Letters from a 300-year-old Italian farmhouse. May 19

Why Piemonte is impossible not to love.

Why Piemonte is impossible not to love, at least for me.

Even after ten years of living here, it still happens. A small, confoundingly charming moment (or two) that defines life in Piemonte. This morning, I went with my husband to Bra, the next town over, to have one of his suits altered for a wedding we are attending. Just an ordinary errand.

The woman doing the altering was not young, and had a little trouble getting around, even in her tiny studio, stuffed everywhere with fabric and garments to be taken in, shortened or let out. As she was measuring my husband’s jacket, we happened to notice an array of colorful pottery she had displayed on the shelves behind her. Oh, yes, she said. Those were her pots. She made them. She had been a potter her whole life. And they were for sale. So began the deliberations; my husband in a t-shirt and suit coat speckled with tailor’s chalk and basting stitches, I in my Nikes and workout clothes, and our ceramic artist/seamstress with pins in her mouth and a measuring tape in her hands. We laid out all the pots and vases and finally settled on two.

One to brighten up our dining room table and show off my roses. And one more

for the happy, soon-to-be-wed couple, handmade from a part of Italy we know they love. Piemonte.

Pleased with our purchases and errand accomplished, we left the tailor’s shop and headed back towards our car. But another shop, one we had passed by several times before, somehow caught our attention. A butcher, featuring Salciccia di Bra. Sausage from the town of Bra, a town renowned for its sausage.

Bra is also renowned for being the birthplace of the Slow Food Movement. That wonderful story will be for another post, another day. But suffice it to say, that if Bra is proud of its sausage, the sausage must be pretty darn special. So we popped in to see what the fuss was about.

It was sparking clean, with the proud owner and his capable team helping several customers at once. They had a sign posted to announce they were the Scaglia family butchers, members of the consortium protecting the quality and value of Bra sausage since 1986, when the Slow Food Movement began.

On the wall behind them was a thoughtful treatise explaining, in Italian and English, how special their sausage is, made of local beef and pork, using only the “noble” part of the animals, flavored with Grana Padano cheese and Arneis wine and special seasonings. Available only in Bra, it so delicious and of such high quality, it can, actually, be eaten raw. Impressive.

It looked amazingly fresh and vibrant in the cases.

In fact, all of the Scaglia offerings looked delicious and quite special.

Their store, itself, was a veritable museum honoring their beloved animals.

We were duly impressed, and spontaneously ordered a pound of Salciccia di Bra for dinner tonight.

Although I am quite sure I will want my sausage nicely grilled.

What are your thoughts? Do you know a town like Bra, full of good food, with art and craftsmanship at every turn?

I find it hard not to get excited about food raised and cultivated with such pride and care, even if it is not the food I grew up with. I am learning so much living here among a culture that respects it in this way. And I love that artisans are to be found everywhere, even in the tailor shops! What towns in America can you think of that are the same?

Keep looking for my posts each week. I’ll be right here.

This is how I stay close to everyone far away. I will be writing letters once a week, with stories of Piemonte, recipes that I have fallen in love with, tales of people I meet, places I discover and anything else that I think you might find amusing, curious or worthwhile. It’s a way to look at the world from a different window, and hopefully let a little Italian sunshine into your day.

A presto!

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