We took a couple of days in a little beach motel on the shore of one of the biggest volcanic lakes in Europe, the lago di Bolsena. Our first day there was blustery. Or maybe it was more than blustery: it was so windy that the lake looked like a storm-torn sea, and swimming was essentially an act of playing among the waves.

The morning we left Viterbo for Bolsena, we talked about renting a car. Then we concluded that one of the pleasures of this trip for a Californian family was not having a car. So we took the bus. (Busses, in our experience, in Italy, are punctual, comfortable, and usually pretty fun. They’re a little more expensive than the trains, but they go to almost everywhere.)

Somewhat regrettably, the beach motel was a mile out of town (exactly 1.8 km from the center of town, according to the milestones, and a full kilometer from the city limits). The walk could have been pretty, and it certainly was manageable -- it’s just as far from our house in Menlo Park to the train station we use regularly. But this walk was along a busy highway with only a narrow, dusty verge on one side for most of the way. Felix complained, but his complaints were focussed entirely on the presence of road kill. When he thought a dead animal might be close to us, he’d close his eyes and have me guide him along the path.

And Bolsena has one taxi. The driver happened to be on vacation while we were there. So when it came time to go up to the hills on the other side of town to try a restaurant. We thought we were either out of luck or in for a long, long walk.

Instead, after an amusing discussion between the hotel clerk and the restaurant owner, the latter suggested that he’d just come by and pick us up a little before dinner time. The result: at 7:30 he pulled into the parking lot with his little car and drove us the ten minutes back -- and the 300 meters up -- to his house among the vineyards and olive groves overlooking Bolsena. He spoke beautiful country Italian -- pretty different from what we hear in Rome -- and he asked that we forgive the state of his car, since it was more often used for potatoes than patrons.

A native of Bolsena, Bruno is exactly the person you want hosting you at a restaurant. He is obviously devoted to the quality of ingredients, he doesn’t indulge in (or think much of) complication (I keep seeing the adjective elaborato, which I think is a Slow Food insult). And he’s genuinely funny.

The recent Slow Food guide, which combines in English the consortium’s hostelry guide with their restaurant book, is a wonder. If you read some of the Slow Food people, you would think they are all into restaurants and luxury service. But their heart, at least in the case of this book, seems to be in food nerdery, somewhere between chowhounds and foodies, but with an especial emphasis on local, disappearing, and seasonal ingredients.

And the little trattoria La Tana dell’Orso, in the hills above Bolsena, might be where I could eat every night for the rest of my life. Overlooking the huge crater lake, the menu is pretty much a collection of good sausages, cheeses, vegetables, pulses, and a few grilled meats. Bruno’s wife cooks, and he is the host and the shopper (and the taxi driver).

Our dinner: a plate of basic antipasto, with slices of cured pork loin, the oft-maligned soppressata (which in this case starred), and some alternative sausage. Then we had three interesting things: a plate of five cheeses, among which the best might have a been a true gorgonzola, which was streaked (not flecked) with green. But Alaina liked better a very ripe tête de moine, and especially something called testun de grotta. The more challenging cheeses we ate with a tiny bit of chestnut honey.

La Tana dell’Orso also gave us a fairly interesting sausage served on a bed of even more interesting lentils, which are evidently one of the Slow Food people’s treasures. Better, even, though, was a bowl of simple soup of farro and lentils -- the same lentils, and a bowl of soup that tasted in turn of the olive oil, the salt, the rosemary, the lentils, and the farro itself. Gosh.

On eating out

I realize, reading through some of the blog pages, that I sound like one of these people who just gush over food when they are on vacation, failing to admit these four things:

- most of us do not follow our waistline’s advice during vacation, so every meal feels like an indulgence;

- most of us work up an excellent appetite during vacation, and there is no better chef;

- inevitably, some of the food when travelling will be novel and interesting, so even if it’s poorly prepared, there’s something to pay attention to and little in our experience to compare it to;

- every thing that I’ve written about it actually pretty ordinary and covered admirably in the guidebooks.

That said, we’ve had mostly good food since arriving in Rome. A couple of places, chosen at random, were not up to snuff. And I was surprised to find that the pizza al taglio at the well-regarded bakery on via del Moro here in Trastevere can’t hold a candle to the pizza al taglio at the less hip bakery called Shock on the corner of p.za S. Cosimato (and thus four blocks closer to home).

I think I mentioned in an earlier entry that the role of the bar is kind of as a cure-all for bodily functions, in the same way that a tobacco-and-salt shop (tabacchi in Italian, although they are almost all licensed also to sell salt) is the cure-all for bureaucratic functions like paying a tax bill or buying a lottery ticket. In our experience, bars have coffee and pastries, usually a collection of edible-to-excellent sandwiches, bottled water and wine and beer, and lavatories.

On money

Part of the challenge of this trip has been the plunge of the dollar, which is the currency in which we get paid at home. For the first time since I was little, the U.S. dollar is worth less than 50 pence, and it’s clearly plummeting toward U.S. 1.50 per Euro. The last time it was so weak, though, the Americans were embarked on wrongheaded but eventually reversible plans to rescue themselves from the 1970s malaise. This time, we can count on a 20-cent discount for the war tax, which will last for decades. Presumably, since the government of China (who would have expected this in 1980?) will eventually stop buying U.S. dollar bonds, it’s only going to get worse. I think I need a scheme to get paid more dollars or in Euros.