Dinner at the villa. Under the stars. In front of the big screen.

It is a tradition that was just waiting to be born.

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Our return to Umbria, after a two week detour that brought us to Sicily and Ponza had the feeling of a homecoming. And not just because the temperatures – as have been the case in our hometown of Washington, DC – were topping out at nearly 100 degrees (just under 38 degrees celsius). But because we were returning to a familiar villa in a familiar part of the world with good and familiar friends.

So how better to celebrate a homecoming than with a party? Una festa!

Our accounts of parties by the pool with our Italian friends may be getting a bit stale for our reader(s) to swallow. But they never get old or stale for us to experience. And so we set about organizing una cena with many of our local friends. Gerardo Ribigini, owner of Geribi ceramics along with his wife Assunta and son and daughter Federico and Claudia; the famiglia Pardi, our friends from Montefalco that are master winemakers and producers of luxury linens and who would be gracing us with the presence of Alberto and sons Albertino (Alberto Jr.) and Gianluca as well as the first visit to the villa by our dear friend Augusta, “the poet of the family”; and our closest friends and neighbors, Lodovico and Anna Palermi, who have graciously lent us their son Marco to help manage and run the villa.

The guests began arriving as the sun hovered over the nearby hills that are home to Bettona and Perugia and within a short while it had disappeared from view, still illuminating our valley but bringing some measure of relief from the uncharacteristically hot temperatures that have been with us since our arrival here. As the mercury quickly dropped from sizzling to merely warm, we enjoyed a glass of grechetto, brought to us by our friends the Pardis and bearing a label with their name on it.

As darkness finally began to envelope us and the temperatures settled into a cool comfortable range we switched on our video projector, the new toy for this trip. A few weeks ago for Father’s Day I received as a present a portable outdoor movie screen from my kids so we could watch movies at night out by our pool back home in Washington. We gave the screen a single tryout at home and immediately decided that it would make a perfect addition to the villa in Italy, so we lugged it over with us and broke it out a few days prior to our dinner party, figuring out how to connect up a computer or DVD player and how to output the sound through a pair of portable speakers we had earlier bought for the villa.

So as the darkness fell we turned up the sound on the evening’s entertainment, a black and white Italian movie (with English subtitles for our family and American friends) – Divorce Italian Style. It was a surreal sort of experience. For the Americans it felt like a drive in theater without the cars. For our Italian friends it seemed just plain weird. But where there is a screen with moving images there are invariably going to be people mesmerized by it and staring at it. That certainly was the case.

And the staring and smiling became even more pronounced when we interrupted Divorzio all’Italiana and began a loop of videos that we had produced from interviews conducted with many of our assembled Italian friends over the past several years. There were several vignettes featuring Gerardo and Assunta, demonstrating their skill and passion creating ceramic art. There was an interview with Augusta explaining the family’s tessitura or weaving mill. There were clips showing the Pardi men working the vineyards and making wine. There were testimonials from all of them and the Palermis about the villa. We were dining under the stars with movie stars!

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But as usual, the real star was the food, the wine, the ambiance, the camaraderie and the conversations. It was an evening, as we have come to enjoy, with conversations taking place in English and Italian, the multilingual guests strategically spread around the table, moving the conversations along regardless of the language. These polyglot evenings have become something of the norm around here and are a key to enabling our American friends to connect with our Italian friends. It’s a great way to learn a little Italian as well, only we sometimes have trouble recalling it the next morning.

On this evening, Maria Pia, our fabulous cook and Marco, one of our property managers completely outdid themselves. Our dinner under the stars started out with a light antipasti, consisting only of grilled eggplants, grilled zucchini, a salad of tomatoes, potatoes, eggs, tuna and caper berries and melon with proscuitto. We had debated the possibility of skipping a primi or pasta course, settling at the last moment on Maria Pia’s fabulous eggplant risotto. As my children will tell you, I don’t generally like eggplant, but this was not only good, it was exquisite. But to be honest, it was mostly the risotto that I ate, an incredibly rich and savory tomato sauce that was at the same time light and anything but

heavy.

Then came the mixed grill, a series of pork products grilled to smoky perfection by pitmaster Marco. Honestly, the sausages, which were provided by our butcher friend and business associate Mauro (who operates a norcineria or pork butchery in Rome) were senza paragone – unequaled. Cooked lightly, so they were still sweating and moist, yet tickled with smoke and slightly crunchy on the outside, there were eyes a-rollin’ around the table. So, too, the thinly sliced pork chops and the pancetta spoke to the Umbrian tastebud as well as to the American. It was clearly a case of excellent ingredients meet superb preparation. It is truly scary to think how much pork was consumed that night.

Or how much wine and, at the end of the dinner, sorbetto. Our new favorite summertime libation, sorbetto, or as some of our Roman friends call it, sgroppino, is a lemon sorbet served in a champagne glass and mixed with a small amount of vodka. The sweet-tartness of the sorbetto combines beautifully with the vodka and makes the latter go down easy. It is like feeding candy to a baby. Or vodka to a drunk. No matter how you serve it, it is a cool, refreshing end to a hot summer evening dinner.

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A few hours later, after much political discussion, cultural discussion, parental discussion and general solving of most, if not all of the problems of the world, we said our buona nottes and another installment of dinner with the Italians came to an end. But not before the black and white movie screen, which had been reset to play Divorzio all’Italiana and its star, Marcello Mastroianni announced “Fine.” It was indeed the end and it was also, as our Americans would attest, mighty fine.

* * *

But for at least my brother in law Marc and me the evening was not finito. There was still wine to be drunk and cool, post midnight air to be enjoyed. So we fired up the projector and watched Roberto Benigni in La Vita e’ Bella – Life is Beautiful. It is the poignant story of a carefree Jewish man and his son’s efforts and ability to survive and find the beauty of life in a German concentration camp. Not the sort of thing that perhaps lends itself to late night viewing after a raucous party. But with its message of hope and survival and it and its main character’s intense focus on finding the beauty in life, perhaps it was the perfect end for a perfect evening. For here in Umbria, it is hard not to believe that la vita e bella.

Sometimes life imitates art.

Ci vediamo!
Bill and Suzy