More Lardo, Please!!!!

This is going to be all about food. Yeah, we saw some AMAZING art today. Getting a little museumed out, by the way. The Bargelo was the best...amazing sculputure, especially the famous Donatello David, from around 1430, the first full body male nude done since Roman times. Pure Renaissance stuff. Very beautiful.

But the frickin' food here in Firenze is just amazing. Last night, after we had blogged, we went to a restaurant right near the Duomo. Started off with this tasting dish of three things; Tuscan sausage in a rosemary-white wine sauce....unreal. Sundried tomatoes with some radicchio...this was okay (if you like sundried tomates, which I don't). But the piece de bleeding resistance was LARDO with white beans crustini. Never had lardo? Pure pork fat, baby. I mean, pure pork fat. Just this slice of white, fatty, porky goodness on your toasted bread. Melts in your mouth. I can hear all the Americans who would never eat this kind of stuff just go 'eewwwwwww!!!'. But let me tell you, this is a pure pork wonder.

After this we had a taglietella pasta with FRESH porcini mushrooms. GETOUTAHERE!!!! Doesn't get any better then fresh porcinis. Then it was little pieces of rabbit with a white wine sauce with shallots and carrots. With all this Tuscan wonder food we had a bottle of Chianti Classico. Chianti always starts out a little astringent, to say the least, but by the third or fourth glass it tastes like Chateau Petrus.

So we are just leaving the restaurant, wandering down the street when, what do I hear? Sounds like church organ music. Must be coming from a boom box or something. But a few feet further we passed a church and out of the door came the sublime music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Not just any JS Bach, but one of his great tocattas. I was suddenly in another world, entering this church and hearing the great, loud power chords of history's greatest composer of 'music to send you to another world'. Just sitting there in this little church, listening to Johann Sebastian bouncing off the walls, so loud it almost breaks your eardrum...this was a totally spiritual experience for me. Bach organ music, especially the fast, powerfull stuff, has always sent me into another dimension. And then, to top it off, the organist played the greatest of all Bach's pieces, the Tocatta and Fugue in D minor. For those of you who don't recognize this, this is the piece they always play in the old horror pics. You'd know it if you heard it. This is Bach at his most sublime. And when you hear it in a very small church, bouncing and echoing off the walls...well, there is nothing more beautiful. And it also helps to listen to it after a wonderful meal and a bottle of Chianti Classico.

So the food highlight today was a wonderful restaurant near the San Marco, Restaurant Mimmo...thank you Barbara and Dennis!!!! The special was a roasted leg of pork, which I must say, was the BEST pork I have ever had in my life. It was so, so tender and juicy and had this crustiness of salt and pork goodness. It was served with potatoes that must have been cooked in pork fat. Crunchy, salty, ooohhhhh so good potatoes. With this we had pumpkin flowers (yes, pumpking flowers) stuffed with meat and cheese, with a pomodoro sauce. OHMYGOD!!!! And a salad of arugula and radiccio with pine nuts and walnuts. A half carafe of local wine, again getting better with each glass. And to top it off a cake made out of ricotta cheese with chocolate sauce on it.

So we have just come out of this meal, kind of ambled down the street and are again in an internet cafe that is only 1.5 euros per hour, about 1 third of the other places. And again, the owners and all the clients are from Sri Lanka. Don't ask, I have no idea.

We really deserved this great meal as we probably walked about 300 miles today, with all the museums, going to the central marked to buy lunch (really good parma ham, 4 year old parmessian cheese, crusty rye bread and some sort of tasty pastry), then hiking way, way up to the Piazza Michelangelo but before getting there discovering this really cool church called San Miniato, where there was a mini concert of four people singing this beautiful church music, then having a coffee for 4 euros at a little cafe looking over the beautifu city of Florence, with the Duomo and Palacio Vecchio, then hiking way, way down along the Arno over to Santo Spirito, another Bruneleschi church, and having a couple of nice bottles of wine there, then hiking to the other side of the Arno, way up to Barbara's restaurant, then back here. Whew!!!!

So tomorrow it's (you guessed it) more museums and hopefully another dinner that is as good as the last two. As long as there is Lardo anywhere nearby, I will be happy.