Today is the final day of the “Slow Food” convention in Torino, about an hour’s drive from Alba. Dawn and Breanna and I went to a slow food festival in San Francisco over Labor Day, and this would be a great opportunity to see many of the small regional vendors all under one roof, so we decided to venture out to Torino and have a look. Alberto Bettini also had a booth there, selling Amerigo’s bottled products, so that would make it a bit more fun…
I didn’t run this morning as the winery was discouragingly foggy. This is the patio outside our room. Brrrrrr!
The trip to Turin was a bit confusing, but we made it there, and found the parking garage, which was a right turn halfway down a dark tunnel. Alberto had explained how to get there, but it once we parked, we also had to navigate a large shopping mall to eventually find the convention hall. There were lots of locked doors leading nowhere, all a bit confusing.
After a bit of wait to purchase tickets, we arrived in the very large hall. We were able to find Alberto’s booth fairly quickly, and he directed us to the part of the fair where the small regional producers were gathered. We were able to find the place where we’d seen Diego make parmegano, and some of the legumes from the Sillibini mountains around Norcia! There were many many types of preserved meats, and we lamented that it’s impossible to bring such things back home.
One of funniest things was a producer of prosciutto hams, which had created a “wall of ham” in their booth.
There were food purveyors from all over the world, and I could not resist trying to Polish cheese that was encased in fried bread. Yum!
There was also jam made out of white plums. They dry the plums in white paper, and the purveyor let us taste one of the plums before it was made into jam. Heavenly!
This man very enthusiastically sold pistachio creme.
They also had gorgeous candy tins with pinup girls on them.
We found the larger part of the convention to be somewhat tiring, as there were throngs of people (albeit quite polite), and we were at this point lugging a few bags of jam around with us. We decided to say goodbye to the Slow Food fair (which closed tonight at 6pm anyway), and see a little bit of Torino.
One of the things we saw at Slow Food was a *gorgeous* display put on by Lavazza coffee, which is the premier large coffee manufacturer in Italy.
At the fair, we saw that they had a flagship coffee shop in the middle of Torino. Having no other itinerary for the evening, we made it our goal to find this cafe. After about 30 minutes of navigation (during which we went less than 5 miles, but twisted around a lot), we were able to find it. They make all the normal coffee drinks, but also some wacky things with flavored whipped cream, and some espresso desserts. I had an “espresso tiramisu”, which was (from bottom to top): a thin layer of gelatinous panna cotta, a shot of espresso, crumbled cookies, and caramel sauce. Kind of overly sweet, but good.
Dawn had an espresso side-by-side with two shots of flavored whipped cream. They sell the flavored whipped cream in the markets here, apparently.
We walked around Torino, and decided that it reminded both of us of Manhattan. It had a kind of gritty, urban feel, but also was quite old, lots of twisty streets, and surprises around every corner. This is one of the very cute side streets.
And the main street, with lots of pedestrians.
The main shopped streets were very cosmopolitan, and the smaller streets had all sorts of great-smelling restaurants. We also had a slice of pizza, and I tried the gelato from Grom, which someone suggested in Florence, but we didn’t get around to. Dawn was able to remember the name, which I find amazing. Things fall out of my short-term memory all the time, but once she hears a word or the name of a restaurant, she remembers it almost indefinitely. Here is to awesome memory superpowers! I had the caramel with himalayan sea salt, and coffee, which is always my favorite flavor. Their coffee is dense and dark and a little bitter, which is hot I like it.
Yes, that makes two desserts in one evening, although spaced about 2 hours apart. What can I say, except, that’s the kind of thing you do on vacation?
Walking back to the car, we found ourselves near what looked to be an ancient crumbling wall. We joked that as we would not be able to see the shroud of Turin (aka Torino), the next best thing might be to take our photos next to a section of Turin’s ancient Roman city wall. Photos were taken, amidst much merriment. The ones of the wall turned out fine. The ones with us in them turned out fuzzy.
The next morning, upon reading a travel guide to Italy, I found that we in fact had been in the piazza containing the Duomo that holds the infamous shroud of Turin, one of the more famous medieval relics. The shroud lies in a silver casket inside an iron box within a marble coffer inside the urn on the chapel altar inside the Duomo, and is not on display. The actual shroud was found to be a fake in 1988 – rather than being the shroud of Christ, it dates back to only to the 12th century. I think it is hysterically funny that we were joking about not seeing the shroud of Torino, yet in fact we were as close as we could get without actually being in the Duomo! And to boot, I think the Roman wall was actually older than the shroud.
The drive back to Alba was uneventful. We fell immediately to bed.
