Might as well start with the cheese. I've never seen so much Pecorino in one place. Giant wheels of it: staggionato (my favorite), fresco, crusted in herbs, crusted in hazelnuts, with bits of black truffles. There were booths devoted solely to goat cheeses. One booth had some of the best Gouda I've ever tasted, as well as the greenest cheese I've ever seen: Gouda made with basil.
Speaking of truffles, the Arezzo area has apparently had a bumper crop this year. This is the first time I've ever seen fresh truffles in the flesh, for sale by the kilo. Apart from that plenty of sellers had jars of truffles in oil, truffle-porcini relish to put on pasta or bread, truffle pate, and so forth. Truffles aren't prohibitively expensive here, so it's really unfortunate that I don't have a kitchen. One kind seller--after sharing a taste of a local red wine--took the time to explain that, to make a little truffle flavor go a long way, you warm tiny bits of truffle in olive oil, so the truffle aroma permeates the oil, and then you just make sure the oil has thoroughly coated your pasta (or whatever). This combination of flavor, simplicity, and economy is one of my favorite aspects of Tuscan food.
Then the honey. Varietal honey is a big deal here. You can get honey made from acacia, girasole (sunflowers), millefiori (which I think translates as wildflowers), orange blossoms, lemon blossoms, chestnut blossoms, and several others. Each variety has a characteristic color, aroma, and flavor. My favorite so far is lemon, by a mile, but girasole is quite good as well. Chestnut honey is quite dark, and the flavor is soapy and bitter; I wonder if it's close to the flavor of unroasted chestnuts, which I hear are pretty awful. Anyway, one way to eat honey is to drizzle it over a slice of Pecorino. No day can be bad in which you have tasted that.
The bread. Several of the forno booths had giant six-foot loaves of Tuscan bread (white, crusty, no salt) they were selling by the chunk. There were also olive breads, foccaccia, pastries, strudels, and crepes.
The meat. Prosciutto is relatively inexpensive here, a standard part of the diet (although on the whole Italians eat far less meat than Americans do). I have no idea what the term is for a large chunk of prosciutto--a hock?--but they were hanging everywhere, along with pancetta and sausages of every conceivable variety. At least two booths had boar's heads stuffed with raw sausage, one of those frank, sort of medieval reminders that meat was once living--the sort of thing you don't get in the more squeamish States. Somehow the effect wasn't grisly; it just heightened the sense that I was walking through a still life by one of the Dutch masters.
And oh, the olives. This area is the source of some of the best olive oils in the world. And the olives themselves--Diavolo Nero (large and black), Dolce (large and almost the same green as asparagus, with a light, mild flavor), al forno (oven-cured, black, intense and sweet), calamata, Sicilian (a meaty green, spicy, with red pepper)--make me wonder how anyone could possibly be contented with a wan American specimen stuffed with a limp pimiento.
What else? Onions. Garlic. Wine. Chocolate. (I avoided that because I'm going to the Perugia chocolate festival next week; I think it's possible I may never leave.) Preserves. The most beautiful dried fruit I've ever seen--kiwi, mango, fig, strawberry, orange, cherry, apricot, all retaining its color somehow. Chestnuts are a big part of local cuisine; several places had roast chestnuts, and I even saw sacks of chestnut flour. Chestnut trees, incidentally, grow up and down the street that leads into town. The nuts are encased in spiny sheaths that look like little green and brown blowfish:
It's the sort of thing that makes me marvel that anyone ever figured out it was edible.
And all that, in a place that looks like this:
How did anyone ever stop eating and admiring the landscape long enough to start the Renaissance?
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