A little trip through good food, architecture and global warming.

Hello Hivers,

Today I would like to share with you an other business trip that I did with my colleague and friend @will91 who is also a member of the hive community.

An experiment

We are trying to make an experiment, realising a shared post, where @will91 will take care of the photos and their editing and I will try to narrate our adventures.

A seafood based lunch

This was a 2 day trip in Marche and Lazio.
We departed from our job at 6.00 in the morning (😴) and drove towards Tortoreto, a small town in province of Matera. I will not annoy you with the detail of our work, so let's start from the important things: food of course 😂.
The first restaurant where we stopped for launch was: La locanda del marinaio, a fish restaurant with a really nice saylor style.

You have to know that when we are on a business trip we have a predefined cashet, that is 25 euros for launch and 40 euros at dinner. So when we arrived at the restaurant and the waiter told us that the menu was outside for COVID reasons, we told him our cachet and we entrusted him for the choice of our menu. A posterior this was a really smart move 😎.
In the following part I will make a detailed review of what we had:
The waiter brought immediately a bottle of still water and a bottle of white wine.

Then we started with the appetizers:

• Bruschetta con olio e sale --> Bruschetta with oil and salt

• Triglia scottata su cream di zucca --> Seared mullet on pumpkin cream;
  

• Olive ascolane con ripieno di pesce --> Ascoli olives with fish filling;
  

• Salmone affumicato con salsa di Mango e mandorle --> Smoked Salmon with Mango sauce and Almonds;
  

• Porchetta di peace spada (cucinata sotto vuoto a bassa temperatura - 55 gradi - e poi scottata in padella per creare la crosticina esterna) --> Swordfish porchetta (vacuum-cooked at a low temperature - 55 degrees - and then seared in a pan to create the external crust)
  

• Insalata di mare con pisellini e melograno --> Seafood salad with peas and pomegranate;

• *Cozze al rosmarino (con sugo aromatizzato al rosmarino e aggiunta di burro pepe nero e sale ) * --> Mussels with rosemary (with rosemary-flavored sauce and the addition of butter, black pepper and salt)

All the appetizers were really good, but a special mention goes to the Mussels's sauce who was so good that we had to ask for a bread refill.

But this was not everything, the waiter also brought us a prime course: Linguine fatte in casa allo scoglio --> Homemade linguine with seafood.

The linguine here were really amazing, we made the compliments to the chef after we finished eating.

Amazing foliage

After we finished our launch we headed to our next destination: Norcia.

In order to get to Norcia from Ascoli you need to pass exactly in the middle of two marvelous national parks, i.e. the national park of Sibillini's Mounts and the national park of the Gran Sasso.

This area usually during winter is amazingly beautiful due to the wide range of colors that the foliage of the trees has. When we got there we weren't expecting to see much colors, since we are almost in December, but actually we were lucky (or maybe not) and this is what we saw:

Global warming - a silent but lethal enemy

I added on porpouse "or maybe not" in the previous sentence, since I believe that the main reason why the foliage is still so colored is that the temperatures are way too high for this period of the year, and this is mainly due to the global warming effects. This is a subject which I feel really dear to me, because apparently most of the people don't have even the slightest idea of what the consequence will be if we don't make something right now (and I am not even sure that we are still in time to do something).
Global warming is a problem that will affect our lives much more than any kind of problem that we are facing now. And I am not saying that we should be ignoring our actual problems, but at least we should be considering that with our actions we are irremediably changing our planet. The real problem is that we as humans, are one of the least suitable species to live on earth, and if we continue like this the amount of livable places on Earth for us will start to decrease very rapidly. Earth will survive to this, probably, as a lot of other species, but we humans are not so strong as we think and we should try to think a little more also about the future, instead of focusing only on the present.

Norcia

After this small but very important side note, let's return to our trip.

The city of Norcia is made famous worldwide by various elements, among which I would like to remark:

• the precious Black Truffle of Norcia, with an unmistakable smell and unique taste;
• Prosciutto di Norcia PGI, certified with Protected Geographical Identification since 1999.

Very famous are also Norcinerie, which is a term used to describe delicacies made from pigs, and the practice of salting and curing of meats.

I have been in this city when I was young and I had very good memories. But while approaching the city we had this anxiety feeling which was growing since we knew that in 2016 in this area there was a terrible earthquake and a lot of cities took a lot of damages. And unfortunately our worries were motivated, we found in front of our selves a city which is really much different from the one that I saw. Most of the monuments and buildings were under restructuring and it was impossible to view them. Moreover this period of the year is also not a touristic one, so the city was really empty and gloomy. We still took a walk through the streets of the historical center.

We hope that in the next years this city will return to his ancient splendors.

Cascia

Cascia was the real surprise of the day, neither I or @will91 had ever been to this city. Since it was in the route and it was a little bit late to reach any other place (sunset was approaching), we decided to stop in this small city.
I don't know much about the city, but I believe that the photos are quite explanatory in this case, and so I will let them explain to you why we liked this small town so much.

With the lights of the city turned on, everything became even prettier than before.

Rieti

After this nice detour we finally arrived to our final destination, Rieti. Here, something unexpected happened. When we arrived at our hotel, @will91 went to the reception to make the check in, but surprisingly, there was no reservation 😅. Luckily for us the hotel was not full, so we were still able to make a reservation and get two rooms for the night.

We headed then to have dinner in a local restaurant.
Usually when we are on a business trip, we try to restrain ourself in order to not come back home rolling 😂. Due to our cachet, which is quite high as I told in the beginning of the post, we usually prefer to eat in restaurants which have a fish based type of cuisine, so that we keep high the quality and not the quantity.
This time we will only show you the photos of what we had, without the description, if you want you can try to guess what each plate contained...

Conclusion

This was the first part of our trip in middle Italy. We worked, we visited some really nice cities, we had a glimpse of Autumn even in winter 😅, and most importantly, as in every business trip, we had a lot of good food.
This was an experiment as I told at the beginning, but it was quite funny, so probably we will try to repeat it when we will have the opportunity to make another business trip together.
In the next post we will continue telling you the remaining part. Spoiler alert: we went to Assisi, the city of San Francesco, so don't miss it.

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