Curds, Whey, and the Family Town

Friday, September 20

Bettola is about an hour’s drive away from the region that produces what many consider the king of cheeses: Parmigiano-Reggiano. As the name suggests, Parmigiano-Reggiano is produced in two towns, Parma and Reggio Emila, and the area around them. We headed to Parma this morning to tour Consorzio Produttori Latte, one of the many caseificias that convert milk into Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.

The process is pretty interesting to watch. Milk is cooked in a cone-shaped cauldron about three feet high. When the curds separate from the whey, they sink to the bottom. One of the cheesemakers uses a tool shaped like a canoe paddle to pull the curds away from the sides of the caldron. Meanwhile, his partner slips two corners of a cheesecloth underneath the ball of curds, and then the two of them pull the ball up from the bottom of the caldron and hang it from a metal rod spanning the top of the caldron.

This is a pretty big chunk of cheese: the final cheese will weigh about 70 pounds, so I’m guessing that with all the liquid in there the curds must weigh pretty close to 100 pounds.

The curds are placed in a form (hence the Italian word for cheese, formaggio), which presses a plastic ring into the side of the cheese to imprint the date, batch, serial number, etc. From there the cheeses go to a brine bath for a month. The brine bath leaches out the lactose in the cheese; I was surprised to learn that Parmigiano-Reggiano is lactose-free. Not surprisingly, the brine bath also adds salt to the cheese and toughens the rind: I had always assumed that Parmigiano-Reggiano had a wax or cloth skin, but the rind we see is simply a part of the cheese, and although it’s edible, it’s tough enough to protect the cheese.

“Parmigiano” is simply the Italian adjective for Parma; we, of course, say “Parmesan.” Evidently the cheese has been famous for a long time: I remember the British diarist Samuel Pepys detailing his efforts to save his “Parmazan” cheese from the Great London Fire of 1666 by burying it in his yard before evacuating. Christiana Capelli, our guide, made sure that we understood that not all “Parmesan” cheese is Parmigiano-Reggiano, and of course that message is one of the reasons why they make these tours available. We enjoyed the samples they offered before we left, and visited their store to purchase some gifts and mementos. After our immersion a few days earlier in the life of ancient Rome and the treasures of the Vatican, it made a fascinating look at an everyday product of our own times.

With a stop for coffee on the way back, we spent the rest of the day in Bettola. We arrived pretty close to siesta time, which gave us an opportunity to look over the lovely town square. A statue of Cristoforo Colombo occupies one end of the town square, and a fountain occupies the middle. One side has a café, the municipio (town hall), and a tabacchi (the ubiquitous “tobacco” shop, carrying everything from prepaid cellular minutes to candy to post cards to actual tobacco). On the opposite side and dominating the square is the parish church.

The church is referred to as the Sanctuario di Santa Maria della Quercia: the Sanctuary of St. Mary of the Oak. The name refers to a 1496 apparition of the Blessed Virgin to shepherds at an oak tree near Bettola. If I understand the Italian correctly, the present church dates to 1954, but the list of pastors on the wall goes back to 1828, including the pastor who would have baptized my great-great-grandfather. The campanile (bell tower–seems like all the churches here have one) bears large letters reading Ai caduti della Valnure–“To the fallen of Valnure.” Valnure, the Nure Valley, is the name of the geographical area that includes Bettola. We sometimes forget that 70 years ago, we were at war; we would occasionally see reminders like this.

Evidently, this a church still has a congregation; signs of current worship are everywhere, although I didn’t see an organ or any other instrument. The sanctuary has a golden niche to hold a statue of the Blessed Virgin, when she isn’t out in the church closer to the parishioners, as she was for our visit. You can see her on the right side in the photo below.

We went for lunch at Ristorante Agnello, a few doors down from the church, joined by Francesco and his mother, Maria Luisa. We think that they are related through the Costas, one of the many branches of our family formed through the dozens of marriages over the years. As we sat in the outdoor café area, Bianca Lavezzi, a Bettola expatriate who spends most of her year in England and part of the year at her apartment across the square from where we were sitting. We chatted with Bianca for just a few moments–she was on her way to a meeting with her attorney, who has an office near the restaurant.

We had visited Francesco’s Vecchia Stazione the night before, and we stopped there briefly to meet his father. At their recommendation, we headed off to Grazzano Visconti, a reconstructed medieval fortress about halfway between Bettola and Piacenza. According to Wikipedia, it dates to 1395 and was somewhat restored in the early 20th century. Today it is perhaps most notable for its shops, but it was fun to walk around the grounds and see some of the exhibits.

We stopped at the Vecchia Stazione one more time for some snacks and drinks, and then it was time to head back to Villa Enrichetta for the usual late dinner. We had Francesco call ahead and explain to GiamPier that we would need a lighter dinner than usual. That proved to be a good move: we made do with only a single pasta dish and the usual salume (plate of cold cuts) this evening, and we left the table a bit less overloaded than on some of the previous evenings.

Tomorrow we plan to settle our accounts, take a few more pictures on the town square, and then head to Genoa.

On to Bettola

Thursday, September 19

We had breakfast at La Novellina with Anna and Bart, friends of Judy’s. Anna was Judy’s Italian contact who set up our accommodations in Cicagna. Our party was too big for La Novellina, so John and Elaine’s daughters and their men stayed these two nights at another place nearby. Once we had regrouped, we began the ride north to Bettola.
This, by the way, is the single scariest ride of my life. For part of our way, our road ran right through a nature preserve on the side of a mountain, which meant one-lane dirt switchback roads without guard rails. Our drivers handled this amazingly well, and within a couple of hours we had crossed over the mountains and arrived at Bettola, the town where the Lavezzis moved from Soglio in the mid-1800s and from which they emigrated around 1870.
Our accommodations here were at the Villa Enrichetta, which in the USA would be called a dude ranch. Noël says the accommodations reminded her of band camp; and although my own camping recollections are more primitive, it is certainly rustic enough. 
Bettola today has about 3,000 inhabitants, and to my eyes appears to be essentially a bedroom community for the town of Piacenza, about a half hour to the north. It has a very pretty town square and another beautiful church, and a remarkable bar called Vecchia Stazione (the Old Station), tended by a 33-year-old bundle of energy named Francesco Costa. Francesco is an old acquaintance of Judy’s, and has done some research work for her. Although he says his English is poor, he speaks it pretty well–certainly far better than any of us speak Italian. Francesco had us all in for drinks and snacks, and then we settled in at the Villa for dinner before what would be an early morning tomorrow.
Tomorrow, we meet the Big Cheese–about 100 pounds of Parmigiana Reggiano. We’re going on a cheese tour.

Exploring Soglio and Romaggi

Wednesday, September 18

One of our purposes in staying here is to use Cicagna as a base of operations for visits to some of the towns near Cicagna. The couple that links the families on this trip consisted of a Soglio boy, Costantino Lavezzi, and a Romaggi girl, Rosa Raggio. (I use the term “town” with some flexibility. Some of the units I describe as “towns” probably aren’t, but some other civic unit.
Before visiting the family churches, though, we had some free time. Noël, Judy, Lew, Kelley, and I  took the chance to visit the area around Cinque Terre, a group of villages on the coast. After driving perhaps 40 minutes from Cicagna to the coast, we found ourselves strolling around the seaside in a town called Santa Margherita Legure, where we had lunch at a restaurant branded as Zinco of London. The London connection didn’t make it any less authentic, however.
We’ve been learning that there are several types of dishes served as “misti,” which seems to mean “mixed”: for example, misti formaggi, which is a cheese plate. Here we tried a fritto misti, which is a plate of mixed fried seafood. We enjoyed it a lot, although we had to get used to eating whole small octopus, looking at a whole shrimp, and wondering just why one would bother to deep-fry a shrimp anyway, when the breading goes on a shell that no one will eat.
After lunch, we rejoined the others at the Church of St. Michael in Soglio. This would have been the church where Costantino was baptized. The population has fallen in this area, and now there are very few families left to carry on, so one views these churches by appointment, and Judy had made an appointment for us to see this St. Michaels’s. St. Michael’s in Soglio appears not to be used as an active church any more, but it maintains its own kind of rugged beauty. I noted that it has an organ, but evidently the organ hasn’t been played within living memory. The lady who let us in told us that it hasn’t even been opened in many years.
This is a mountainous area, and the churches, as well as the residences, are built on what might be characterized conservatively as hillsides. From St. Michael’s to the churchyard is a scary walk of just a few hundred yards, and we finished up with a walk around the cemetery, visiting the tombs and graves of many Lavezzos. We found Lavezzo graves, but we don’t have enough information to know just how they are related to us.
Any Lavezzos from the last 150 years would have been descended from siblings of my great-great-great grandfather GB Lavezzo or even more distant relatives, and presumably those ancestors didn’t marry girls with the same surnames as did GB; but I don’t believe we know any now living in Soglio. Family lore has it that the Lavezzos emigrated to San Francisco for the Gold Rush, and I do write to Stephen Lavezzo, who is a teacher there.
After our visit to Soglio, we went to a nearby town called Calvari for lunch with Pier Felice Torre, a local genealogist who has been been working with many Italian-American families to piece together their ancestry. Mr. Torre is charming, elegant, and working gamely to recover from a stroke suffered earlier this year. The place we met is called Bar Torre, and he lives across the street.
From Calvari, we went up behind the hills to Romaggi, birthplace of Rosa Raggio, my great-great-grandmother. The church there–another St. Michael’s–is the one where she was baptized and where she and  Costantino were married. I was invited to look at the campanile, or bell tower, and I walked into its second story, which has to be one of the most uncomfortable and frightening spaces I have ever been in. It has a tiny spiral staircase, rough-cut into stone steps smaller than my feet. Fortunately, the bell-ringer generally didn’t have to climb to the top except to make repairs: the bell ropes ran to the first floor through a one-foot hole in the floor.
I also got a look at the organ, which has about one octave of foot pedals, a single manual of perhaps 48 keys, and about six stops. The pipes were encased in a cabinet, and I didn’t see them. A crank for operating the bellows extends from the side of the case. I don’t know when it was played last, but it’s been a while. At least it can be opened, unlike the one in Soglio.
Romaggi only has about 34 residents, so it’s surprising that this St. Michael’s is still an active worship space. It’s also surprising that next door is an excellent trattoria called Pellegrino (which I think means Pilgrim). Italians eat dinner late, so it was pretty close to 10:00 by the time our drivers got to show off their mountain driving skills again.
Soon we were back to La Novellina in Cicagna, ready for the next stage of our adventure tomorrow.