Back in Florence for just a couple of days, the birthplace of our love of Italy. Two days here and one in Bologna before returning home to Umbria to start our two weeklong Cucinapalooza cooking tours.

Over the past six months or so we have been working, meeting, talking, brainstorming and planning the reopening of Bella Italia, our Italian retail store and labor of love for the past decade. Uncooperative landlords and an antiquated county bureaucracy and legal structure that penalizes those who want to popularize small, local, authentic wineries stood in the way of keeping our doors open. But with every door that closes another opens and we continue to hope for – and plan for – a very grand reopening of a new Bella Italia in the not-too-distant future. And when we do, it will be the Bella Italia we always hoped it would be.

Which brings us back to Florence. Part of the reason for our visit here is to reconnect or stay connected with our memories of this fascinating town. Part of the reason is to enjoy the city and its food and wine at this particular time of year, when life is literally being reborn – an annual rebirth in the city that gave us the renaissance. And part of it is to put our finger on exactly what it is about Italy that we love so much. What it is that must be a part of the new Bella Italia.

Which is why on our first day we headed straight for the Mercato Nuovo food market and why we later in the day found ourselves sitting over a glass of wine at the Cantinetta dei Verazzano. Two experiences that are quintessentially Florentine. Quintessentially Italian. Two experiences that are remarkable and memorable in their simplicity and plainness. And two experiences that have never been successfully translated into the American vocabulary.

To wander the fresh food stalls of the Mercato Nuovo is to enter a world that is strange and different, without a real counterpart in America. Here simple farmers display their offerings simply. Without the pretense that sometimes infects and spoils the American urban farmers market. Nothing here is precious, in the negative connotation of the word. Everything here is precious, in the positive sense.

As we wander the boxes of fresh artichokes, ripe strawberries, varied lettuces, visions of simple dishes danced in ours (Suzy’s) head. Next door bags of beans, lentils and spices lay out, waiting to be shoveled into smaller bags for a journey home. Butchers hammered at enormous bistecche with their cleavers as whole animals – rabbit, chickens, duck – most with their faces still smiling at you mingled with inner parts one rarely sees and nearly never thinks about – veal lungs, livers, testicles. Cheese stands abound as do a few seafood counters in a town not renowned for its seafood. The point is that every seller is king of his small domain. He or she does one thing only and one thing exceedingly well. And that one thing is always very simple and very elemental. No frills. No pretentions. Totally real.

And in this bazaar of the simple life is a small restaurant, more of a food truck without wheels, called Nerbone. A staple of Florentine life for generations, this shop prepares simple food – for some of the simple worker folk that patronize it at lunchtime it is more like simple nutrition. A porchetta sandwich on a plain roll. Boiled meat made from the parts that require long cooking then enriched with savory salsa verde or a piccante red sauce. We are not big fans of simple (read cheap) house wines, but at Nerbone a carafe of the house red was simply made to go with this elemental food. Our table mates, a couple of local Florentine lads against whom we were pressed up at our marble topped communal table, showed us the best way to drink this simple wine, with a little acqua naturale added. They were right.

How to translate the simplicity of this meal, peasant fare in a manner of speaking, and to offer not an Epcot-ized caricature of the real thing, but the real thing? How to attract people from across the economic spectrum, to happily equalize everyone through the joy of simple food shared in the company of others? How to avoid the temptation and the economic compulsion of upsizing and gentrifying each element in order to pay the rents in an American urban center? We don’t know the answer to all these questions, but after an €18 lunch at Nerbone, our first meal since arriving in Italy this morning, we know these are questions worthy of an answer.

As is the question of whether Americans will be content to sit down for half an hour, drink a glass of wine and savor – in the best meaning of the word – a plate of freshly made focaccia topped and stuffed with various simple delicacies – roasted onions, radicchio and mozzarella, fresh artichokes. Returning to the Cantinetta dei Verrazzano, a wine bar that describes itself as a focacciaria and coffee shop, we asked ourselves that same question. But mostly we enjoyed a glass of Chianti Classico riserva, produced by the cantina in Chianti and savored – in the best meaning of the word – their homemade focaccia, in a relaxed atmosphere where the troubles of the world simply cannot get through. Are Americans ready for this? We won’t know until we open up shop in the hopefully not-to-distant future. But whatever the answer we know, from our experience, that they should be.

Ci vediamo!
Bill and Suzy