I’ve heard it time and time again.  ”I can’t wait to have Fettuccine Alfredo in Italy”.  Ummm, sorry friend… you won’t find it.  It isn’t Italian.  Well, that isn’t entirely true, actually.  You can get it in Italy, but you will never find anything like it it on a menu, and certainly not by that name.  To get you in the right frame of mind, imagine I served you a simple slice of toast with a pat of butter on it, and I told you this was a special dish I call ‘Bread alla Michael’, you would laugh, right?   Fettuccine Alfredo falls into that realm for an Italian.

My Stomach is Unsettled Tonight

When you were growing up, if you had a little stomach ache, maybe your mother gave you some chicken broth.  Perhaps some simple rice, or a little toast?  If your stomach was unsettled, she gave you something light, right?  In the pasta culture of Italy, one of the most common things ‘mamma’ would have given you is a very simple pasta, called ‘pasta in bianco’.  That translates to ‘white pasta’… or more indirectly, ‘without any sauce’.  Of course, mamma would never have just given you pasta without flavor, so she put a little butter and Parmesan cheese on it to get you to eat it.

It is the most basic of pastas.   You will never find it on a menu in Italy, because who in their right mind would go out and pay to have Pasta In Bianco?  It is so simple, so basic, that if you really wanted it any restaurant could give it to you, so to advertise it on a menu would be like Ford advertising that their cars have steering wheels.  Duh!

To go to a restaurant with the purpose of ordering this dish would be like going to a Chinese restaurant with the purpose of ordering plain, steamed, white rice.  It simply is what it is.  And if you DO ask for it in a restaurant in Italy, the waiter may show concern for you, thinking you may not be feeling well.

The Pregnant Wife

So why am I rambling on about stomach aches, anyway?  This is how ‘Alfredo Sauce’ was born.  As the story goes, there was a restaurant owner of a touristy restaurant in Rome back in the 1920′s.  His name was Alfredo, and at the time he had a pregnant wife. She was regularly having pasta in bianco, because she couldn’t keep anything else down.  The story they tell you now is that one day Alfredo rushed into the kitchen to make a special dish that she simply could not resist, and he suddenly invented Fettuccine Alfredo… well, it makes for a good tourist tale, but it is just Pasta in Bianco. It is what any Italian would make on any given day for any pregnant woman suffering from nausea.

One day, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were at his restaurant and had this dish that the wife had been eating.  That day the pasta happened to be Fettuccine, and of course she was having it ‘In Bianco’.  They loved it,, and gave Alfredo a picture of them to hang on his wall along with a golden spook and fork.

Alfredo gave them the “recipe”.  I put recipe in quotes for a reason. Try to imagine if a visitor asked you for the recipe for buttered toast.  To any Italian, giving the “recipe” for pasta in bianco is just like that.

When they went back to Hollywood, they began to serve it to friends, telling them about Alfredo’s restaurant in Rome.  Alfredo suddenly found Hollywood elite visiting his restaurant, looking for ‘Alfredo’s Fettuccine’, so it made its way to his menu.  Pasta in bianco was now ‘Fettuccine Alfredo’, at least for the steady stream of tourists that frequented his place.  Many actors also contributed photos, of course.  The restaurant became a very popular tourist destination for Americans.

Off To America

After several years, Alfredo sold his place to the person that runs it now.  But he later got involved with another group of entrepreneurs, who opened another Alfredo (including Alfredo’s in New York, Vegas, and Disney).  Fettuccine Alfredo became even more popular in America as a result, to the point that it became a staple in just about every Italian restaurant in the US.  Of course,, as good Americans, we need to make everything bigger and better, so ‘Alfredo’ became a ‘sauce’ for just about everything, almost like a Starbucks ingredient for coffee.  Chicken Alfredo, Shrimp Alfredo, Tomato Pesto Pasta Pine Alfredo….. ugh.  People began to add cheese, pepper, starch, and who knows what… to the point that any white creamy thing that went with pasta became ‘Alfredo Sauce’.  In America.

New-Yorkese Cuisine

That is how much of what we believe to be Italian food came to be. Imported, morphed and combined shadows of what the real Italian thing was.  I call it ‘New Yorkese’.  Buca Di Beppo is not an Italian chain, it is a New Yorkese chain.  Maggiano’s? New Yorkese.  Olive Garden?  No, I won’t even give Olive Garden such a high designation.

You won’t find spaghetti and meatballs in Italy.  You will never find olive oil and herb dipping sauce with your bread.  There will be no Chicken-Pesto pasta, and you won’t see a meat lover’s pizza.  You will also never see Alfredo Sauce.  That is, unless you happen upon the restaurant that exists with the sole purpose of capitalizing on the fact that you are seeking it out.

L’Originale Alfredo

You can go there.  It is in downtown Rome.  They will have beautiful outdoor seating, they will have a people that will serenade you, and you will see the pictures all over the walls.  And yes, you can order a dish of Pasta in Bianco.  ummm, I mean Fettuccine Alfredo.  You will be joined by nothing but other Americans that were looking for the same place, for the same reasons.  You will find no Italians, no other Europeans, nada.  This place is there just for Americans.  If that is what you are after, by all means go and have a wonderful time.  It is truly a pretty place.  But for those that are looking for something authentic, by all means, keep walking.   Since they don’t cater to Italians here, they can get away with low quality ingredients, producing low-quality food.  Why?  Because you are a tourist and you won’t know the difference.  Why not stay home and go to Olive Garden if you want bad Italian food?

Actually, if you find yourself there and suddenly see what I am talking about, there is a great place next door called ReCafè, which makes fantastic pizza.

But if you really, really want it…

Hey, just because it is extremely simple, doesn’t make it bad, right?  Actually, Pasta in bianco is a wonderful light dish, just not something one would pay a premium for.   So when you are in Italy, don’t worry about the fact that it is not on the menu.  If you want it, order Fettuccine In Bianco.  If you want creamy, you can ask for Fettuccine Con Panna.  It will be what you are looking for, but will be much better than what you will get at the Alfredo place.  But if you go into ANY Italian restaurant and ask for ‘Alfredo Sauce’, they will certainly ask you who Alfredo Sauce is.

I’ve been back in Los Angeles for a week now, and last night we went to an Italian restaurant for dinner for the first time since I got back.  This may not seem like a big deal, but for us it is always a tragedy.

The restaurant was Pomodoro in Woodland Hills.  I don’t want to say it is a bad place by American standards.  Actually, it is one of the better chains.  It is just that I was in Italy having the real thing a week ago, and by those standards, even the best place in the states simply stinks.

To give you an example of what I mean, let me go back about a month.  I was having a mega craving for roasted chicken and roasted potatoes.  In the states, we would generally call it Tuscan chicken, since it is generally a central Italian thing.  In Soriano, there is a place that makes roasted chicken and potatoes that are to die for, and this craving I was having needed to be addressed.

We decided to go to a place called Rosti in Westlake Village.  It is a tiny chain of just 4 restaurants.  We had been there in the past many times, and it had always been good.  In fact, it has always been the closest thing to real central Italian food we had ever eaten in the states.  The problem was that I was craving the real thing, not the ‘closest thing’.  I had the memory of Italy in my head, not the memory of a cheap imitation of Italy.

So we go to Rosti and order Caprese, followed by roasted chicken and potatoes.

The Caprese was a disaster.  But t wasn’t their fault… it was ours.  We had the memory of the real thing.  Caprese is pretty simple… it is hard to mess up.  I mean, Mozzarella, Tomato, basil, and oil… How hard can it be?  The problem is that the tomatoes we get here in L.A. taste like water, not tomatoes.  The mozzarella is never fresh, and even at best, it has absolutely no flavor. So in the end, you get something that looks like Caprese, but tastes like nothing.

Then came the main course.  The plate looked awesome!  There were my potatoes and my roasted chicken… Yummmmm!!!  That is, until my knife hit the chicken.  It didn’t feel right.  When I tasted it, I suddenly frowned and wondered how they got the chicken flavor out of the chicken.  Then I tried the potatoes, and I could feel the effects of the microwave used to heat them in my mouth.  I was devastated.  It was like craving an In n’ Out burger and settling for a Big Mac.  The problem was that this is as good as it gets.  The only way to satisfy the craving was 8.000 miles away.  Why can’t we make decent Italian food here?

Actually, it is our own fault.  We live in a move ‘em in and move ‘em out country. It starts with the farmers and ends with your meal.  The farmers mass produce everything, having to make a bigger tomato that gets to the market faster so they can grow more tomatoes.  Technology gets us bigger and cheaper tomatoes faster than ever. The price of this is flavor.  The chicken ranchers are replaced by chicken ‘mills’ that pump them full of hormones, giving us bigger chickens than ever.  They are big and cheap, so who will notice that they don’t actually taste like chickens?  

As we walk into restaurants they take our orders as soon as possible and deliver us our food as quickly as possible.  We mistake this for good and fast service, but it isn’t that at all.  In fact, they want us in and out quickly so they can get reuse your table as many times as possible that evening.  But food just doesn’t cook that fast, now does it?  So they have to precook as much as possible.  They can’t waste the time and energy to make things from scratch, so they buy the majority of what you eat in frozen form from a huge distributor.  Food is prepped quickly and reheated so that they can use fewer people in the kitchen with higher efficiency, all the while getting your order to you in lightning speed. 

The process is beautiful, and the only thing you lose along the way is flavor.   But even that is ok, since we are preconditioned to think that is the way it is supposed to be.

Then we wonder why the Italian food is so much better in Italy.  Go figure!

I’ve been here for 5 days now and have had no time to write as I have been so busy working on our apartments.  However, yesterday I took my cousin to see Rome.  After all, she has never been to Italy and it is less than an hour away from our house. 

Lining Up in St Peters Square

It’s late October… we are pressing hard on low season here, but Rome was flooded with tourists.  As we walked down the streets, all we heard was English and German.  Every time we got near an ‘attraction’, it felt like we were at Disneyland on a Saturday in June.  The line to get into St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican consisted of tens of thousands of people.  Everywhere we went was crowded beyond belief.  You just couldn’t enjoy a thing, and this is LATE OCTOBER!  Ugh!

The Trevi Fountain obscured by Junk Souvenirs

The tourist trap stands were out in force, and since it was raining a little on and off, there were armies of people trying to force umbrellas on us.  Do people actually buy plastic St. Peter’s

snow globes?  I mean, where do they put this stuff when the get home, anyway? 

 It was all just over the top.  Maybe I was just tired, but it really showed what i always say about the touristy areas of Italy:  They were once beautiful places, but have been destroyed by the ravages of mass tourism.  The real Italy… the experience that really leaves you wanting to come back over and over… can only be found in the villages outside the cities.

Home Sweet Home

As we left Rome last night, a sense of relief swept my body.  The closer I got to home, the better I felt.  I got home, went to bed, and woke up at sunrise.  I made my coffee and went outside.  After snapping pictures of the tourist traps of Rome all day yesterday, I couln’t help but snap a picture of the Alto Lazio and Umbria countryside at dawn from my house… such a contrast.  No plastic towers of Pisa here.  Just nature, peace and quiet.  Ahhhhhh.

Some people travel to Italy, see the sights, eat the food, and go home thinking they experienced Italian culture.  In reality, the vast majority of these people only experienced a tiny fraction of the amazing culture that Italy offers.  You cannot experience the true Italy from a traditional tour, or by visiting the standard tourist destinations like Rome, Tuscany, Venice, etc. 

To really experience Italian culture and beauty, you have to get off the beaten path, away from all of the tourist traps.

The problem for most people is that they either don’t know how or where to go, or that the adventure of getting in a car and just driving is just too overwhelming.  CultureDiscovery.com provides the adventure , while helping remove all of the unknown for you. 

Soriano nel Cimino is a stunning small medieval Italian village of roughly 8,000 people that is largely undiscovered, while being strategically located within a short drive to the best Italy has to offer.  In ancient times, its castle was the summer Vatican.

When you are traveling, sometimes you can just feel it. You go to pay for something, and you just know that if you were a local, you would have paid a much lower price. You are an ‘unsuspecting tourist’, and they will take you for what you’ve got. Here is a link to a New York Times article on this subject so that you really get the point.

So how can you avoid this? Here are some steps you can take:

It generally only happens in the tourist traps

It is really interesting to see the difference between a place that is full of tourists, and one that has limited tourism. Where you find streets full of tourists, the locals tend to bite the hand that feeds them. In places where tourism hasn’t quite caught on yet, the locals welcome the tourists as guests. I’ve seen tourists in Rome or Tuscany get ’special’ menus with inflated prices, and I have seen tourists in Soriano nel Cimino get special menus with lower prices than the locals get!

Food: It is all about the menu

You may walk into a restaurant and be handed a menu in English. What a convenience, you may think. But consider that if the place has an English-only menu, they also have a menu for Italians. There is a chance that the prices are different. Also, if the place does not have prices on the menus, beware, as they can give you any price they want.

I remember once I was in Pompeii with some other Americans that didn’t speak Italian. We went to a restaurant, and as they heard us speaking English, they handed us English menus. I glanced at it, and considering that I was accustomed to ordering in Italian, I asked (in Italian) for the Italian menu. The waiter was caught off guard, excused himself and gave me the Italian menu. It took about 30 seconds before I noticed the prices were much lower on my Italian menu than they were on the English menu.

Must you really eat 100 feet from the Spanish Steps?

Perhaps it is the steep rent they have to pay, or perhaps it is due to the steady flow of tourists that think the Euro is play money, but the closer you are to a major tourist attraction, the more you are going to pay for just about anything.

I use the Spanish Steps in the title because long ago Paola and I were hungry, and we happened to be there. We went to the first place we could find, and had a cinnamon toast and a cup of tea. In today’s value, we paid the equivalent of about $40.00 for 2 cups of tea and a slice of toast.

Stand up!

When you go to a caffe and want to order your espresso, you may have the option of being served at a table, or standing up at the bar. There is often a huge surcharge for sitting at the tables. Again, the closer you are to Tourist Central, the worse this will be.

Shopping

If you have to ask how much something costs, and you are in a touristy area, you a re probably about to be ripped off.

Paola and I were walking in Rome once, and we spotted an Espresso machine that was so ugly, so cheap looking, that as a joke, I walked into the store and pretended to be an American that was interested in it. You have to understand that this thing was horrid, and couldn’t have been worth more than $25. It was the Yugo of Espresso machines. At the time, $150 was extremely expensive for a home Espresso machine. When I asked how much it was, I was quoted $250 , which was, at the time, like saying $1,000 now.

Keep it short

In a loud and crowded environment, if you stick to very few, easy to pronounce words, and you are not dressed with a straw hat and camera hanging on your neck (and that 6 carat diamond on your finger), you might not be recognized as a tourist right away. For example, if you don’t stick out visually, and you walk up to a bar and quickly say in a low voice ‘un caffe’ , instead of the Learn Italian in 7 days version that would be something like ‘Vorrei un caffe’ per favore‘, you probably won’t be noticed until you start fumbling though the Euro change to figure out which coin is which. But by that time, you have your price, and probably were not ripped off.

Off the beaten path

I said this at the beginning, and will say it again. When you get away from the major tourist spots, and find yourself on the road less traveled, these problems just don’t happen. The people are not bombarded by thousands of tourists a day, so you are more of a welcome guest than a quick buck. Italians are extremely hospitable people.