Pinerolo's "Man in the Iron Mask" festival

Iron masked Prisoner and Musketeer guards

Another year, another mysterious masked man is brought to Pinerolo, escorted by D'Artagnan and his fellow musketeers from the island of St Marguerite( in the bay of Cannes) in our annual reenactment of this documented but unsolved mystery. The legend, brought to light by the French writer Voltaire, is of a richly robed man in an iron mask that was held in several prisons before ending up in the Bastille, where he ultimately died and was buried in 1703.

This much loved mystery not only lives on and continues to intrigue, it has it's own enactment and celebration in Pinerolo. This year festival marks Pinerolo's 13th edition of the arrival of Pinerolo's most infamous and also documented masked prisoner. He arrived in Pinerolo prison August 24, 1669 where  he was kept for 11 years. There are many theories and versions of the story and in actuality it is difficult to know if any of them are one mans story or the synthesis of several with a strong sprinkling of legend and embellishment along the way. There was, however, a man in a mask who arrived in Pinerolo and the story lives on every year the first weekend in October with pageantry, historical costumes, music, games, and lots of speculation as to the identity of the man portraying the man in the iron mask this year. 

The Iron masked prisoner and his confessor

The commemoration opens on Saturday night with the arrival of the prisoner with this year's edition featuring several other famous Pinerolo prisoners from this era to add to the spectacle and speculation. I thought it added another nice element of drama as the prisoners made a dash for freedom before being put behind bars. Every year there is a bit of tweaking this event with an effort to accurately portray the time period in costume and village life. 

Other infamous Pinerolo prisoners

On Sunday the town comes alive with another round of dancing, flag waving, colorful costumed lords and ladies promenading around town, with various types of entertainment and wares to sample or purchase. Then the parading of the prisoners through the streets before unmasking this years celebrity to the crowd of 5,000 or so onlookers. It's a festive and interesting town performance, especially if the weather is cooperative as it was this year, that you should make plans to attend one day.  There are some excellent videos of the festivities on the Festivals website here. We have a video posted here.
I'll leave you with some highlights of the festival.

Pinerolo's Gem-a Year Round Market

I'll admit it, I love markets, adore them.  

There I've said it, in case you didn't know.

What's not to love? 

 Friendly vendors....

colorful in fact 

and that's not even referring to the produce.

rainbow of cauliflower

or the colorful shoppers.

Fabrizio getting friendly with the cabbage and shoppers

It is always a delight to go to the local markets here in Italy. I have sought out markets over the years wherever I have lived, for the food, the bargains and the entertainment value of seeing what's on offer. Just a nosey around the stalls to see what's new and what looks good.  The people watching is always interesting too. I am so appreciative of the farmers and vendors efforts as our alpine garden is still covered by a thick blanket of snow making greens from our garden still a dream away.  Pinerolo has a long tradition of being a market town. 

Always a wonderful varied selection of salad greens

Leaf lettuce, Radicchio, Escarole,

The year round outdoor market that doubles as a parking lot has been held in the same location in the center of town for over 1,000 years, even as the surroundings have changed over the years. The large market is held on Wednesdays and Saturdays without fail, unless however those days fall on a holiday and then is held the day before. Italians take their holidays very seriously, just in case you know didn't know that.  The "Mercato dei Produttori Agricoli" is the smaller, very local produce only market that runs 6 days a week in a smaller piazza off from the main square and has everything under the sun and more. Definitely not a tourist market, but tourists love it for its atmosphere, energy, and rubber necking potential. Naturally, Pinerolo itself has many enticing shops that make it difficult to get away without a swift kick to your wallet if you are unable to resist the siren sound of the various specialty shops. The historic old town center has a pleasant atmosphere to wile away a few hours in the cafes or restaurants, indulging in the pastries, chocolates or gelato with your coffee. 

Cafe Ferraud cappuccino and award winning pastries

We are so lucky to have this market year round and people with green houses and the wear withal to work the land even in the bleak mid winter. I have shopped at times when in spite of their most valiant efforts the produce has frozen at the stall and their hands and cheeks are red to the point of turning blue, and still, there they are stoic and usually a friendly word even when it would pretty hard for most of us to suffer through that kind of cold or rain without some serious grumbling. I really do admire them. It's not an easy life. Most of them have come to this life through their families, a few  through conscious choice. Many have been bringing their wares to this very market for over 50 years or so. One couple who are both in their 80's, have never driven a car and bring their goods by bicycle, one with a trailer stacked to the sky sometimes. 

Reliable transportation

  If you have ever visited and stayed with us in our Bella Baita B&B, it usually doesn't take long before the conversation will include the Pinerolo market. Aside from all reasons I have mentioned and the fact that buying locally you are putting money directly into the hands of people that are working hard for those  €, I just plain admire these people and their determination and hard work. To have the fortitude to do the back breaking labor in the fields and greenhouses, they then load it all up and drag it to market and back again, some of them 6 days a week, no matter the weather. They stand when it is hand numbingly cold or drippingly miserable to sell their food because perishable goods don't wait for the weather to improve. The show must go on and we love to partake of this time honored ritual. We look forward to introducing you to this gem of a market with it's many facets and faces, our friends.

Some of our hard working Pinerolo market friends

Autumn in Pinerolo is Festival Time

I must say that I love all of the seasons here in Italy, but autumn is dear to my heart just because it has so many different festivities it'll make your head spin.  You could say that the celebrations go into overdrive with a sagra or festa for just about anything and absolutely everything. Bread, chestnuts, polenta, wine harvest, donkey races, porcino mushroom extravaganza, music, artists, food, and drink, and, food and, did I say food? Well, I believe you get the picture.  Then the leaves start  to turn and work their golden magic, so, why not get out and sample just as many as you can?
Our big town of Pinerolo, (population around 35,000 with the surrounding frazione/hamlets) which lies at the mouth of our valley has more than their fair share lined up in rapid succession. Each year it seems they just get better with each new edition of the festivities. Over the past month we have been able to enjoy 3 of Pinerolo's offerings. The "Mostra del'Artigianato" is a weekend of various artists displaying their work, with an emphasis on the woodcrafters.

Many of the artisans ply their trade with the more practical elements of woodcraft, adding elaborate decorative elements to the Italian doors that are so fascinating and found everywhere throughout Italy. Often even the most humble looking dwelling will have a distinctive door that just sets it apart and draws one in to admire the craftsmanship. This year the woodcrafters were lined up around the perimeter of the church in the center of the old part of town and busily working on their different chosen specialities.

Whimsical or serious, hand made wood carvings are a thing of wonder to me. I love the ability of someone who is able to bring a piece of wood to life. What a gift and opportunity to see that  transformation occur before your eyes.

Sharing the same weekend as the artisans festival  is a town favorite, "I Concorsi Ippici"or the Equestrian Event. This weekend is an international horse jumping competition with 34 countries represented this year.

Pinerolo was the home of the original Calvary before moving to Bologna about 10 years ago, and so has a long love of horses and tradition of equestrian training and competition. We have a wonderful Calvary museum in town that is free to the public. There is another weekend of national competition the following week, making for a lot of gorgeous horses and competitive jumping to enjoy.

Then our other favorite annual autumn festival is quite a unique and unusual event, and that would be the "La Maschera di Ferro", or the Man in the Iron Mask festival.

 This annual recreation of the arrival of the mysterious "Man in the Iron Mask" starts on the first Saturday night of October with the famous musketeers bringing the masked man to town where he was imprisoned for 11 years before being moved on to another prison up the road in Exilles. This festive period celebration brings out all manner of people in period costumes and street performers carrying on what might have been a typical festival back in the day of his imprisonment, which was 1669.  You can find out some of the history in this Wikipedia entry here. There is a great YouTube video but out by the local association for the festival here.

 It is by far one of my favorite festivals. I love the costumes and activities that bring this period to life. The town really comes into its own at night with the campfires, torches, music, jugglers, flag throwers, and the marching corps with lords and ladies all parading around town in their finery, while the peasants roast chestnuts, cook up some stew, slice off juicy pieces of pork from a slow roasting pig on a spit and dance a jig or two.

The next day the festivities continue while everyone enjoys some of the games on offer and a chance to get a good look at the prisoner and try to guess his identity. They always have an Italian celebrity every year and unlike the real mysterious prisoner, the identity is revealed at the close of the festival Sunday afternoon and a collective gasp of surprise usually arises from the crowd.

It is a great time all weekend long, so you might want to consider making plans to come and visit us during this festival to feel like you've stepped back in time and privy to a mystery still unsolved to this day.
Last year during the festival we had the pleasure of hosting travel and educational film makers, Sid and Mary Lee Nolan, as our guests during this festival as they wanted to film the festival, to add some flavor to short film they are making about Italian wine regions. What a wonderful time we had showing them not only the festival but also our local treasures and introducing them to a few of our wine producers as they filmed away.

We enjoyed their many stories about their varied travels as they have been filming exotic location for over 35 years. Mary is a professor of geography and thought that filming many of the locations that she taught about would be not only interesting but a lot of fun as well as a means to travel to just about any location in the world you might or might not be interested in visiting. As one of our other guests remarked, "Every time they open their mouth, we're in a new country." They have produced an extensive selection of short, travel and geographic films and when they are not globe trotting or still busy teaching, they enjoy presenting their films to a wide range of audiences. They are always keen to find a new project that will launch them on to their next adventure. I can't say I don't blame them. You can find out more about them and sample some of the work on their site Academic Media Network / Globe Scope Travel Productions. I don't think they have finished their Italian wine regions project just yet, but when they do I will certainly put a post and update about it here when they do.

You can read about previous Maschera di Ferro celebrations here.  You can follow us around last year when we brought them around to a few of our favorite places and introduced them to some of our wine makers in my post, Vendemmia in Val Chisone.

Fruit Dazed

The market is bursting with color and vibrant with all the delightful fruits and vegetables here at the height of the season, as the produce stacks up and the shoppers become laden down. We've gotten enough cool weather to make even the most listless renew their interest to do more than just eat prosciutto crudo and melon or figs alternated with mozzarella and ox heart tomatoes(cuore di bui). Now people are beginning to cook a bit more, but there is still just so many fruits and vegetables to choose from, what's a girl to do.

Get to making stuff, time's awastin.....

So I have been peeling, slicing, dicing and baking; canning, freezing, gelato making and eating, eating and eating as much of this luscious fruit as I dare. 

Apricots, plums, the first of the pears, 
and berries of every variety.

Rose currants, blueberries, blackberries and red gooseberries

Did I say gelato making? I actually meant sorbetto. What a delight and revelation making fresh fruit sorbet of every persuasion has been this summer. The freezer is stuffed, we need some eaters!

Strawberry kirsch sorbetto

Before  and after...

Strawberry sorbet with a chorus of berries

And Peaches

 

to make a southern girl not even think about missing the peaches back home.

The little green ones are actually ripe and a local favorite variety, i persi d'le vigne, or the peaches of the vineyard. Who knows? it's a local dialect name. What I know is that for looking green and under ripe, they are quite tasty.

Huh?  Smashed peaches?

No, they are called Pesche Tabacchiere, or peach snuff boxes. Perhaps they are called this because they are small enough to fit in your hand and sweet enough to take away the sweet craving that hits frequently when we have these in the house. They have been around for a few years, but it took me awhile to get past my suspicion of their unusual shape and price to actually try them. The insistent urging of one of our market vendors finally had me giving in and now I almost regret it, as I can hardly resist them when I spot them in the market. They tend to be a bit pricier and most come from the south of Italy, but some of our local growers have started to have added them to the delectable array of peach varieties to tempt and treat us. Peach Blackberry amaretti crisp has been a favorite lately.

Then we get to the apricots and plums, yum...yes yum.

Ramasin and Claude Reine

We have the first of the local plums coming in, our Piemontese Ramasin, as a harbinger of all the colorful ones to follow before the end is nigh with the Santa Claras. Not ready for that just yet.

The greenish golden one on the right of the Ramasin are named after a queen of France. Silly me though they were named after the person who cultivated them and at one point even thought they were named after a before my time actor named Claude Rains. 

And what is summer with out tarts tarts and more fruit tarts. 

Sunny side up brioche apricot tarts

I just can't make enough of the variety of  tarts there are to make, individual, free form, galettes, pies and on and on..

Apricot Thyme Almond Tart

and  last but not least

 

Apricots in local moscato wine. 

Divine, just divine.

To finish off all those apricots after so many tarts and sorbets.

We will so enjoy this when these become a distant summer memory.

That's what I've been up to, what about you?

Finalmente..La Notte della Pizza e´del Pane!

I'll tell you what, it's an exciting time in the Roncaglia household these days.
Finally, pizza night arrived, much to my and my in laws delight, and, Fabrizio's relief. At last he can have some peace, that is until we start pestering him for when the next pizza party is slated to take place.
It all started about two years ago in the spring when my father in law decided that we needed a wood burning oven on the premises for me to ply my bread baking trade to a different means of bringing the bread to the table and kicking up my baking skills a notch or two.  Papa also wanted to have a decent pizza as our attempts in our regular and convection oven, weren't too bad, but just not quite pizzeria style quality and he had faith in me. I think it didn't hurt that when my in laws had their friends over for one of their famous big dinners, one or two of them always brought some of their home baked, oven fired bread along for the sampling. Again, my in laws have never failed to praise my bread and secretly hope that I will make a loaf or two of my black olive bread for any of those big dinners, so they had bragging rights expanded as well. It almost goes without saying that the rest of the feast is always memorable, thanks to their tireless effort to "put on the dog" as my parents use to quaintly state, and the fact that they had all those years to perfect the art of entertaining with good food and drink from their "La Baita" restaurant days. Their commercial gelato maker is always prominently featured as well in these feasts as my father in law has perfected the art of a banana gelato, that is rich tasting without all those cholesterol inducing ingredients. He won't say exactly what is in it either, but, I can tell you that it is a very brief list.
 Enough said.

After much discussion about which oven to purchase and and why, naturally, with some disagreements over the details, the day arrived, just before Italians go on holiday for the month of August, when we became the proud owners of a wood fired oven and it was actually in our possession. You can read about it's arrival here. 

Now, if you think that it would be a straight forward proposition to install it, test, tinker around with it, adjust and go into full blown use of it, like I did, then, you would be wrong. Like so many things that seem straightforward  in Italy, it is a long serpentine route to the destination and even a bump or two along the way, a bit of back draft, too much snow on the roof,  too little dry wood of the particular kind you need, or just too hot, just too, too, tooooo long in coming.  But, what do you know, the time arrived last night. Arrived indeed and enjoyed by all it was. 

The second most asked question of me from acquaintances, right after how Fabrizio and I met is, "Do you miss America?"  I always reply, that aside from easy access to my family and friends, other than virtually, I miss the direct and often expedient way that things get done in America, the directness, the convenience, the immediateness, that is, at least for me, quintessentially American. Yes, I do sometimes miss that very much indeed and occasionally a movie in English at the movie theater.

Fabrizio's parents digging in at last 

on Davide's naturally leaven pizza pies

Definitely worth the wait!

Luckily for us, Fabrizio's old friend Davide, a former colleague and one of the local kids that hung around the Villar Perosa Hotel in the days when Fabrizio worked for the Agnelli family, and currently the maestro of the pizza department in our Pinerolo Eataly, came over to help us get off on a positive start to our wood fired pizza and bread adventure. You can see Davide hand tossing pizza dough here, as I got a much better photo of him in action over at Eataly than I did last night. I was too busy trying to ask questions and absorb his techniques to get too many decent photos.  Big thank you Davide!

These are our leftover pizzas ready to warm up and top fresh today in the oven that is still warm enough to heat them through..mmm, mmm good!

If you're looking for a pizza dough that performs well, a good one to try is from Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice. Peter's book is a great resource of accessible yeasted dough information and will have you making great pizza, foccacia and artisan breads in no time. It has a lot of instruction, but I think you will find the info invaluable. You can find a copy of the recipe here in it's entirety, but I do recommend buying the book as it is well worth every penny if you love to make great bread.

We all ate ourselves silly and there seemed to be as much enthusiasm for my pizza dough as there was for  Davide's. That bodes well for my future of making pizzas for my in laws! 

It was a fab evening with the fab folks that work over at Eataly.  When you're in Pinerolo, you just have to stop in and try Davide's pizza as well as Chef Roberto's delicious cuisine. If you're lucky their wives, Michelle and Monica just might be taking your order and serving you some of Eataly's high quality food. Naturally, a meal isn't complete without a digestivo from our friend Enrico's line of Genepy and Barathier. Those of you familiar with it will savor the flavor and those of you unfamiliar will just have to come and try some whilst you're here, as you won't find Genepy outside the Italian and French alps.

I must say though the biggest thrill came this morning at 6 am when we came back to the oven upon Davide's instruction and loaded it up with my naturally leavened loaves of bread that had been languishing in the refrigerator waiting for the oven to cool down enough. We returned in an hour and some later, to discover these bronzed beauties awaiting our return.

It was so exciting to see them puffed up and browned to a hue sometimes difficult to accomplish.

Naturally, there is some tweaking to do and I look forward to it, but when we pulled open the door and found all these lovelies inside, my heart skipped a beat. I love cooking and baking has always fed my soul, making fruit and chocolate desserts rich in cream and butter is always a thrill, but baking bread speaks to me in a way that seems to satisfy a very basic instinct of mine, making our daily bread. Firing up the wood oven stirred my connection to the  weekly town bake that used to be so common over a good portion of Europe and the wood stoves I cooked on in the states many moons back as well.  Then I think of the Egyptians who are credited with being the first bread bakers, burying their terra cotta pots in a fire pit and when I feasted my eyes on these, I  felt transported back and then some.

 Be still my beating heart.

Naturally,....

 Fabrizio steals the show and my heart as well!

 I love that even though my bread is still the same recipe that I have make hundreds of times over the years, it seems to now have a new personality and that, is so very exciting. I look forward to this next phase of the journey. I think we will be looking toward offering some special weekends perhaps dedicated to the wood fired oven classes, coming up in the near future. Stay tuned.