Hearty minestrone keeps us filled, healthy and contented every day

Wednesday, March 26
Never in my wildest imaginings did I think I’d write a blog about cooking in Italy. Eating, yes, because one can always find food here that’s worth writing home about. But I am known in my family only for making pancakes, waffles and omelets on a regular basis, and pumpkin and walnut pies for holidays.

Nearing the final stages: Beans and grain in upper left,
greens in skillet, everything else in the soup pot.

However, when I spent two months in Italy last year without Lucy, I learned to make minestrone that was so good that I would think about it all morning, looking forward to having it for lunch. If I could delay my gratification by eating something else at lunch, then I could anticipate having the soup for dinner. Just writing about it now makes my mouth water.

Lucy had left me several cookbooks and encouraged me to use them, but I am impatient when it comes to reading directions and measuring ingredients. When Lindsey visited for a week, though, I served as her kitchen assistant and head of the one-man clean-up crew, and it helped to participate in the cooking  process rather than just reading about it. After she left, I started making a huge pot of minestrone every Wednesday, eating it once or twice a day, rationing it out so it would last until the next Wednesday. Now that Lucy is with me, I have continued the tradition, and she is able to enjoy the fruits—uh,  vegetables—of my labor.

This is the market where I buy my veggies, from Grazia.

It starts with a bike trip to the weekly outdoor market in San Salvatore. There are many other outdoor markets we could frequent, but this one is very close and has the sentimental value of being in the exact location where the house of my nonno once stood. Most markets have multiple vendors to choose from, but the San Salvatore market has only one stand, run by a pleasant woman in her 50s who is usually accompanied by a man who looks older but we think is her husband. The prices and quality are favorable, and we feel comfortable and welcome because of the friendly service. I fill up my backpack with vegetables, while Lucy selects the fruit.

Once home, I start heating a pan and a large soup pot on the stove. The pan has dried kidney or pinto beans that I had started soaking the day before, but they still need to boil for at least an hour to soften further. The soup pot, which I estimate holds about five quarts, takes water and a couple of tablespoons of concentrate for making vegetable broth. I pour some olive oil and water into a large skillet, and then I start chopping up the vegetables, which will go first into the skillet. I don’t start heating the skillet until it is about a third full to avoid overcooking the first vegetables, because I am a bit slow at chopping. I put the more fibrous vegetables in first, such as the carrots and potatoes.

I can’t specify the quantity of each ingredient, because it varies each time, but here is a list of the staples: carrots, potatoes, garlic, green or red onion, celery, Swiss chard, spinach, asparagus, zucchini (flowers included), parsley and green, yellow or red pepper. I sometimes put in radishes, chicory and some carrot greens. After frying them on the skillet for ten or fifteen minutes, I put them in the soup pot. I usually can’t fit everything in the skillet, so I do a second batch, which usually only includes the leafy ingredients such as the chard, spinach and parsley that don’t need to be fried for more than a few minutes.

By the time I have put all the veggies in the soup pan—along with some salt, pepper and oregano—I have also added about a half a cup of mixed smaller legumes to the simmering kidney beans. These come in a package called Minestrone alla Toscana and include a variety of smaller beans, peas, lentils and some grains. I put these in later because they don’t take as much time to soften as the kidney beans do. After they have simmered for about twenty minutes, the beans and grains are added to the soup and simmered for another thirty minutes to an hour. By this time, my soup pot is nearly overflowing and we have enough to last the week.

Just before eating a serving, I drizzle my full soup bowl with fresh cold-pressed olive oil from a local farm, which surpasses any oil I have bought in a supermarket. Then I grate and sprinkle a hearty dose of Parmigiano-Reggiano on top. The result is bursting with fresh flavor, and I have to exercise some caution to keep from eating too much, because it is very filling. It keeps my stomach busy for many hours digesting the diverse and healthy nutrients that are sometimes lacking in my other meals. I eat fewer between-meal snacks after having a bowl of soup because I feel full until the next meal time.

Lucy enjoys having a little less food preparation to attend to, and she also appreciates the health benefits. “I know that I’m getting lots of nutrients that I’m supposed to have,” she said. “Nobody gets enough vegetables. I look forward to eating it every day.”

Unproductive morning capped by some interesting new discoveries

Friday, March 14, part 2
At the parish archives this evening, I continued my long-term project to record the name of every Spadoni baptized in Ponte Buggianese up to about 1920. It is a boring and somewhat mind-numbing project, and I probably won’t finish it for a couple of years. However, during a coffee break, I told Andrea the story of my run-around earlier in the day, and how in the end I had been told to call the “ragazzo che sa tutto.” Did Andrea really know how to find the state of the family document I was seeking? Instead of answering directly, he said that the baptism records for Egisto Seghieri’s family would probably be in the ledger for Chiesina Uzzanese. He pulled out the books and almost immediately found the baptism of Egidio Seghieri, and seconds later he had found a brother of Egidio that I had not known about previously.

This is much more interesting than the Spadonis of Ponte Buggianese during the 1600s, I said, and I put the other book aside to focus on the new one. I recorded the baptism dates of three previously unknown siblings of Egidio: Ulisse, Adolfina and Alduina. Of equal interest, I noted the records of some Spadoni children as well. These must be the descendants of one of my great grandfather Pietro’s brothers. Two years ago, I had found records of two of Pietro’s brothers, Francesco and Angelo, when the family still lived in Pescia. The books in Pescia said Francesco and Angelo moved to Montecarlo in the late 1800s, but I lost the trail because Montecarlo had nothing on their families. Now I knew that Angelo had actually moved to Chiesina Uzzanese, because he was named as the grandfather of some of the children baptized. Before the archives closed for the day, I found that a son of Angelo’s, Pietro, had fathered at least three children: Anita (1901), Bruno (1905) and Quarta (1908). If I continue to look in the weeks to come, I’m sure I will find more, and I may find other Spadonis living here that I can definitely attach to our family tree, relatives that will not be as distant as the ones from Ponte Buggianese. After finding nothing in the morning, I am now re-energized and excited to return to my research next Wednesday.

Trip to hillside city a pleasure, even though no new info discovered

Olive trees surround the city in this view from near the top.

Friday, March 14
If I were a pessimist, today might be considered a waste of time, an exercise in futility and frustration. But I am not, and I thoroughly enjoyed going on a long bike ride—and walk—to Uzzano Castello while searching for family tree information and drawing a complete blank.

The frana that forced the road closure.

The purpose of my field trip was to find out more about the family of Egisto Seghieri, whose son Egidio immigrated to America in 1905. Egidio eventually settled in San Francisco and had two sons, a daughter and numerous grandchildren, one of whom is Donald Seghieri. I am trying to help Don clear up some mysteries about a house that his grandfather lived in that is only about a mile from where I am staying at the Casolare dei Fiori. During the 1950s, Don’s dad Tristano was contacted by an aunt, Adolfina, who wanted to modify the family property, but since Tristano and and his brother Fiory were listed as part owners, she couldn’t get a loan. They signed away their ownership so she could proceed. Don wanted to know more about the property and the family his grandfather had left behind, and so did I.

One downside of olive trimming is the ubiquitous smoke.

Last week I had gone to the address Don had given me, Via della Priora 2. I snapped some photos from various views to send to Don, and I knocked on the door but found no one at home. Don was grateful to receive the photos, which he forwarded to his cousin Gary, a son of Fiory. Gary wrote to thank me, too, and added more information: “Dad went and saw the house in 1990 or maybe 1989, I believe, and he said he knocked on the door. A woman answered, and he identified himself and asked to see the house and vineyard as he said his father most likely might have been born there and lived there for quite a while when he was a young man. He said the woman really hurt his feelings when she said, ‘Why are you here? To claim your property?’ Sorry to say he never saw the house, except for the outside and never walked the vineyard. He left very upset and said he doubted he’d ever try again.”

Last year I found Egidio’s birth certificate in Pescia, but when I tried to find out more about his younger brothers and sisters, the people working in the Pescia archives said that the location of the family house had passed from the jurisdiction of Pescia to Uzzano and then to Chiesina Uzzanese shortly after Egidio’s birth. To find the “state of the family” document, I was told I would have to look in the Castello del Capitano in Uzzano Castello, which was only open two days a month. I had not been able to make it last year, but I had put it on my list of possible research topics for this year.

Since spring has come early here—all sunny days and temperatures ranging from 65 to 70 degrees all this week—today seemed like a good day to take the journey, and it being the second Friday of the month, the archives should have been open. However, the web site providing me this information had not been updated since 2012, leaving some room for doubt, and an e-mail I had sent asking for confirmation had bounced back.

I took off around 10 a.m. and made a 20-minute ride to the base of the collina that leads to Uzzano Castello, a city with medieval origins on the side of a mountain. The winding route up to Uzzano Castello is about three kilometers, all of it too steep to ride my bike. In addition, I was faced with a sign saying the road was closed near the cemetery because of a frana, a word I didn’t know. I figured it was probably a landslide, and not wanting to take a long detour to an alternate road on the other side of the hill, I went anyway, reasoning that I could walk my bike past the frana.

It appears some people leave their olive nets up year around so they are always ready for the harvest.

The scenic beauty of the ascent and inside of the city made the trip worth the time, even though I found the archives closed when I reached the top. The warm weather had caused plants and trees to bloom early, adding a sweet fragrance to the air, and the birds surrounding me sang in celebration. Bees hummed in the fruit trees. All along the route, I saw people working in their olive orchards, trimming branches and gathering them in bundles to be burned. The climb took about 30 minutes—45 if one counts the times I stopped to take photos, observe the olive trimmers and take a quick foray through the cemetery. I easily passed the landslide, and after entering the city’s only porta, I continued uphill on narrow and worn stone streets. Wild plants, some in bloom, sprouted from the irregular rock walls lining the central street. Uzzano Castello, once a way station between Lucca and Firenze and valued for its defensible position and strategic view of the Valdinievole below, is now just a bedroom community. I saw fewer than a half dozen people during my 15-minute stroll.

Church of Saints Jacopo and Martino.

The Palazzo del Capitano was closed up, with no sign outside giving a hint that it would ever be open. I found a middle-aged man lounging on a bench in the piazza, and he told me the archives were no longer here, or at least no longer open. I must go to the municipio down below in Santa Lucia, on a different side of the hill, he said. After a few more minutes of sight-seeing, I descended, still walking in some places for fear my brakes wouldn’t be sufficient to slow me enough to maneuver some of the sharp turns.

At the municipio, my hopes rose when the clerk found an index card with the names of Egisto and his wife Virginia Giuntoli, but after a couple of minutes of deliberation with a colleague, he told me he didn’t know where the actual state of the family document could be located. I have some suspicions that the state of the family documents are still in the building at the top of the hill, but the city government doesn’t have the personnel available to make them accessible to the public.

If the document is not here, then where? I asked. There is a young man who knows everything, the clerk told me. If I called this ragazzo, he could tell me how to find what I was looking for. The clerk made a photocopy of the young man’s business card—it was Andrea Mandroni, the same person I see twice a week when he opens the parish archives in Pescia. I have already received much help from Andrea and was trying to avoid wearing out our friendship with my endless questions, but there was no use explaining this to the clerk, so I thanked him and rode off. I took a different route home, which seemed appropriate, since I already felt that I had just been going in circles. Still, had I been simply a tourist in Italy today, not doing research, this might have been the very excursion I would have chosen anyway. The weather, the sights, sounds and smells—everything else had been perfect. I arrived home around 1 p.m. to find Lucy waiting with a savory beef stew on the stove, and we dined outside.

The reddish glow is from the red walls of the Casolare.

How did my morning go? she asked. “A complete and utter failure—and an absolutely wonderful, unforgettable experience,” I said with a smile of contentment.