A love letter to... BRESCIA
The Italians call it “seconda casa”. Australians would call it a weekender, a holiday house, or maybe just our place… in the country, up the coast, in Provence, or where the family came from in Greece, Croatia or Sicily.
But I’ll go with the Italian expression. In my case, my second home is a lesser-known northern city called Brescia and a small apartment in Garda Bresciano, the western shores of nearby Lake Garda.
Not far from Milan, the capital of the Lombardy region, Brescia is a surprising city with an extraordinary history. Etruscans, Romans, the Venetians and of course, the Lombards were here. The living legacy of these great cultures and civilisations can be seen in Brescia’s UNESCO World Heritage-listed Santa Giulia complex and the nearby Roman capitolium.
This is a place of pasta, rice and polenta, cheeses, soft and sharp, from the surrounding mountains, butter (and plenty of it), game meats, lake fish, porcini in autumn, excellent wine and some of Italy’s most acclaimed chefs, restaurants and food artisans. And my Italian-now-Australian husband… hence the connection.
As mass tourism engulfs Italy from heel and toe right up to its boot straps, there’s much to be said for finding your own little corner to explore, away from the backpacks, selfie sticks and pizza, pasta and gelatofrenzied hordes. That said, Brescia has great pizza. At La Cascina dei Sapori in the small town of Rezzato,
New Pizza champion Antonio Pappalardo slow ferments stoneground flour from his mixes of ancient grains to make light, airy bases, topping them with seasonal vegetables, and creatively combined meats and cheeses. (Pappalardo has worked with Sydney’s Stefano Manfredi, also originally from Brescia, on Manfredi’s Pizzaperta restaurants.)
Pasta? A no-brainer: in any trattoria across Brescia, you’ll find casoncelli – fresh egg pasta “caskets” wrapping a meat, breadcrumb and parmesan mix or a filling of piquant local Bagoss cheese, both versions dressed with burnt butter and sage.
And some of the best gelato I’ve ever tasted (and believe me, it’s a regular pastime) comes from a modern gelateria in suburban Brescia called Bedussi.
Beyond the city, Brescia’s playground is its provincia, the almost 5000-square-kilometre administrative region surrounding it, which takes in three key landforms: mountain, lake and plain.
Chief among its lakes is Garda, site of our little apartment, with its Mediterranean microclimate and produce (olive groves, citrus trees and caper bushes), grand 19th-century villas, mountain trails, glorious views and its less-glorious history as the site of Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic – the Nazi puppet state established in the final throes of World War II.
To spend time there is a source of great pleasure: lake swims, mountain walks, pebble-beach afternoons, meals of fish with bigoli (fat, house-made spaghetti) at the trattoria over the way, alpine cheeses, freshwater sardines from the fisherman’s stall in the square, spiedo bresciano ready-roasted from the butcher’s (a mix of meats spitroasted with butter and sage) to serve on polenta taragna – yellow cornmeal darkened with grains of buckwheat.
And always, if not a Pirlo (Brescia’s Spritz), a local Lugana or Garda Classico, there’s a glass of Franciacorta, Italy’s answer to Champagne, made on the mineralrich soils by Lake Iseo next door. At the base of the Franciacorta hills, at the Osteria della Villetta in Palazzolo sull’Oglio, I’m happy to have every local producefocused course with una bollicina (literally “bubbles”).
Which brings me to the plains… la pianura, la bassa bresciana, the lowlands and pastures of the Po Valley running down towards other Lombardy provincial centres like Mantua – notable for the three-starred Dal Pescatore run by the hospitable Nadia Santini and family.
Another favourite is Crema – the provincial town chosen by director Luca Guadagnino as the location for his film, Call Me by Your Name, which also featured Lake Garda’s Sirmione.
This is another Lombardy, winding along the Po river and its tributaries to the Emilia-Romagna region.
In Emilia-Romagna, you’ll find many more places of my heart: Bologna, where I first lived in Italy as a student, a city nicknamed “the red, the fat, the learned” for its communist and anti-fascist past, its Lambrusco, mortadella, tortellini, bomboloni and tagliatelle al ragù, and its ancient university.
There’s Ferrara with elderly ladies in fur coats riding their bicycles in the piazza. And Parma, which gave the world prosciutto di Parma and Parmigiano-Reggiano.
And finally, there’s Modena, home to the finest aged balsamic and the marvellous Massimo Bottura and his brilliant wife Lara Gilmore… But that would be another (Italian) story.
This is a place of some of Italy’s most acclaimed chefs, restaurants and food artisans.