Pizza

I am too scattered right now to manage an entire Friday Five, but I have to say a few words about pizza. Chicago or New York? Neither.

Italian pizza has a crisp, thin crust, and comes to the table unsliced, to be eaten with a knife and fork. Sometimes it has red sauce on it, sometimes not. You can get any or all of the ingredients that are familiar to us, but the sausage is spicier, the black olives bigger and better, and the funghi might be porcini. We had delicious pizzas with pears, gorgonzola, and walnuts, too.

Last Saturday we sat with four companions in a Cortona restaurant called Fu Fluns (the Etruscan name for Dionysus) and had a late lunch that lasted about three hours. We ate pizza (mine had mozzarella, mushrooms, and black truffles) and pasta, passed our plates back and forth ("You have to taste this"), drank fabulous triple-fermented Belgian beer, talked about everything, and laughed. And then laughed some more.

I will probably forget what I saw at the Uffizi, or the mosaics at St. Mark's, before I forget that lunch.