Alberici: Finding beauty in an unlikely place.

Arianna Alberici

The Pianura Padana is a wide plain of unbroken grey skies and damp, foggy farmland that stretches from the western Alps to the Adriatic sea. Driving across it is tedious. Approaching the village of Boretto required inching along an abandoned gravel road for several kilometers. Monochromatic broken concrete barriers, deep drainage ditches, and roughly ploughed farmland lined the path. Sodden clouds met the ground, and matched its pallor. Imperceptible mist made five degrees Celsius feel colder. The new Audi rental didn’t know what to make of the faintest fog coating its windshield. Automatic swipes came out of nowhere, jolting my dulled nervous system. 

Reggio Emilia in hibernation. It was a visit to the quietest of remote places, accessible via a series of progressively tinier roundabouts, a slow weave through smaller and smaller provincial towns and villages leading inevitably to one-car-width roads. In this vacant place I somehow managed to arrive at Il Casalone at the same time as another guest. A white haired woman dressed in the conservative formal attire favored by many older Italians in rural communities showed up to claim payment for pruning work. She was a day laborer and farm worker who resembled a small town administrative employee to my untrained foreign eyes. 

Arianna Alberici skittered around the family’s courtyard, flustered by a sudden surge in visitors. “Jai!!” She bellowed my name across the courtyard in her lyrical, inimitable accent, and then vanished. 

Amilcare Alberici emerged, followed by his son. They were busy labeling new bottles of wine to sell during the holidays. In fact, I’d arrived on the patron saint day of the next-smallest and closest town, Guastalla. As a fervent nonbeliever, this piece of information only became of interest when the Alberici siblings and Amilcare discovered (via Google) that the region’s best Pamigiano-Reggiano producer, located in Guastalla, would be closed for the celebration. Il Cantone uses vacche rosse cows to make a sublime version of Italy’s most famous cheese. It’s a small, family-run place, and kinda magical. 

Frenzied internet searches, headscratching, furrowed brows. Worse news followed: even the second-tier places were closed. What to do?? I’d already purchased a fashion-forward yellow suitcase in Bologna that very morning, with the intention of adding multiple kilos of local cheese to my outbound luggage. 

It’s true that I’m a bit of a food hoarder. Setting aside latent tendencies, it only makes sense to buy big when visiting Parma and the surrounding countryside. At a fraction of the price of mediocre-at-best NC grocery store parm, one can purchase a bag full of 24-36-40 month-old beautifully pristine umami-laden Parmigiano Reggiano, direct from the maker. Cognitive dissonance kicks in when I get the receipt for my Santa’s bag full of cheese. It’s a pittance. 

I’d take back Prosciutto, too, but the US government gets weird about meat. Protecting our weak facsimiles, that’s my conspiracy theory. Blah blah blah about food safety. 

Arianna is the self-described “woman who cooks for the entire family.” Unsurprisingly, there is an Italian word for this role. After a cold half hour spent sipping Maestri and Salomino tank samples in the barn, she lured us back to the hearth with white gold nuggets of parm the size of walnuts, salami made by her father, and bistrot glasses of Fogarina and Fortana (a sweeter red) plus abundant chips, bread, and moka pot coffee. Amilcare makes his a cafe coretto, adding black market grappa that he distills from Fogarina pomace. This jet fuel is best served with espresso. Taken raw, it will test the constitution of any but the hardiest of farm workers. At American retirement age, Amilcare has the huge, calloused hands of a man who uses tools, and works outside. His wry smile and humor-filled sotto voce banter give the impression of a man who isn’t rattled easily. In four decades of farming, Amilcare has seen quite a bit before.  

There’s joy in the Alberici kitchen. Protected from bitter cold by a crackling woodstove, the room is a liminal space separating elements of the family’s microcosmos. Between cellar and living space, bordered by barn and empty vineyard, this small space is the warm heart of the property. It’s hard to stray from its glow for long. 

Arianna’s nine-year-old daughter danced around the room. First, she retrieved a set of new white ballet slippers, ceremoniously removed their plastic cover, and put on the prized possession. The girl haphazardly discarded the bumble bee-themed house slippers in which she’d been shuffling around the house, worn footwear that had drawn the disapproval of her mother for being both seasonally inappropriate and shabby. The “shoes” looked both affectingly childlike and extra comfy. I saw their charm.

The child danced, smiling, loving the attention, and the excuse to practice elementary school English. Her mother’s face is an open book. Big emotions, eruptions of laughter, self-effacing humor. Arianna went to London for a week last summer, to improve her language skills, and see the sights. I made her promise to come see us this upcoming April. She’ll win over everyone. It’s impossible not to feel Arianna. No wonder that “in a past life” she was a talented opera singer and viola player. I feel closest to the human condition in her presence. With her I feel the sunlight and the terrible gravity of this time on earth. 

We walked outside. I needed to drive to Milan, the absolutely opposite place. And I’d stop at I Grandi, a Parmigiano coop large enough to be open on a holiday Monday. Good enough. Vacuum-packed parm for a song: load me up. 

We stood outside and took pictures. Arianna insisted I take four persimmons. I can’t bring these bright orange globes to the states. Their naked non-industrial agricultural nature, a mottled film of grey covering misshapen iridescent globes that hung like early Christmas ornaments on an otherwise lifeless tree, next to the family beehives. This is food that won’t pass the most cursory of TSA inspections. 

No matter. At 1am, I ate the sweet tannic flesh from inside the most promising of the group, cutting crescents with a pocket knife, dripping juice onto the beige airport hotel room floor. I’d left the real world. Back in the simulacra, tasting the sweetness of a place I’ll maybe see again for an afternoon in a year or two. Hopefully it will be a warmer visit, close to harvest. I don’t drive through Reggio Emilia very much. Its drab-from-the-highway appearance might be the most deft/guileful of adaptations. Outwardly nondescript, uninteresting on Instagram, it survives. A chameleon against the cloudy sky. 

* the wines. They are great. Cleaner than I remembered. Traditional method. Bone dry. I would buy them if they were worse. If you encounter farmers like Amilcare and his two children and do not support their timeless labor, their preservation of our connection to land and agriculture, then you dear reader have a heart of coal, a lithium battery in place of a soul. Life doesn’t give absolutes. Il Casalone is a necessary reminder that freedom from our easy, empty existence is a choice. This world remains. 

the big cheese