Feasting in Verona In this region of Italy, tradition and creativity intersect and the only thing fast about the food is its ability to please, writes
Liza Weisstuch.
It was a chilly Tuesday afternoon in a giant shopping centre in Verona, Italy, and there was a feast before me: a plate of tagliatelle strewn with saffron, spec and mushroom; oversized raviolis packed with scampi and artichoke. The raviolis on my friend’s plate were stuffed with polenta and ossobuco. It was disorienting to be in a mall because this was some of the most excellent pasta I’d eaten in recent memory.
You might scoff, but remember: this is Italy, where the only thing fast about the food – even in a food court – is its ability to please. The eatery, across from a picture-perfect display of produce in a country-style supermarket, is one of 23 Giovanni Rana quick-service restaurants scattered throughout the country. In standard food court fashion, we waited in line to order at the counter and watch short-order cooks prepare dishes in a small open kitchen. There wasn’t much standard beyond that.
The raviolis, each a dimpled parcel of intense flavour, had that delicate pillow-like quality that tempts you to dig in with a spoon, as if poking it with a fork would be abusive. The pasta could easily pass for something an aged Italian grandparent prepared, adroitly yet swiftly, thanks to decades of practice. In a funny way, that’s sort of the case. I was drawn to this eatery because I’d heard that the facility where the pasta is made is mere miles away.
If it sounds silly – sacrilege, even – to talk about a pasta factory in Italy, one that sends its goods to dozens of countries around the globe, no less, consider this: Giovanni Rana, the almost 80-year-old patriarch whose smiling mug is all over the pasta’s packages, is hardly just a figurehead. One woman who worked at my hotel told me he’s the most popular man in town, after the Pope. His company has its roots in his entrepreneurial grit when, as a teenager after World War II, he made tortellini out of his family’s home.
As the story goes, more women were working and handmade pasta was starting to seem like a treat, not tradition. Enter Rana, with a secondhand motorbike for his nascent delivery business. Decades later, it’s a massive global enterprise with patents on all sorts of pasta-making machinery. It’s the stuff of folklore, except when it’s true.
This was all stuff I learned the prior day when my friend and I took a pasta class at the facility, a reminder of how much practice it takes to turn flour, water, salt and eggs into lunch. Later, when I was wandering through Verona’s medieval cobblestoned streets of the city, it struck me how fitting that story is to this city, where tradition and creativity intersect. Verona, you might say, is one of the more modest of Italy’s cities, easily overshadowed by the energetic swagger of Rome, the mythic splendour of Florence, the romance of Venice, or the high-style elegance of Milan.
What Verona does have is a palpable fortitude and wisdom, evident everywhere, especially in the architecture. The city itself is a Unesco heritage site because so many ancient buildings endure here. The amphitheatre, built in the first century and Italy’s third largest today, is not least among them. It’s incredible to look at them knowing that the structure was already ancient when Napoleon and his army occupied the city in 1797.
When Dante was exiled from his native Florence in the early 1300s, he found sanctuary in Verona, where he worked to write Paradiso, the last part of The Divine Comedy. In it he praises and thanks ‘‘thine earliest refuge’’; a stately statue of the writer in a pensive pose stands in Piazza Dante. And, of course, Shakespeare set his most famous love story here. The pub-like warmth of the place was one thing, but when I tried the risotto all’Amarone, one of the region’s signatures, it was easy to understand why it’s known to have been a stop for everyone from Hemingway to Berlusconi ...
The food in Verona, fittingly, is very much in keeping with Northern Italian traditions, which is to say hearty, stickto-the-gut fare. (Like I said: fortitude and wisdom.) Broths and wines tend to be favoured by chefs over tomatoes, and chopped herbs are the preferred flavouring agent. Nowhere is that more evident than at Bottega dei Vini, though it’s said there’s been an inn on the site as early as the 16th century. Today it’s owned by a consortium of 11 winemakers, who resuscitated the tavern when it shuttered in the summer of 2010. Its cosy old-world charm is very much unspoiled. The walls are lined with shallow shelves crammed with wine bottles as a library’s would be with books.