We’re back. Just as we knew we would be. But six, nearly seven weeks removed from Italy, since our last two month visit, is and was a long time away. It is, naturally, good to be back, especially as our month long itinerary will be a mix of the old and familiar and the new and exciting. Sicily, Ponza, Umbria. Beaches, Greek ruins, rental boats and Umbria Jazz, the villa and our Umbrian neighbors. Pete and Nancy (their fourth or fifth visit?), Bill and Corinna (their second), Willia and John (their second, too) and Bruce and Christine, John and Betty (their first). I can’t imagine ever getting tired of this.

Our trip will officially begin in earnest on Saturday, when we will fly from Rome to Sicily to begin a week on the island’s southern coast at a beach house owned by our friends the Becchina family, producers of an outstanding Sicilian olive oil – Olio Verde – that we have been enjoying and selling for a decade. It will be our third visit to Sicily, but the previous visits, at three and four days, respectively and consisting of a mad dash from one side of the island to the other while captivating, were too rushed. It will be nice to stay put for a week, to enjoy the beach house (that borders on the national park housing the Greek ruins of Selinunte) and to explore the area around the villa.

But before arriving in Sicily, we have decided to add an auxiliary bonus trip, a two day visit to Bevagna, the tiny, walled Roman-medieval gem of a town that lies less than 15 minutes from our Umbrian villa. We have made an annual habit of visiting Umbria in July, during the Umbria Jazz Festival and each year for the past five years we have arrived just as Bevanga has been cleaning up from its summer Mercato del Gaite festival, a medieval town festival that takes place over two weeks in mid June. This year we have decided to drop in for a few days during the festival and to see what all the fuss is about. More about the festival later. Today we gush about our hotel and its restaurant where we spent our first dinner.

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Owning a villa in the area, we have not had many opportunities for staying in local Umbrian hotels. A couple of years ago a weeklong visit coincided with the rental of the villa and we spent a lovely week at a local spa/hotel. For our brief two day visit to Bevagna this time we chose to stay at the hotel l’Orto degli Angeli (the Garden of the Angels). We have eaten at the hotel’s restaurant, Redibis, on several occasions and have been curious whether the hotel is as enjoyable and lovely as the restaurant.

It is.

The Orto degli Angeli is a complex of several buildings and a dozen and half rooms spread out over several blocks in the old Roman part of Bevagna. You enter the hotel through a nice lobby and immediately head upstairs to a large sitting room with a number of smaller rooms radiating off of it. A number of guest rooms are scattered about in this main building which is the center of the family’s historic holdings. But when you step outside the main building is when it gets really interesting.

Just outside the main parlor, across a small bridge lies a beautiful garden, the “orto” in the Orto degli Angeli. It is built on the top of the building next door and is a full story above street level, a secluded, private garden completely unknown to the world below. Above in the garden, a giant arbor provides soft shade on one side of space, a long row lined with comfortable garden chairs. To the right the façade of the neighboring building, with a colonnade of round arches framing an open portico looks down over this scene of tranquility. And just off a corner of this little slice of heaven is the door our suite. The eagle has definitely landed.

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Under the portico is a huge rounded window and when you look into it, depending upon the time of day, you see a bunch of faces staring back up and out at you. For inside, on the other side of the window and down one full story, back on street level, is the floor of the hotel’s restaurant, Redibis. If the hotel is special the restaurant is even more so.

Redibis is built inside the ruins of the Roman theatre that stood on this site nearly two thousand years ago. Then, when the town was called Mevania, Romans worshiped in the temple, the base and columns of which are still extant and standing in the adjoining square (and which is visible from our friend Simone’s restaurant), relaxed in thermal baths decorated with black and white tile mosaics of exotic and fantastical sea creatures and found entertainment in the semicircular theater that stood on the site of the hotel and restaurant. Perhaps it is possible to enter Redibis and not notice that the long corridor that makes up the main dining room is the excavated archway of the theatre, over which the theatre seats were built. Perhaps it is possible not to notice this, but once it is pointed out to you, and the staff will be sure to do so, it is impossible to shake the image from your mind. Here you are, sitting in a lovely, enormous two story space under an old stone and brick barrel vault, awestruck that some Roman boy had probably made out with his girlfriend under that very same arch two millennia earlier. The setting, is, without doubt, one of a kind and magical.

But Redibis stands alone not just because of its unique setting. For us, it is one of the tiny handful of “white tablecloth” restaurants that we have eaten in in Italy that we have found worth the cost, getting dressed up for and being on good manners for. In short, the food and dining experience are worth every penny.

That experience ends with the food but it most definitely starts with the service. On every one of our several visits there we have been waited on by a tall, striking and extremely affable waiter who has guided us through the unique menu and outstanding winelist, as well acting as tourguide for this most interesting venue. It was only on this visit that we ventured to introduce ourselves and make his acquaintance. Paolo is his name, and we can safely say that of all the restaurants we have patronized, the finest, the best service we have ever received was from our friend Paolo.

But the food at Redibis is the final ingredient of the ambiance-service-food trifecta that is the winning ticket. There is a seriousness and even scholarliness about the menu, featuring a host of traditional dishes where traditional does not mean popular, but really coming from the food tradition in Italy. And when one speaks about food tradition in Italy, generally one means a peasant tradition, a tradition of simple foods that were born in a time of scarcity, where Italian cooks had to use wild, free and inexpensive ingredients and combine them with imagination and creativity to make them delicious. And so the menu features a number of peasant dishes, pastas made without egg (because eggs were for the rich) and heavy on organ meats that were used rather than discarded. The menu also features the best of Italian ingredients as well, and we start our meal with a carpaccio of beef, thinly sliced and served with shaved slices of zucchini marinated in olive oil and lemon juice, rendering them soft and delicate, a perfect compliment to the raw, salty beef.

For our primi, I have a peasant pasta called strappatelli, a “bread” pasta that is dressed in a fresh tomato sauce. The pasta is a “bread” pasta because the pasta dough is made from bread dough, with yeast added. The result is a pasta that is soft and chewy like bread but also resembling in a way gnocchi. It is simple, inexpensive and yet profoundly interesting to the mind, the tooth and the tongue. This is the sort of thing that Redibis excels at.

Suzy’s primo is a pure delight, perhaps the best thing we have eaten in Italy in a long time. A fonduta, a light yet cheesey fondue is served in a bowl topped with a large, crackly crisp crepe, thin and crunchy, upon which copious amounts of truffle have been shaved. The whole concoction is topped by a soft boiled egg, the yolk of which is broken and oozes into the cheese mixture and which combines with the truffle to unleash a torrent of rich, savory but perfectly balanced tastes. Suzy is ready to pack it in and say good night.

But there is more. Braised veal cheeks, guancia, are served in two small nodini, looking like black, almost caramelized balls of meat, from which she peels small forkfuls of shredded goodness, rich, sticky and utterly delightful. I have a more standard tagliata, slices of steak that are between pink and red and covered with slivers of truffle. It is man versus food and tonight man has come out triumphant.

So our first day back in Italy ends with a meal we will find it hard to top on this trip. And it is only a few steps back to our room, in the corner of orto. For most, the evening, one of adjustment to the new time zone and an effort to overcome jet lag, would come to an end. But we are in Bevagna and the Mercato del Gaite is going on full steam.

It is 11:00. Do you know where your children are? Tune in tomorrow to find out.

Ci vediamo!
Bill and Suzy