Davos Newbies

From RBC:

Obama is either very good or very lucky. Somehow “troops out of Iraq to add to Afghanistan” and “go after al-Qaeda in Pakistan without asking Musharraf’s permission” and “negotiate with Iran” have all become not just mainstream views but Administration policy. And now this [al-Maliki’s support for Obama’s timetable].

You’d think it couldn’t get any better, but then I saw this clip (watch particularly from the one-minute mark):

Sean Tevis, an information architect, is running for State Representative in Kansas. He needed $26,000 by the end of July and knew a grand total of two people who could donate $500. But, as he relates, “This is the Internet!”

So he reckoned he could get 3,000 donors who would give $8.34 each. At time of writing he has 4,662 donors. (Hat tip Tom Steinberg via Google Reader.)

Mike Arrington reports that a number of idiots entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are taking the drug Provigil so they can work more hours. Working more hours doesn’t necessarily create better businesses. As Garr Reynolds notes in an unrelated post, there is an increasing amount of research that emphasizes the importance of getting adequate sleep. Reynolds snips this telling quote by sleep expert Neil Stanley from a BBC article:

Sleep is not just a waste of time, it is a very active time and we need it for things like memory and learning. During the day we acquire information, but at night we sort that information. People complain about sleep deprivation, but now with the 24/7 society and information overload we need our sleep more than ever.

My slow, boring commute home this evening was jolted by as uplifting a radio report as you’ll ever hear. Do yourself a favor and listen to Michele Norris interview Homemade Jamz.

I know it makes us seem philistines, but my family spent an absolute minimum of time in museums during our Italian visit. My wife and I, however, sneaked away from the family when we visited Perugia. After walking around part of the historic center we went into the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, housed in the Palazzo dei Priori. It would not be an exaggeration to say that we were two of perhaps 20 visitors to this large, wonderful collection on a Saturday morning in late June. There’s no better way to see art than in comparative isolation, particularly in such a stunning setting.

But the reason to get on the next flight to Italy, and find your way to Perugia as soon as you can, is Piero della Francesca’s Polyptych of St Anthony. I almost feel guilty about including the pallid photo above. I can’t remember a work of art that gave me an electric charge to see in person. I get chills even thinking about it now.

I’ve long recognized that Venice has had a long time to perfect the art of separating tourists from their money. They’ve had little else to do economically since they lost even the last vestiges of power in the 18th century, after all. But I truly had my breath taken away on this trip by the cost of a vaporetto ride. A single ticket, good for 60 minutes on the vaporetto network, is €6.50, or $10.20 at current exchange rates. I truly think that’s insane. If you want a 24-hour ticket, the deal is slightly better: €16 or $25.

I know that if your a Venetian resident, you can get a cheaper pass, but still. Incidentally, I remember zipping around Venice with a local architect in 1982 or thereabouts. We boldly hopped onto vaporetti without ever bothering about tickets. “Tickets are for tourists,” he told me. That’s no longer true: the clever electronic tickets they now have are easily checked and I witnessed one sweep through the #2 vaporetto by the conductor which resulted in one disgruntled local getting pulled aside.

Vaporetto photo by D’Arcy Vallance from Flickr

By most standards, even in bookish Berkeley, I’m a voracious reader. But I marked a proud milestone on my recent Italian journey. My nine-year old son read more books than I did over the three weeks. Who says the younger generation marks the death of the book?

Going away for three weeks to Italy is as close to heaven as this atheist can contemplate. But I’ve inevitably returned to an enormous backlog of work. The enforced three-week hiatus from Davos Newbies has also left me with a surfeit of blogging ideas that I’ll try to dribble out in the interstices between getting real work done.

Unsurprisingly in the food-obsessed Bay Area, the first question a colleague in my office asked me today was, “What was the most memorable meal you had in Italy?” I had an answer, but the question wasn’t that easy. It’s possible to eat wonderfully well in Italy, but the general standard is, truth to tell, just OK (and I’m not an Italy novice: I’ve traveled there many times and I lived in Italy in 1989-90 for a year). My wife reckons we’ve becomed spoiled since we moved to Berkeley, and she may well be right. The general standard here is truly exceptional: great local ingredients, caring chefs, intelligent restaurateurs.

So where did we eat memorable meals. I’d count four occasions. First, in Rome we ate at Trattoria Monti, which The New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni writes about near-obsessively. We reserved a table, which was a good thing since during our meal there were a half dozen parties who arrived, only to be turned away. Some were Italian, but most were – to my keen eye – obvious NYT-reading Americans. Monti is very much a neighborhood restaurant in Rome, but it has prospered on Bruni’s enthusiasm. We ate well, and the atmosphere was wonderful, but I think it rated fourth out of our meals worth counting.

Third place must go to La Grotta in Orvieto. We didn’t find La Grotta in any of our guide books. Instead, it was recommended by the owner of the best paper shop in Orvieto (who also invited my family to his studio to learn to make marbled paper, but that’s another great story). It’s an Orvietan equivalent of Monti – a solid, local restaurant – but I thought it had qualities that raised it well above the norm. My main course of pigeon was something I wouldn’t ordinarily eat, but pigeon is in some ways the Orvietan dish. If you take the tour of underground Orvieto, where you explore some of the caves cut into the volcanic rock on which the city is based, you see hundreds of pigeonholes cut into the rock hundreds of years ago. My pigeon wasn’t kept in a sub-Orvieto pigeonhole as far as I know, but it was excellent.

The two best meals were both in Venice, which is a slight irony, since Venice has one of the least respected culinary traditions in Italy. The first takes pride of place for setting. Altanella is marked by a non-descript door down an alley on the Giudecca, the largely neglected island that is the setting for Palladio’s masterpiece, Il Redentore. Walk through the humble restaurant and you arrive at a wonderfully picturesque terrace, overlooking a true backwater. For a first course I had an excellent spaghetti with anchovies. My children had the often-lauded gnocchi. My wife and I shared our main courses of grilled John Dory and grilled prawns with artichokes. The young signor Altanella gave us a postcard of the restaurant in a 1902 photograph, which is when his great-grandfather founded the trattoria. (Like Monti, Altanella is not a fresh discovery: it was apparently a François Mitterrand favorite.)

We lucked upon the final memorable meal on our last day in Venice, when we were all tired and sweltering in the heat. While my family went into an art gallery with things I didn’t like, I noticed a sign on the window asking people to inquire at the restaurant down the road if the owner wasn’t in. There aren’t many constants about the art world, but generally art people are discerning about their food. So I steered us into Osteria Oliva Nera for lunch. We didn’t eat much – a single plate each – but they were far and away the best food we had in Italy. My spaghettini alle vongole was to die for; my wife’s pasta with monkfish possibly even better. My children were unadventurous with their spaghetti al ragu (spag bol for the English), but it, too, was as good as it gets. Such superb simplicity doesn’t come cheap, certainly in Venice for dollar-poor tourists. But it was worth every euro.

Important addendum

My one exception to my downbeat verdict on most Italian food is Italian ice cream. As my wife will attest, I will not stint in my determination to find yet another gelateria to sample. I cannot conceive of a day in Italy without ice cream, preferably at least twice a day. Given the heat during our stay, I think my desires also reflected a real necessity to cool down.

So over a three-week period, which gelateria wins the Palme d’Or (or palma d’oro)? Unquestionably, it’s Pasqualetti in Orvieto. They pass the pistachio test fabulously (the best guide to the excellence of a gelateria), but I was knocked out by their amarena (wild cherry). As good a gelato as I’ve ever had. A quick Google of Pasqualetti reveals that they also have a shop in Rome, which is run by the daughter of grandmaster Giuseppe Pasqualetti.

My family and I are luxuriating in the Umbrian countryside, with extraordinary views across to the hill town of Orvieto. The one thing we are lacking — which doesn’t matter very much, to tell the truth — is Internet access. My BlackBerry browser keeps me in touch with the essentials (TalkingPointsMemo is my daily lodestone, although I am using NewsJunk as well). But bigger endeavors, like keeping up with my feeds or even updating Davos Newbies will have to wait.

We found what seems to be the one WiFi hotspot in Orvieto this morning, but I won’t be a regular: Euro 3.10 for 30 minutes! Fortunately there are other aspects to life in Italy.

I passed the sample German citizenship test, with five out of seven correct answers. Not that I plan on applying or anything. Still, if we end up with a McCain presidency, maybe it’s an option I should consider.