar and wowzers...there are no words.

This is something I hadn't seen before - deep fried olives stuffed with tuna. I didn't try them, obviously, but Dave really liked them.

We did try some arancini, but I have to say I'm not a fan. They are balls of risotto rice, stuffed with various fillings and then deep fried with a cripsy coating. I'm just not a fan of the texture of the rice, but maybe I just haven't had really good quality arancini.

One of our favourite things to do in Venice was have a glass of wine and some cicchetti. These are little snacks, usually bread topped with something scrummy. Here we have cream cheese with smoked salmon, whipped goat's cheese with walnut and redcurrants, something like brie with an anchovy, and a nutty, creamy spread with pistachios. These dreamy bites with two glasses of wine came to €8.80, which is a blumin' cheap way to eat in Venice! And if you pick the right place, you can take your treats outside and enjoy the view while you eat.

These next dishes stood out from the crowd not only for flavour, but for the size of the portions. The Italians sure are generous!

If you can believe it, this huge plate of carpaccio was Dave's starter! Now I know you think this is something I'd remember, but for the life of me I can't be sure whether this was beef or horse...either way it could feed an army.

And it was followed by this ENORMOUS piece of breaded veal, topped with a layer of ham and melted cheese. Man were we stuffed!

The next mega-meal was this gigantic seafood stew, which had every kind of aquatic creature you can think of, bones, shells, tails and all. It was an orchestra of textures and flavours. Or so I'm told.

And while Dave was slurping his way through the ocean, I was attempting to polish off this ridiculously large tomato, parma ham and mozzarella "salad". How this can be classed as a salad, I just do not know. But boy was it yummy.

And finally, the star of our trip - the one thing I would say without a doubt, anyone visiting Florence should go and get. This, my dear readers, is the biggest and best steak I have ever eaten. The meal, for which we had travelled to Fiesole, started with a beer, followed by a glass of wine. These were polished off before the food came, so of course we ordered a carafe of wine to enjoy with the steak. I think this is the main reason we both fell asleep on a bench in the village square afterwards. Anyway, I digress.

This huge hunk of meat was served to us rare, with our choice of sides. We opted for simple potatoes and red peppers, which were a perfect match. There was a huge bone running through the middle of the steak and it was carved and presented to us in this rather bemusing way. It was a beast of a meal, but my god were we determined to finish it. And finish it we did!

As someone who likes a lot of flavour in her food, I am sometimes a little disappointed by steak. I can get a bit bored, chewing my way through endless mouthfuls of meat. But this was so charred and gnarley on the outside and so juicy and sweet in the middle...this is what a real steak tastes like. Trust me, go get yourself one! But definitely take a friend - they don't do individual portions!

Roma

“All roads lead to Rome” said a Roman once, and this has been repeated a million times since. This would be the final leg of our Italian tour so maybe the saying was right after all.

We had three days to explore the 28th most visited city in the world (according to Paolo), which seems ridiculously low if you ask me. We knew three days wouldn’t be enough time to explore a city that had been the capital of the world for hundreds of years, and which is so steeped in history and culture that it makes your brain hurt. We know we will return to Rome, so there may be another blog post in the future, when we will explore Rome again and it'll have a catchy title, such as “Roma II.”

Whatever expectations we may or may not have had upon arrival, Rome would prove to be one of the most interesting and culturally beautiful cities we have ever been to. More so than London, New York, Berlin, Tokyo, Beijing, Hong Kong and Bangkok, to name-drop a few. Literally everywhere we turned we hit upon some kind of beautiful building, exuding enough history to make me want to pick up a book. There were so many incredible sites and ruins that it was hard at times not to become a bit passive, and at times I felt like I was maybe just snapping photos (and therefore “memories”) of anything and everything.

Don't get me wrong, we certainly didn't take it for granted and straight after the holiday I went to London, where I did not see anywhere near the same level of beauty, even from high up on the London Eye. Rome was just spectacular.

On day one we went to a 2000 year old stadium called the Colloseo, or in English, the Coliseum. It was fascinating. We paid extra to have a tour by an Italian lady who was enthusiastic and descriptive and appeared especially cheerful when talking about bloody battles and executions, carried out by starved animals tearing off people's flesh. Sand was placed on the battleground to soak up the blood and because it was easily replaced once it had reached blood saturation levels. For this reason the battleground was called the Arena, which means sand in Latin.

Secret doors using pulleys and ramps shielded the audience from seeing the animals and gladiators that ascended from below, surprising and delighting the spectators. Gladiators would only fight two or three times a year so they had ample time to heal. The games were free to watch and the seating was allocated by class, with the Senate in the closest seats (ring side) and the women and povvos in the highest seats. The senators had their names engraved into the chairs and over time, as senators died, their names were crossed out and a new name was written.

The Coliseum truly was a phenomenal place to see, both at day and night. I really want to see a UFC event held there. The new gladitorial battles take place mostly in Vegas but what better venue is there than this one?! Make it happen Dana White.

That night we went to an area of town that I decided to refer to as Transvestite, because the real name (Trastevere) just would not stick. As we had experienced in Florence, night time makes this city glow with intrigue. Beauty wasn’t hard to come by on the streets of Roma.

The second day started with a slight delay due to our Chinese neighbours utilising the shower as a washing machine. The place we were staying had a shared bathroom between two bedrooms, which was a bit annoying. But the apartment was in the centre of town, near Pyramide Metro, so we were happy enough.

Our Colliseo ticket could also be used to visit the birthplace of Rome (Pallatine) and the Roman Forum, so this is what we did. The Pallatine had a series of aqueducts and the earliest finds dated back to 800 BC. We also found the house of Augustus, which had paintings that had stood there for millennia. It was an impressive sight and the detail was still there in places, which the photos don’t show.

The Forum was outrageous. Buildings still stood that had existed over 2000 years ago. There's a bronze door that still has a working lock – 2000 years of opening hasn’t broken it. It was sublime... bar the fluff that scratched my eye, which I barely made a fuss about...

Now the next building I'll mention was probably the grandest of them all. We saw it first at night and it figuratively blew our socks off. It was a towering structure of stone with dozens of statues and it radiated beauty like no other building I have ever seen has. It was built in 1925 and is called Altare della Patria (Altar of the Fatherland). We loved it.

The next major tourist stop was the La Bocca della Verità, or Mouth of Truth, made famous in the film Roman Holiday. This two thousand year old statue didn’t bite off any liars' hands when we were there though. I went for a slightly different take on the traditional photo as I am so wacky!

We wondered the down the beautiful Spanish steps and went into several churches. We saw more palaces and carried on walking until our feet were pleading with us to stop and my camera's SD card was no longer hungry.

As well as buildings, there are a plethora of fountains that are easy on the eye too. This is where I take over, but just briefly so don't worry! I just want to tell you about one fountain which is probably the most famous - Fontana di Trevi. It was built in 1762 and is absolutely beautiful. It has featured in quite a few films, including The Lizzy McGuire Movie! Understandably, it's a huge tourist attraction and so it took a bit of time to get a good view but once we did, it was definitely worth it. It's truly beautiful and so incredibly intricate and outrageously elaborate. These Italians definitely know how to do art and architecture and whatnot, that's for sure.

We also visited the Pantheon, which was brill. How could have been constructed over 2000 years ago?! It blows my mind. We ate a fly riddled pizza outside while staring at the, frankly beautiful, building. Another great day!

Unfortunately we had to leave Rome all too soon, but our Ryanair flight afforded us some lovely views of the mountain ranges as we flew home. Until next time - ciao bellas!