65. All the World's a Stage

And the Italians all actors ... from their astoundingly beautiful medieval and Etruscan towns, their forbidding fortifying turrets, their villages that seem to tumble down mountainsides .. to their shiny cars, shoes, handbags, shop windows and flower boxes.  Every time I look at another aspect of Italy's landscape, I understand why the Italians are such artists - of music, paintings, fashion, design, architecture, textiles, sculpture. Food.  Food.  Food is an artist's palette, an aromatic adventure, a feast and a force and a forgotten waistline.

You can't help being surrounded by the most breathtaking beauty everywhere.   Every aspect of Italian life makes you want to rush out and create.  Or make yourself more presentable ... if you don't it seems you don't want to respect the trouble that other people have gone to, to make themselves as beautiful as their landscape.  Every purchase is an offering; every church a true gift from a god; every stone carefully chosen and laid by a gentle, talented hand.  Meals are laboured over with love, and savoured with delight.  Gardens tended as if they were made on the first day of earth.

A piece of cheese is wrapped like a sacred offering.  Salami is trussed with herbs and special strings. Nougat is packed in decorative tins you want to keep forever. Chocolate wrappers should be framed as objects d'art. Wine bottles wrapped in raffia deserve to be preserved forever, as a memento of good times shared.  Grappa, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, limoncello, held to the light are luminous; a simple mushroom is a terrestrial landscape, but truffles - oh! truffles!  Treated as if they are nuggets of gold, laid out on trays to be drooled over and negotiated with deep respect, carried home like trophies and savoured slowly, admired aromatically and digested with dignity.  Yep, you have to hand it - well, everything - to the Italians.