Verona: What's in a Name?

by Joseph Harris

Kathleen books our trips, and she books them the way other people compose music. The Italy trip was the smoothest I have ever taken, trains that met us, hotels that expected us, and regions that unfolded in the right order. Woven through all that competence were her surprises, which she plants like landmines of delight and detonates without warning. There were two on that trip. The second went off later, in Rimini, when our hotel turned out to be Fellini's Grand Hotel, but I have told that story. The first was waiting in Verona, at the very start, and she had saved it for the city whose name is on our sign.

We came in by train, took a cab toward the center, and then the cab stopped, because in the heart of Verona the cars simply end. The old center is closed to them; the hotel had sent a concierge to meet us at the boundary, and we walked the rest, not blocks in any American sense, but a folding of narrow stone passages, each one older than our country. And then we turned a corner and I recognized where I was. Anyone would have. I had seen this courtyard in a hundred photographs: the worn arch, the crowding walls, the balcony. Juliet's courtyard. The most photographed love story on earth. I expected to walk past it, the way you walk past a famous thing, slowing but not stopping, and instead we walked in. The concierge kept going, through the arch, across the stones, to a doorway inside the courtyard itself. The entrance to our hotel was Juliet's courtyard. That was Kathleen's surprise. We were among the first guests of a newly opened hotel whose front door stood a few steps from the most famous balcony in the world, and she had known for months and said nothing.

I should describe what living there is like. The courtyard is a museum by day, the house restored as a window into fourteenth-century life, the tours moving through, and at the center the bronze Juliet, her left breast polished to gold by the hands of a million visitors who touch her heart for luck. At seven in the evening the gates close, the crowds drain away, and the courtyard is locked. The guests are given a key. Only in Italy. At night we would come back from dinner, unlock the gate of Juliet's courtyard, and let ourselves in. The Veronese walking past would see us and call out, laughing, pleading in Italian to be let in, and we would laugh and lock the gate behind us. There we were: alone in the moonlight with the balcony and the bronze girl with the golden heart. The hotel had stocked the room not with a minibar but with gifts, snacks, bottles of champagne, all of it simply given. But the real amenity was the key. For a week, the most famous love story in the world locked up every night with us inside it. It was magical. It was romantic. It was, I eventually understood, an answer.

Because Juliet asks a question from that balcony, and it happens to be the question this restaurant gets asked more than any other. What's in a name? She argues nothing, a rose by any other word. She is wrong, and her own courtyard is the proof. Shakespeare never saw Verona. He set the most famous love story ever written in a city he knew only by name, borrowing a tale the Veronese had told for generations, and Verona's factions were real; Dante himself, a generation before the story was set, names the feuding Montecchi and Cappelletti in the Purgatorio. The name did all the work. And four centuries later, thousands of people a year still write letters addressed to a fictional girl in a real city, and a club of Veronese volunteers answers every single one, because Verona long ago decided that if the world was going to love a name, the name would keep its promises. A rose by any other word might smell as sweet, but nobody writes letters to it.

The city has been keeping names' promises for a long time. Verona exists because two roads cross: Rome's great east-west highway across the north, and the Adige valley road running up to the Brenner, the lowest door through the Alps. Rome chartered the city, built the Arena, third largest in the empire, and unlike the Colosseum it never retired; it was staging opera under the stars the week we were there, two thousand years into its run. When Rome fell, the kings who replaced it ruled Italy from Verona: Theodoric the Goth held court here so memorably the Germans still call him Dietrich von Bern, Dietrich of Verona. Then the age that gave the city its soul: the della Scala lords, and Cangrande, the greatest of them, who took in a broke Florentine exile named Dante Alighieri. Dante called Cangrande's Verona lo primo refugio, the first refuge, and dedicated the Paradiso to him. Sit with that: the man who invented the Italian language, homeless, and Verona was the first door that opened. Then Venice for four centuries, Napoleon for a moment, Austria for a while, Italy by vote in 1866. Every power Italy ever knew ruled Verona, and Verona enrolled them all and remained itself, the Friuli chapter's argument, again, in fresco.

And the square proves it. Our hotel stood steps from Piazza delle Erbe, and Piazza delle Erbe is the Roman forum, not built over it, not commemorating it: still doing its job. It has been a marketplace for two thousand years without meaningful interruption; the "erbe" are the greens and produce it never stopped selling. The medieval fountain at its center is crowned by a recycled Roman statue the city rebaptized as a Madonna, Rome, repurposed and still presiding. Renaissance frescoes fade on the house fronts, which is why they called Verona urbs picta, the painted city. The winged lion of Venice watches from a column; and under one arch hangs a whale's rib, centuries old, which legend says will fall the day an honest person walks beneath it. It hasn't fallen. The Veronese find this hilarious and a little proud, which tells you most of what you need to know about them. Each night, our key let us into a locked side chamber of that two-thousand-year-old market. I have stayed in hotels with better gyms. I will never stay in one with a better address.

The food of such a city could only be what it is: history in courses. The deepest layer is Roman, and it is wine, and here Verona holds one of the oldest receipts in gastronomy. Around the year 530, Cassiodorus, minister to King Theodoric, wrote a letter praising Verona's acinatico: wine made from grapes laid out to dry through the winter, concentrating toward sweetness, fit for a king. That is appassimento, the drying-loft, documented fifteen centuries ago and practiced in these hills without interruption since. Recioto is its child. And Amarone, the wine of this dinner, is its accident. Sometime in the 1930s a barrel of recioto fermented past its sweetness into something dry, dark, and enormous. Instead of pouring out the mistake, the Veronese named it, amarone, the great bitter one, and it became one of Italy's monuments. A mistake that outgrew everything it was supposed to be, and Verona's whole philosophy of names is in that bottle. The Venetian layer brought the grains: rice from the East, which the Veronese planted in the spring-fed lowlands south of the city, where Vialone Nano still grows, the rice of Tuesday night's risotto, from Verona's own province. Corn became polenta here as everywhere in the north, and let me place Verona on the map of the north properly, because this book has now visited the other norths. Friuli and Trieste are the Habsburg north, kraut in the pot. But Verona belongs to the arc that runs from Liguria through Piedmont and Lombardy into the western Veneto, the north that faces the Po, not the Brenner; risotto and Amarone, not speck and knödel. The north Americans actually mean when they say northern Italian. Still polenta. Not alpine. And one more layer, my favorite: in 1531, in a famine, a wealthy Veronese distributed food to the starving quarter around San Zeno, and the city has thrown a carnival about it ever since, the oldest in Europe by some counts, led by the Papà del Gnoco, a king with a golden fork, on a Friday named Venerdì Gnocolar. Gnocchi Friday. A city that made a five-hundred-year festival out of a charity dinner is a city a restaurant could be named for.

Which brings me to Pasqua. Our most important winery is Veronese, Cucina Verona has poured Pasqua since long before I ever stood in Juliet's courtyard, and at the time of our trip we were the winery's largest California customer, so our U.S. representative arranged a visit, and the family received us royally. But here is what made the day: I grow Pinot Noir on our hill above Fort Bragg and make wine with Greg Graziano, and so somewhere between the tanks and the barrels the visit stopped being a tour and became a conversation between winemakers, canopy and crush and élevage, the language underneath the languages. The Pasqua story is the Verona story in miniature: founded 1925 by the Pasqua brothers, a century old and still entirely family, Umberto presiding, his sons Riccardo and Alessandro leading the company and its American arm, the third generation taking their rightful place, and making the whole range, from very good daily wine to Amarone della Valpolicella that silences a table. They are forward thinkers of a kind Italy specializes in: patrons of artists, publishers of manifestos, modern-day Medici who understand that a wine house in Verona is a cultural institution or it is nothing. Their own tribute to the city says everything, a line of wines whose labels reproduce the love letters written on Juliet's wall. My winery and my hotel were telling the same story, and neither knew it. When we came home and released our '21 vintage, I sent two bottles to Verona. In the city where the whole world writes letters to someone it loves, I wrote mine in glass. Tuesday night, their side of the correspondence is open on every table.

So, what's in a name? When we opened Cucina Verona, people assumed the obvious wrong things: that I was Veronese, that Kathleen was, that we'd picked it from a hat of pretty Italian words. The truth is better and simpler: we named the restaurant for what Verona is. A crossroads that fed everyone who passed. A market two thousand years old that never closed. The first refuge, the city that took in Dante when no one else would. That takes in the world's love letters still, and answers them. A place where a mistake in a barrel became a monument, where a charity dinner became a carnival, where a story by a man who never visited became truer than the walls it was set in. A name, it turns out, is a promise about what kind of table you keep. Verona has kept its promise for two millennia. We do our best to keep ours on Laurel Street every Tuesday night. And one evening in Verona, turning a key in the gate of Juliet's courtyard while the city laughed and pleaded behind us, I understood what the name meant.

So, this is what we cook: nectarines, Verona is orchard country, and the nectarine is the peach that dressed for dinner, with shaved Grana Padano, whose home ground includes Verona's own province. Gnocchi, on a Tuesday instead of a Friday, layered with a Valpolicella sugo and duck put down in its own fat, in onto, as the old Veneto larder called the method, no French required. Then the centerpiece, because it could be nothing else: risotto all'Amarone, Vialone Nano from Isola della Scala, cooked in Pasqua's great wine, finished with Montasio cheese, fifteen centuries of the drying loft in one pot, served from the middle of the table the way a monument should be. And to close, early Bartlett pears, cored from the base, poached in Amarone with cinnamon until they are mahogany to the heart, filled with amaretti-mascarpone cream, standing stem-up on the plate, famous on the outside, and the treasure inside, behind a small door most people never think to open. Like a certain courtyard. Like a certain name.

Salût — no. Not this week. This week, as they say beneath the balcony: alla salute, e all'amore. To health and to love.

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124 East Laurel Street, Fort Bragg, California