Although we’ve already left Italy, there’s one more story I wanted to tell, about the party that my friend Ornella threw shortly before we left Fidenza. She is an excellent pianist but also a very busy music teacher who struggles to find time to make music with friends. We hadn’t played together since COVID, and I was very happy that we were able to start up again. She proposed that she hold a little gathering at the beginning of June, which was then a few months off, where we would perform one or two small pieces. “That way we’ll have to work on them,” she said.
It was a good plan, because it meant that busy as she was, she found time for us to have at least an hour of rehearsal every week. And by the time the date of the party rolled around, we felt ready to show off what we’d worked on.
Ornella lives in an old farmhouse out in the country, with a big garden all around it. Her idea was that the party guests would mostly be outside, while we’d play in her small piano room with the windows open. That seemed very unintimidating, especially since we were talking about only 20 people or so, including Pam and Romano.
But as the day drew near, Ornella mentioned that the guest list had grown a bit. “We keep telling people, and everyone wants to come,” she said. She and her husband, Alberto, had come to pick me up at the train station, to drive me out to their house, and moments later Alberto stopped the car to invite a neighbor who was passing by on a tractor to come to the party, too. “There will be probably 50 people,” Ornella confessed as we drove off.
She and Alberto often throw these kinds of parties, where friends play music and everyone brings food and wine. In addition to playing Mozart and Piazzolla with me, Ornella was going to perform a Diabelli sonata with a guitarist friend and accompany Romano in a song by Toschi. Pam decided she’d bring some deviled eggs, an American treat largely unknown in Italy, and I told Danny to make his famous sesame noodles, which have been a hit at every potluck they’ve ever appeared at.
The day of the party there was a forecast of rain, but they’d been forecasting rain every day all week and rain rarely materialized. But shortly after people started arriving at Ornella’s, the skies opened up and it began to pour. Instead of standing around in the garden, people crowded into the house, and I wondered where the audience was going to be when it was time for us to play.
Meanwhile three big tables in the spacious garden room (formerly cow stalls, I think) were filling up with food. On one table Alberto set up a big industrial slicer, the kind every self-respecting family in that part of Italy has, and began slicing prosciutto crudo and other meats. Then another, even bigger slicer appeared. A guest, worried that Alberto’s slicer wasn’t adequate to the task of slicing the coppa he was bringing, had decided to haul in his own equipment.
In addition to the salumi and Pam’s eggs and Danny’s noodles, there was a lot of food. There were pizzas, savorty tarts, little panini with meat and cheese, a giant hunk of Parmesan, a jam crostata, some little biscotti, and many bottles of wine. This was a relatively young crowd, including quite a few children, but the party tables contained no carrot sticks, no salads, not even a dish of eggplant parmigiano or stewed fennel. The only vegetable matter was the artichoke cream sandwiched in one foccacia and the rich mushroom filling in one of the tarts. Apparently it isn’t just old folks who, in the immortal words of Romano’s mother, felt “we ate enough vegetables during the war.” The people of Emilia, of every age, really don’t seem interested in eating la verdura.
When it came time for the music, Ornella welcomed as many people as could fit to cram into her little piano room. What you can’t see in the photo of our performance is that we had about two dozen people sitting on the floor all around us.
Despite these battlefield conditions, we did a pretty creditable job and so did Vicenzo, the guitarist, and of course Romano was wonderful, as always.
Afterwards, as I was sipping a long-awaited glass of wine, Danny pointed out that the hunk of Parmesan had disappeared almost immediately, while no one seemed very interested in his sesame noodles. He wasn’t surprised. “They eat the same things here all the time,” he said. “I’m starting think of it as prosciutto di fucking Parma. I’m sick of Italian food.”
Pam spoke up. “How do you think I feel after 35 years?” she said.
But at least her deviled eggs had all been eaten.
Love the music with food and wine, and that you’re part of the music. Danny’s sesame noodles are legendary. Silly Fidenza folk.