Category Archives: de rebus italicis

Sharing a meal with a favorite writer.

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Last night found me at Centovini where I was lucky enough to dine with one of my favorite wine writers, Lawrence Osborne, whose excellent 2004 book on wine and taste, The Accidental Connoisseur, offers what is arguably the best explanation of why international tastes for wine are shifting toward the American “modern” palate (which seems to favor extracted, high-alcohol content, “jammy,” fruit-driven wines).

We were also joined by his friend, the truly lovely Elizabeth Spiers, who charmed the table with anecdotes from her career as a gossip-blogger-writer-fashionista. She also offered insight into the career of her friend and colleague Perez Hilton, who had been featured in last week’s NY Times Style Section.

I can’t reveal what we tasted because Lawrence is writing a piece on the flight we shared for one of his regular columns.

While I often attend tastings with noted wine writers, occasionally I get to taste as both professional and fan: I read Lawrence’ book when it came out and was immediately impressed by his quasi-Gramscian approach to the globalization of wine and the — to borrow a Gramscian phrase — cultural hegemony of the modern American palate for wine.*

I was pleased to discover that Lawrence shared an experience as graduate students in Italian (he at Harvard) and that we both enjoy the filmography of Antonioni, to whom we raised a merry glass. Reflecting on the obituary in the NY Times of that morning, we both noted that critics and scholars often forget the abundant humor in Antonioni’s films.

… a truly memorable evening in this city that I’ve come to love.

*N.B.: While I don’t endorse Wikipedia (and often see it as a promulgator of factoids, urban legends, and in some cases outright falsehoods), I liked the entry on Gramsci.

Antonioni’s Ellipse and Eclipse

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Wednesday is the only day of the week that I don’t read the front page of the Times first since Wednesday is the Dining section day.

When I finally got around to unfolding the front page, I felt my heart sink as I read the news of Antonioni’s passing. In my first year post-BA, I studied Antonioni’s films in Padua with film critic and Professor Giorgio Tinazzi. I’ve read Seymour Chatman’s book on Antonioni, The Surface of the World, over and over. And I did meet Antonioni once at UCLA in the 1990s. Pier Maria Pasinetti, Antonioni’s brother-in-law and a collaborator on Le signore senza camelie, was one of my professors at UCLA where I took his 19th Century Italian Lit class (and on many occasions he spoke about his relationship, personal and professional, with the master director). Antonioni was among my favorite subjects to teach when I taught Italian Cinema at UCLA as a grad student.

As we witness Antonioni’s eclispse, I can’t help but think of L’eclisse (or “The Eclispse”), the third installment of the 1960s Trilogy. Many don’t remember that the title — like so many things Antonioni — was intended as a wonderful paronomasia: the Italian eclisse means both “eclipse” and “ellipse” (from the Latin ellipsis in turn from the Greek elleipsis, from the root leipo or lipo, “to be or to go missing”). Today, I’d like to think that Antonioni’s life and work have not been eclipsed but rather that he has given us yet another ellipse that makes us think about the spaces and surfaces of the meaning of our lives.

In The New York Times

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Played with Nous Non Plus last night at the Paris Paris, a disco on the Avenue de l’opéra that features bands a few nights a week. Needless to say we performed our “(I Want to Spend a Night in) Paris,” a song about Paris Hilton, at the Paris Paris in Paris.

Paronomasia aside, I awoke this morning to read about Lini Lambrusco (wines that I love) and see myself quoted in Eric Asimov’s weekly wine column in The New York Times.

Do Bianchi

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Do Bianchi: The origin of the name.

My pseudonym Do Bianchi (Venetian for “two glasses of white wine”) came about when I was writing anonymously for The Magazine of La Cucina Italiana back when I first started working in NYC in the late 1990s. The editor and I wrote 90% of the content and so we each assumed a few noms de plume (my other pen name was Giovanni Malpaghini, borrowed from Petrarch’s calligrapher).

Do Bianchi was inspired by the pseudonym of one of my favorite authors, Samuel Clemens. In the early part of his life, when he lived and worked as a journalist in San Francisco, saloon-goers could often be overheard calling out “mark twain!” In other words: “mark me down for two glasses of whisky.” In the latter part of his life, evidently embarrassed by the origin, he invented a series of less savory explanations.

Trying to come up with my own pseudonym, I remembered the line you often here in Venetian osterie: “do bianchi!” (doh BEE’AHN-kee), “give me two ombre (or small glasses) of white wine!”

The Venetian term ombra means a small pour of wine to be consumed standing at the counter of a bar. The word’s origin is attributed to a wine carriage that appeared in the shadow (ombra in Italian and Venetian, umbra in Latin) of the campanile or bell tower of Piazza San Marco (St. Mark’s Square in Venice, see image above).

As the shadow moved, the wine seller would follow (in order to keep his wines and his patrons cool). One would say: ci vediamo all’ombra (xe vedemo al’ombra) or “I’ll meet you at the shadow.” By metonym, the term came to mean a glass of wine.