We spent one night in Parma, of which the highlight was the tour of the parmigiano-reggiano cheese factory. The particular one that we saw was run by a consortium of 4 or 5 farms, which provided the milk from a very particular kind of grass-fed cow. I think Kathleen summed it up best: no wonder the real stuff is so expensive.

The factory is run by a team of four, of which two are working at any one time. They work from 3 a.m. until 8 p.m. seven days a week, 365 days a year, with just one two hour siesta in the afternoon. The cheese which basically takes a month to make must be aged a year to be officially considered parmigiano-reggiano cheese and two or three years to garner more money. The cheese itself doesn’t have any particular taste until it’s been brined in salt water for about 20 days.

Patrick and I are big consumers of parmigiano cheese and we’ve been eating parma ham throughout the trip, but what we didn’t realize until the tour was that parma ham owed its existence to the cheese. In the cheese making process, there is a tremendous amount of whey that factories are left with. The solution: keeping pigs and feeding them whey mixed with grains. Our guide told us that every cheese factory has a pig farm that is attached. The factories feed the whey to the pigs, which then develop the sweet flavor that parma ham is known for. They then sell them to the ham producers after 10 months, which allows them to supplement their income. Brilliant.

For the past two weeks, Dennis has paid a visit to a gelateria almost every day. Some days he visit two. I think the record has been three. At each place, I take a picture of him in front of the sign, holding up his rating of the place (as the self-appointed gelato connoisseur of the trip). There have been a couple of duds, but for the most part, they’re very good. We paid a couple visits to Grom, the organic gelato chain from Turino with the most amazing dark chocolate ice cream ever. And Carozza right by the Ponte Vecchio. La Carraia across the river was good enough to merit two trips although Dennis found the lemon ice cream so terrible that he fed it to the fish in the river (the fish loved it). For the record, I want to point out that Dennis is the only one who got gelato at all the places. The rest of us sometimes ordered our own but often had a taste of his.

No matter how good these gelaterias have been, however, none of them merited five stars. They scored 4.5 on Dennis’s arbitrary scorecard based on god knows what. When I asked him what would merit a 5, his response was “You just know.”

On the last day of Florence, we finally found the five-star gelato at a place called Badiani outside the wall. Here’s an excerpt of what one of our bibles for the trip “The Food Lovers’ Guide to Florence” said about it:

“Badiani is the queen bee of Florentine gelatarias. You’ll want to make a trip out to this inconvenient spot… for one reason only: Buontalenti…. Buontalenti is the color of buttermilk and has no discernable flavor… Instead it tastes like some kind of heart-stopping quadruple cream straight from the cow.”

The author pretty much nailed the description of this. Because she was literally right. We took one taste (I had mine with coffee ice cream, Dennis with pistachio), looked at each other and agreed that god had spoken through the gelato.

I managed to escape getting a single mosquito bite all summer thanks to the cool San Francisco weather, but in the last two weeks, the mosquitos have had their revenge. My legs and arms and even my hands and feet are covered with bites. The first encounter took place in Tuscany at the Villa where Aiko and Bill got married. The bugs were so huge and omnipresent that even the bug spray couldn’t help me. Subsequent visits to restaurants with open doors and windows finished the job. I loathe mosquitos.

Every once in awhile, a confluence of factors come together to turn a meal into something special. Last night’s dinner at Tre Soldi, a tiny trattoria outside the walls of Firenze was one of those. It was the end of an amazing day in the city, seeing Michaelangelo’s David (truly, truly magnificent and amazing how the veins in the arms of the marble statue look like they’re pulsing), strolling through the Uffizi and getting lost on the streets. Patrick and I were feeling relaxed after an aperitivo at a wine bar near the hotel, followed by a second cocktail in the hotel bar. Everyone had time to recover from the exhausting day and we were all hungry after a light lunch of panini (first lunch on our vacation that didn’t involve multiple courses) and gelato. We were also ready for a more local experience after a dinner the previous night at a restaurant, in which every nationality seemed to be represented except for the Italians.

So when we arrived at the small and elegantly decorated restaurant with no English menu (the first since we entered Italy), we were ready for a small adventure. Kathleen and I planned on sharing the one salad in the antipasti menu. How risky can salad be, we thought. As it turned out, it had shredded horse meat on it. I hesitated, but Kathleen suggested we go for it, so went for it (it tasted like bacon). Patrick, who doesn’t eat meat, especially pork, was suggested a typical Florentine dish of braised pork neck with white beans, so he went for that. The four of us (including Patrick) ended up sharing the Florentine beef, which came with a range of slices from rare to medium well — something for everyone. We topped it off with various gelato and sorbetto. I ordered the white peach sorbet with bergamot. Amazing. Ending the meal came coffee, limoncello, and vin santo.

We loved it so much, we went back for lunch two days later (11 euro for the Fast Lunch with a primi and a secondi).