L'Italo-Americano

L'Italo-Americano PAGE��� 22 DOT���ANDERSON Turn up your taste buds and mark your calendar because the Turin Chocolate Fair, CioccolaTO 2013, is coming up hot the first two weeks in March 2013. During this time the Piazza Vittorio Veneto area in the middle of Turin is filled with booths and tents where all things chocolate are cooked up, shaped, filled, topped, dipped, shaved and poured to perfection. Turin is a city that���s proud of its chocolate to the extent that the symbol of Turin is a chocolate shaped like a boat and called the gianduiotto. Turin���s own best known chocolate treats include chocolate combined with hazelnuts and liqueur injected chocolates. Turin has been making chocolates for more than three hundred years beginning back in 1678 when Turinese chocolatier Gio Antonio Ari was granted the first license to make chocolate. As a result, Turin became the first center for the production and consumption of chocolate in Italy. Turin���s chocolate industry and its major companies such as Ferrero, Streglio and Caffarel have acquired a worldwide fan base. It is also home to a number of master chocolatiers who run small artisan chocolate companies. In the 18th century Turin was the birthplace of a hot beverage concocted from coffee, cocoa and cream that they named Bicerin. here at home when these three ingredients are mixed enjoy today. Turin���s first individually wrapped chocolate bonbon was invented in 1865 when Michele Prochet mixed cocoa with hazelnuts and called them gianduiotto. The CioccolaTO festival attracts exhibitors from throughout the region and beyond. It also attracts thousands of visitors. If the past is any footnote to the future, more than 85,000 lbs. of chocolate will be consumed during this year���s CioccolaTO. According to nielson research data about 48 million pounds of THURS DAY, ��� FEBRUARY��� 21, ��� 2013 locals and tourists who may be in town for other reasons, but are delighted to find out that a chocolate festival is in full swing. The festival provides visitors with more than just some very satisfying taste sensations. It also includes educational opportunities for anyone wanting to know more about chocolate from actually watching as chocolates are made to learning how to pair chocolate with wine. As with most food categories, and certainly with chocolate, there is a Turin's Piazza Vittorio Veneto square and picturesque cafes host the CioccolaTO' festival we call it mocha, but it is Bicerin that originated and set the bar high for this beverage. Chocolate in a solid form wasn���t available until the 19th century, when experiments in Turin resulted in blending cocoa with sugar, water and vanilla for a mixture that would cool down to a solid. The result of this discovery led the way to chocolate bars, truffles, pralines and liqueur filled creams that we chocolate are sold during Valentine���s week in the US alone and the week leading up to Easter actually tops that number at 71 million pounds. That���s a lot of chocolates made from the more than 3 million tons, yes tons, of cocoa beans that are processed into chocolate each year. Connoisseurs and chocolate lovers who come to Turin especially for this event mingle with quest to learn what���s new and how to better appreciate all of its traditional forms. Even those who shy away from calorie laden forms of chocolate are very much on board with a little dark chocolate treat. It���s a healthy treat loaded with antioxidants. Don���t think for a moment that the Turin tourism board hasn���t thought of everything. They���ll be ready with information on carried on a rich correspondence with Lou while he was writing a monograph about Rodin while he served him as secretary. Rilke consulted Lou on his personal and artistic matters, and she said later on, ���You Alone Are Real to Me���, the title of her sensitive book about Rilke. So, for me, it was a deeply moving experience to visit Duino Castle. My wife and I had the special privilege of being it aloud: ���Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels��� hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart, I would be consumed in that overwhelming existance.��� Today, Duino Castle has returned to Italian sovereignty. (It was always a limenal place) It has been refurbished and yet how to get there, where to stay, what else to see in the area, and their much-in-demand What���s a Chocopasses. Chocopass? It���s your ticket to eat chocolate by purchasing a 10 sampling/24-hr. pass or a 15 sampling/48-hr. pass to use during the festival. The CioccolaTO is not just about tasting, shopping and learning about chocolate. The event also has competitions for its chocolatiers and the central part of Turin creates a festival atmosphere with music and other chocolate themed entertainment. In years past while booth hopping at the festival, visitors have been able to conveniently work in onsite spa breaks centered around, you guessed it, chocolate. Because the festival is held in the city���s center visitors will probably want to stay in one of Turin���s hotels that are close to the festival. They���ll have many fine choices from the 5-star hotel Principi di Piemonte that is also near the train station for those arriving by rail; the 4-star Mercure Torino Crystal Palace; and the 3-star hotel Alpi Resort. On hotels.com prices for Turin���s city center hotels range from $274/night to less than $100/night. Any hotel in the city center is also convenient to top museums and historic sites in Turin such as the Royal Palace. Chocolate aside, Turin is an interesting place to explore with stunning architecture, art and many temptations for the palate. For more information on the festival and the city visit these sites: cioccolato.it, slowitaly.yourguidetoitaly.com, thriftytraveling.com and comune.torino.it. Rilke, Poet of Duino Castle FRANK���LA���ROSA What a wonderful experience to dream about a place and then to find oneself standing there on the very earth as though transported by some special gift. And this is especially so if the unique place was also the abode of a profoundly moving poet. I am referring to Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) who was born of German parents in Prague of the old Austro-hungarian Empire and traveled throughout Europe, Russia, and Egypt but found his place of Soul at Castello di Duino as it is known today near Trieste. Castle Duino had been the hereditary family castle, for several hundred years, of the Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis. Even before being occupied by Europeans, Duino was an ancient site. She herself was a branch of the Czech Thurn und Taxis royal name. She was a devoted patron of the arts, spoke Italian and German and befriended Rilke when they met in Paris. She invited Rilke to Duino Castle making him promise that he must stay as long as he wished. She became his confidant, admirer, and friend. Rilke���s ���cortesia e gentilezza��� had ways of drawing loving friends to him. Duino Castle is only a few miles from the ambiantly light and dark city of Trieste. The Castle sits high up on a headland of karst exposed to the Adriatic winds. Oftentimes, Rilke had this entire Castle to himself for weeks at a time, and he could wander its rooms, halls, and battlements, and he frequently walked the lonely, cold windswept cliffs. This is where one day he was given the Muse���s sacred gift of the opening lines of ���The First Duino Elegy���. The words came to him as a flash, an assault, and he rushed back to the Castle holding the words in his ear and soul so that he could write them down. This began a ten year creative period in which ���The Duino Eligies��� were born; the last elegy was written at his own little castello, Chateau de Muzot in 1922. Rilke named the Duino Elegies ���the property of Princess Marie���. Rilke died at Muzot after he had written the tenth, and last elegy. Another of Rilke���s intimate confidants was the talented, intellectual Russian Lou Andreas Salom��. She wanted to study psychoanalysis with Freud, but he said no, it would be a waste of time because she already knew more than he could teach her! Lou became Rilke���s companion from 1897 to 1902. he Duino Castle, Trieste alone in the Castle, one sparkling windy winter day, as we ourselves roamed the grounds and rooms. One hallway was punctuated with windows that overlooked from high above the bright yet dark deep blue Adriatic Sea. On the wall next to the window was a manuscript copy of ���The First Elegy���. I read remains the property of the Thurn und Taxis (Torre e Tassis) family. Princess Marie���s son Alessandro is its present steward. The Castle is open to the public. It has a cozy, cellar cafe where one can chat in Italian with the kind, gentle Italian servers. This caf�� and the other rooms of the Castle have feelings that the Princess Marie and Rilke have never left. The Princess had another abode in Venice named Palazzo Valmarana. I finally located it after asking insistent questions of the locals; it is boarded up now and is a ghost of the past. nevertheless, Duino and Venice were Rilke's favorite places and I envision him being happy, relatively, in both places. A patron bought Chateau de Muzot in Switzerland, refurbished it, and presented it to Rilke to live in as long as he wished. Rilke completed the writing of ���The Duino Elegies��� there as well as the immensely loved ���Sonnets to Orpheus���. I recommend the fine Stephen Mitchell translations of both works. It was at Muzot that Rilke succumbed to leukemia, his fated disease. he died in possession of his mind and Spirit, having written his own stellar epitaph now inscribed on his headstone in the cemetery of Raron, Switzerland. I quote it here in English (the original however should be read in German) because of its haunting. Intense, pure poetry: ���Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy of being no-one���s sleep under so many lids.���

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