where fish wear crowns 249I’ve ever tasted. We didn’t poach on the wedding banquet, just the three
ordinary courses they’d whipped up to feed the staff. While we ate and
recovered our senses we watched the banquet pass by, one ornate entry
after another. Forget all previous remarks about simplicity being the soul
of Italian cuisine, this was an edible Rose Bowl parade. The climax was
the Coronated Swordfish: an entire sea creature, at least four feet long
from snout to tail, stuffed and baked and presented in a semi- lounging
“S” shape on its own rolling cart. It seemed to be smiling as it reclined in
languid, fishy glory on a bed of colorful autumn vegetables, all cupped
delicately in a nest of cabbage leaves. Upon its head, set at a rakish angle,
the fish wore a crown carved from a huge red bell pepper. Its sharp nose
poked out over the edge of the cart, just at eye level to all the bambini
running around, so in the interest of public safety the tip of His Majesty’s
sword was discreetly capped with a lemon cut into the shape of a tulip.
I imagined the kitchen employees who carved this pepper crown and
lemon tulip, arranging this fish on his throne. No hash slingers here, but
food poets, even in an ordinary budget roadside hotel. We’d come in ex-
pecting steam- table food, and instead we found cabbages and kings.
/The roads of Abruzzi, Umbria, and Tuscany led us through one spec-
tacular agrarian landscape after another. On the outskirts of large cities,
most of the green space between apartment buildings was cordoned into
numerous tidy vegetable gardens and family- sized vineyards. Growing
your own, even bottling wine on a personal scale, were not eccentric no-
tions here. I’ve seen these cozy, packed- in personal gardens in blocks sur-
rounding European cities everywhere: Frankfurt, London, every province
of France. After the abrupt dissolution of the Soviet Union’s food infra-
structure, community gardeners rallied to produce a majority of the fruits
and vegetables for city populations that otherwise might have starved.
Traversing the Italian countryside, all of which looked ridiculously
perfect, we corroborated still another cliché: all roads actually do lead to
Rome. Every crossroads gave us a choice of blue arrows pointing in both
directions, for ROMA. Beyond the cities, the wide valleys between medi-