Escape to Italy, Vol. 3

What would a blog series about Italy be without a few words about the delicious food we enjoyed? Pasta, pizza, prosciutto...and giant scampi and celery pyramids??? Oh yes, and Max couldn't believe his good fortune. Alesha, however, was a little more skeptical.

But I'm getting ahead of myself... We were searching for a great dinner place for Saturday night, and the owner of our campground recommended La Ruota, which turned out to be a gourmet all-you-can eat restaurant. Yep, you read that right -- we had no idea such a thing existed, but eight courses later (and with seconds of the to-die-for crepe suzettes on offer) we were believers. Cuttlefish ink pasta, salted fish, potato mash octopus cakes... We were in dangerous territory, and we hadn't even made it to the all-you-can-drink bar cart. Seriously. It was both heartwarming and disturbing to watch Swiss Mister's delight as that trolley came trundling over with digestifs galore.

What made the evening really special, though, was our conversation with Eduardo, the proprietor of La Ruota. He shared with us this New York Times review of La Ruota from 1989: food critic Letty Cottin Pogrebin's 50th birthday trip to Italy may have been more than twenty years ago, but she can assure you that La Ruota was as good then as it is now, and the driving tunnels really are as crazy as we say. At least now we have lights inside!

The one-way tunnel was four miles long. Maybe the car would break down inside. Maybe I'd get claustrophobic. Maybe we should have lunch in one of those nice trattorias back in town.

The signal turned green and we began to drive into the passageway. It was pitch dark. Our headlight beams were absorbed into nothingness. The inside walls, blasted out of craggy black rock, were marked with a fading horizontal stripe and an occasional dim reflector. My husband hunched forward over the wheel, squinting as he steered into the abyss, trying not to scrape the sides of the car against the pressing tunnel walls. Occasionally, a slice of daylight cut through the rock, blinding him with a glimpse of the sky beyond our mountain crypt. For four long miles, we rolled at a crawl, both of us focusing our night vision on the horizontal stripe snaking through the darkness.

Eduardo, the son of Chef Campiano in the article, perhaps as a thank-you for braving the death-defying tunnel, gave us gifts as we left: fun La Ruota slates for the walls of our kitchen, and he introduced us to his mother. All this on top of an absolutely amazing meal at nowhere near Zurich prices.

Swiss Mister and Miss love Italy, and plan to return to La Ruota just as soon as they can. Hopefully their waistlines will have recovered by then. And if not, meh, might as well eat another crepe suzette. I'm sure we can find some mountain to hike up to work it off.