DO IT FOR MARCOS
A venture into Il Negozietta is enough to understand why Italy’s flame has yet to be snuffed
Everyone and their grandmother writes about Italy. Every Christmas your aunt whips out that book of Italian landscapes and short stories from the organized bus trip she did through Tuscany a few years ago. The big box bookstore at the mall has an entire section on Italian travel books and memoirs of a middle-aged woman’s pasta and wine escapade. You may even know a neighbor who tried his hand at an authentic Italian restaurant, scrounging up recipes from a short stack of books on lasagnas and garlic bread. Italy has been done—over and over. And the cliché pasta stories and blogs ridden with someone’s singular magical experience may seem like old news. But a venture into Il Negozietto in the town of Orvieto is enough to understand why people may never stop writing about the place.
Maybe I was just relieved to longer be hauling buckets of flowers uphill in the sweltering Tuscan sun and navigating through windy roads as my friend’s floral design assistant. But the moment we GoogleMapped our way to the outskirts of the towering mountain top town of Orvieto, I was at ease, and the tensions of Siri’s voice bastardizing the Italian street names faded into the honeysuckle-spritzed air.
We had an hour and a half to print boarding passes, drop a couple postcards in the mail, and find a quick and respectable lunch. As a travel companion I can’t offer anyone navigation skills or Italian conversation, and I’m a horrible decision maker. But I’m damn good at finding an acceptable meal. And with so little time, this became the ultimate test—the world cup of whatever you’d like to call this especially delicious skill.
Luckily, it didn’t take long. A small worn wooden sign caught my eye off one of the main streets. There was a large P painted onto it, with “porchetta”shooting down vertically and and “panini” off horizontally, forming an upside L. The rest of the sign was written only in Italian, so we followed the arrow down a windy path shaded by overgrown vines and Christmas ornaments . (It was June). We ended up at a small shop marked with an actual wild boar’s head, and made our way through the 1960s beaded curtain door.
No more the size of European bedroom, Il Negozietto was just as curated as the photo in the section on Tuscan delis in your neighbor’s cookbook. On either side were simple shelves showcasing Marcos’s prized local accouterments: jarred black truffles and white truffle sauce, dried pici and tagliatelle pastas, a few bottles of regional red wine, and cloudy green olive oil. Racks of flour-dusted bread were the perfect backdrop for Marco’s storybook performance. He stood behind a glass case spanning the bread-curtain’s entirety—a museum worthy display of of white molded fennel salamis and kingly proscuittos, peppered coppas, and rounds of fresh and aged sheep’s cheese. On the left side of the case lived the saintly porchetta—the mecca of our short but pressured lunch challenge.
A middle-aged Italian-American gentleman from Jersey sitting at the only available table with another couple, struck up a conversation with a mouth full of Chianti, asking us what a couple of Americans were doing here, and telling Marco in Italian, that he was the best in town. He and his friends assured us that we had, indeed, come to the right place, as Marco hand-curates every single product that passes through his shop. Eventually, they offered suggestions on what to order from their favorite Italian butcher. We followed suit and the original wooden sign, ordering porchetta paninis. Marco smiled nervously as he received the Jersey man’s orders in Italian, and went to work.
His shiny bald head bobbed here and there, baskets of vacuum-sealed charcuterie bits and ends hiding his face from the small crowd, as he artfully clipped bits of crispy pork skin onto our a few layers of thinly shaved porchetta and truffle pecorino cheese. He handed the sandwiches to us in paper bags, and it felt as though he was entrusting us with something precious—hoping we would care for and enjoy it, just as he did.
Before heading out to sit on the bench in front of Il Negozietto to enjoy one of the best sandwiches I’ve ever tasted, the Jersey man told us we needed a picture with Marcos. I thought the man would be reluctant, and I was even a little embarrassed this American guy’s fanaticism. But Marcos was actually delighted, in that star-gazed kind of way. Maybe it was because he loved the idea of taking a picture with a couple of young females. But his eagerness to spotlight in a photo of hungry American tourists and the quintessential Italian dedication to the culinary craft makes me think he wanted us to evangelize—to tell stories about Il Negozietto and its humble porchetta panini. So here I am, sharing another food-related anecdote about a sandwich in Italy like the next basic traveler. But if I do it for Marcos, it seems a just a bit less cliché.