by Joseph Harris On San Marino, a very stubborn stonemason, priest-strangling pasta, and a small area of Los Angeles that would absolutely secede if it could. Questions Asked While Driving Past the Turnoff What is San Marino really? The oldest republic on earth. Founded in 301 AD by a Christian stonemason named Marinus who climbed a mountain to escape Roman persecution and apparently never came down. It has been a sovereign republic ever since. Seventeen hundred years. The Un

On Michael, the chili, and the Italian-American kitchen that got credited to the wrong region for a hundred years by Joe Harris This was before the Godfather. I want to establish that clearly, because it matters. The year was around 1967. Before Coppola gave America a mythology to attach to Italian men with friends in interesting places, before anyone had a script for what to call what they were seeing, I had Michael. The real version. I was about fourteen, in junior high sch

by Joseph Harris When you understand what food synergy is, everything changes. The idea is simple and almost impossible to teach: flavor is greater than the sum of its parts. The right ingredients in exactly the right proportions create something that cannot be achieved with a recipe. It must be tasted and adjusted until it is just right. It requires an educated palate, experience, skill, and above all the concept — the understanding that you are not following instructions bu

by Joseph Harris Most of the regions in our journals arrived through travel — a trip, a meal, a market, a kitchen in someone else's country where something clicked into place. Piedmont arrived differently. Piedmont did not wait for me to go there. It sent people instead. Three of them, to be precise. Three men connected to the hills of the Langhe, to the Nebbiolo grape, to the serious and uncompromising wine culture of northwestern Italy, who found their way to Mendocino Coun

by Joseph Harris There is a food show in Italy called Cibus. It happens in Parma, in the spring, and it is where the Italian food industry gathers — manufacturers large and small, importers, distributors, buyers, chefs, and a certain category of person who simply cannot stay away from a room that contains this much of what they love. We fell into the last category, though our credentials from the Mercato gave us VIP access and made it official. We had booked our flight to Ita

by: Joseph Harris There is a concept in the world of longevity research called a Blue Zone. The term came from a simple act — two scientists in 1999, mapping the villages in the mountainous Ogliastra province of Sardinia where men routinely lived past a hundred, drawing circles on the map in blue marker wherever the centenarians clustered. The blue circles gave the phenomenon its name. Dan Buettner later expanded the research globally and identified five places on earth where

by Joseph Harris My first deep understanding of the special regional characteristics of Italy came from pottery. Not food. Not wine. Not travel. Pottery — and the bricks that built the Duomo. This requires some explanation. When Kathleen and I first opened the Mercato, we were doing what every new shop does — chasing suppliers, building relationships, trying to find the people who cared about the same things we cared about. We had been introduced to a smallish importer called

by Joseph Harris This chapter begins, as so many chapters of my life do, with my stepfather Bill Greene. Bill is the subject of his own document and his own deepening list of stories — he was my mother's second husband, married into our family in 1962, and was the most interesting man I have ever known. He gets a full chapter of his own. For Cinco de Mayo what matters is this: Bill brought Mexican food into a North Carolina kitchen at a moment when no one else in our part of

by Joseph Harris We came to Siena from the south, which is the wrong direction if you want an easy introduction to the city. Siena doesn't have a simple entry point. The ancient center was built for foot traffic and horses, not automobiles, and the Sienese have made no particular accommodation for the modern error of arriving by car. There are narrow one-way streets that go nowhere useful, surveillance cameras that record your mistakes, and a general architectural consensus t