Reading Papero Giallo to keep up on Italian food news

 
 
One of the RSS feeds I read regularly is Papero Giallo from Gambero Rosso founder and longtime former director Stefano Bonilli. (Gambero Rosso is a respected Italian restaurant guide.) Bonilli’s 6-year-old blog is in Italian, but with the help of an Italian dictionary, it’s not that difficult to get the gist of his entries.

For me, that’s much of the point. I want to stretch my vocabulary and at the same time keep up with what’s happening in Italy’s restaurant world. I met Bonilli in London earlier this year and after decades of following the food world, he’s still full of the curiosity and passion evident in his blog. He also gets around -- to New York, to Australia, Spain and elsewhere. Check out the links on his site. 

This week he reports that the Roberto Anselmi winery in the Soave region has been flooded. All the boxes ready for shipment, ruined. The server with all the winery’s accounts and data, ruined. The bottling line, too. Fortunately, the casks on the upper floor are OK.

What a shame. Anselmi is one of the most innovative producers in the Veneto, known for his fresh white wines and passito-style dessert wines.  In fact, I think I still have a bottle of his luscious sweet wine "I Capitelli" in my cellar. I'm going to open it tonight.

-- S. Irene Virbila

Photo: Stefano Bonilli. Credit: Papero Giallo

Comments

[Luddite]

Hi, Shirley! And many thanks for the heads-up about Papero Giallo.

One thing that might be of interest to you: If you use Google as your search engine, you can use the translate feature at the top. In fact, you can do as I did while on the Papero Giallo site, and hit the "translate all Italian" button.

When I did this while reading the Roberto Anselmi story, the first paragraph came out like this: "When I heard that the river had burst its banks and Alpone had flooded the town of Monteforte d'Alpone I thought of my friend Roberto Anselmi and so I phoned him."

So put away your dictionary and Google your way through . By the way, when you've translated the text this way, the original Italian appears in a "balloon" when you scroll over it.

We've gone a long way down "La strada gialla del mattone (con il papero giallo)", haven't we?