Italian Noon Meal

With nowhere to go and nothing to do, Bill and I hopped on the train headed towards Florence and got off at the first stop, a little town called Castelfiorentino. We pictured a quaint little town with a castle set on top of the hill. Well, much to our surprise, there wasn’t a castle to be found in little Castelfiorentino, though the town was pretty enough.

We walked up and down several of the town’s hills in search of the elusive castle, but kept running into dead ends. We saw some pretty streets and some lovely flowers and pots of basil and sage, but no castle. I guess we will never know from whence the town gets its name.

Since it was nearing lunchtime, we found the Il Giglio Restorante and Pizzaria, and it was open for the noon meal. The restaurant was full of Castelfiorentinoans, with nary a tourist in sight. In fact, Bill and I decided that, with the exception of Roccotederighi (the little town on top of the hill in Maramma in which we spent those four days before Rome), this town in general and this restaurant in particular had fewer tourists than any other place we had been in our travels in Italy.

Their menu, however, did include English translations. Bill concluded that someone must have one of those computer translation programs that never really work very well because some of the translations of the meals were just hilarious. Our favorite was tagliotelli alla porcini, which they translated into English as spaghetti for the porky ones.

Bill had salami pizza and I had pasta made with fresh tomatoes and basil. Both were very good. Since it was such a typical local restaurant, the atmosphere was very relaxed, and we had lots of time to study the Castelfiorentinoans while we sipped our vino rosso and waited for our meals.

Two tables particularly caught my eye. The first was a table of four men who were clearly working on some sort of road crew. They were all wearing t-shirts and the bright orange pants you see on road workers so that they can be easily spotted from oncoming cars. These four men were there when we arrived at around noon, and were still there when we left around 1:30. When we got there, they had three big bottles of water and one bottle of white wine on the table. Shortly after we ordered, the waitress brought each of them a plate of short pasta with a red sauce. Over the course of our meal, I watched these four men consume their four plates of pasta, a pizza, two large salads, four main courses that looked like veal scaloppini, and two bottles of wine.

These men were such a typical example of the afternoon siesta. When all those stores are closed from noon until 3 all over Italy, and thereby driving me crazy, the workers are eating a meal just like this one, perhaps at home, perhaps in a restaurant. As the men slowly enjoyed their meal, they talked and laughed and talked some more. The midday meal is something we will never again see in the United States.

The second group that interested me was a man with his son or grandson. The older man had a bottle of white wine. The boy and the man each ordered a plate of the same short pasta that the workers had eaten. They then each ordered a main course – the older man eating the same veal as the workers, and the young boy eating what appeared to be a pork chop. The boy enjoyed his chop so much, picking it up with his fingers so that he could get all the meat off the bone (just as I wish I could do when I am served a particularly yummy chop of any kind in a restaurant). At one point the man began speaking to Bill in Italian. Bill said, “Non capisco.” The man then asked, “Inglese?” Bill said, “Si, para Stati Uniti.” The man asked from which state. Bill said Colorado, and the man didn’t seem to understand. So Bill began to use hand gestures to indicate mountains, and the man said, “Oh, Montana.” Bill said no, Colorado. I’m not sure he ever understood. But he told us the boy was his son, and asked the boy to tell us how old he was in English. The boy told us he was 11.

After we finished our meal, we took the train back to Certaldo. After a quick stop at the market, we came home and spent the remainder of the day quietly. Our quiet evening included a very brief telephone conversation with our grandchildren, who were enjoying a day at the zoo with their mom, my sister, and my niece. Our 5-year-old granddaughter was entirely puzzled about how it could be evening while it was just midmorning in Denver. “How can it be dinnertime, Papa?” she asked her grandfather. "Because we're so far away," her grandfather replied.