The Way Home from Work
My Daily Bread (and Fruit…)
When I lived in Milan, supermarkets were just beginning to break into the urban fabric. Like New York, real estate is expensive and parking impossible. Somehow, the bottega system has managed to survive.
I don’t remember where I shopped for food when I lived on East Tenth Street in Manhattan, but I do remember that I did not like the sad grocery stores with their grimy entrances, beat up carts, and merchandise stacked precariously. Going to the upscale food boutique, Dean & DeLuca, was like going to Tiffany’s for me: look but don’t buy.
Once I was in Milan I had to learn the routine. Every neighborhood has a street of shops that you would frequent, in a certain order, depending on your starting point and destination. They would punctuate your journey home.
For a few years, I lived within walking distance of my office in via Stampa. Due to Milan’s fluid workday, leaving at 6:30 or 7:00 PM was not uncommon. Sometimes I had to move fast, because the stores closed at 7:30.
I used to wind my way through the labyrinthine streets till I emerged in the piazza in front of the church of San Lorenzo. A Roman colonnade stood between the piazza and the narrow, stone-paved street. A long, sleek tram rumbled and squeaked in its tracks a few feet away, daring the the columns to hold their ground.
I could have gone down via Cesare Correnti, home to perishable teen fashion and cheap shoes, but I preferred the impossibly narrow via Gian Giacomo Moro, with its cobblestones and orange-stuccoed buildings. I like streets that aren’t straight. Your point of view is constantly changing as make your way through them. At the end of via Gian Giacomo Moro, there was an ice cream shop. Across the street, there was Pasticceria Cucchi (which is conveniently pronounced like “cookie” with an Italian accent). This was a great place to pick up a dessert if you were invited to a friend’s for dinner. Pasticceria Cucchi also had a bar-cafe, where you could have an espresso in the morning, or an aperitivo on your way home, most likely with a friend. On a nice day, people would sit at small tables that crammed the sidewalk outside.
Every time I go to a bar here is the U.S., I wonder why they don’t set out little snacks. At Cucchi, you order a Campari, or a Negroni, or a glass of spumante, and your drinks arrive on a tray with little dishes and bowls of nuts, olives, foccacine, or whatever they had available that day. Or, if you preferred standing at the bar (because the stores close at 7:30, remember?), you could nibble on pearl onions and bruschette while your drink was prepared. Pure civilization. (Yeah, that’s the plural. Please see my story, It’s “BruSKETa,” dammit! for more on that.)
The point of the aperitivo is not to get loaded. It is a ritual that takes you from the workday to the evening, your time to dine and hang with your loved ones. You can unload your woes, share your conquests, or maybe just chat with a bartender about the latest news. You slow down. (But not too much, because the stores close at 7:30.)
If I didn’t have time for an aperitivo, my first stop was the butcher. A few doors down, cheese and dairy. There are no lines in these shops, just a mini-mob. This can create anxiety for an American. The trick is to take note of the person who enters after you.
I usually bought three or four types of cheese, cut fresh from a wheel or scooped from a container proudly displayed in a glass case. Buona sera, Dottoressa, the merchants would say. That was the default title with which you were addressed, used for those presumed to have a college degree. Sometimes they would call me bella scuira, sciura for signora in Milanese.
My next dilemma happened at the greengrocer’s. How many potatoes are in a kilo, anyway? How the heck did I know! And guess what? They only had things that were in season.
I learned to love the rhythm of the seasons: the smell of oranges before Christmas and the asparagus, harbinger of spring. By the way, I asked for four medium-sized potatoes, being a visual person. They took it in stride.
The bakery was my last stop. Now, everyone knows that the pickings are slim at the end of the day, but my baker usually had a couple of the chubby, oval multigrain loaves I liked. She was very responsive to the demand, and I believe one of those loaves was there for me every day. I wonder who bought the other one?
At the end of my journey I’d schlep the groceries around the corner to my apartment building, fumble for the keys, get my mail, say hello to the portiera, and call the elevator. The wire cage made its way down, I hopped on, and pulled my haul in after me.
Sometimes this litany felt like a drudgery. Now, every time I pull into the parking lot of a grocery store so big and full of everything from everywhere with people bumping carts and cashiers who don’t know the names of the vegetables, and the machine churning out the long white tongue of paper listing everything you bought and how much you saved, my heart cries for some human interaction, and the sport of getting there before closing.
That was home.
