Food

We thought that we might take a day trip to Pisa, and check out the leaning tower. Touristy - yes, hilarious - yes.

A nice two hour drive later and we were there.

It was a big enclosed area with a few other huge buildings, but everyone is mainly interested in the Leaning Tower, and it does lean a fair bit.

It is crazy the amount of people doing the stupid “I’m holding the tower up” so what else would we do but join them?

After having a cheap tourist lunch here we heading back to Bologna.

I had also found a cool place in the countryside about an hour out of Bologna for dinner, so we got back to Bologna about 5, then heading out again at 7.

It was a really nice drive through the countryside to a small town called Savigno to a restaurant called Da Amerigo. I had done a bit of looking, and this was supposed to be good, traditionalish food. After having only mediocre meals since we arrived, we were hoping this would be better. And it definitely was.

We sat outside in a little courtyard, and I pretended to understand a lot more Italian than I actually did. Which worked for most of the night.

We were given menus in Italian, and were quite unsure about what most of the things were. Once again, my trusty research saved the day. I had taken screen shots at the hotel of the menu in Italian and in English. Luckily the menus were fairly similar so we ended up getting what we wanted.

I started with the pate and Ben with a bready/nut concoction with lardo on it.

The pate was delicious, and had just enough ratio of bread to pate.

Next up was the pasta. This was our most tastiest pasta that we had had, and we knew that we were on a winner with this restaurant. The tortellini was so tiny and each different sizes, and Ben’s tortellini had cheese and ham inside and just melted in your mouth.

Next up I had the rabbit with balsamic vinegar as it is a big thing in the area, and Ben had veal cheek with mashed potato.

After this we were pretty stuffed, but in a good way.

The owner of the restaurant came over and had a bit of a chat to us (in English) and asked where we were from, and he had visited Perth many times, as well as Margaret River, and after our chat we could hear him telling his staff that we had come all the way from Australia.

We couldn’t pass on dessert, so I went with the icecream with balsamic vinegar dressing and Ben had a chocolate and coffee dessert. Strangely enough, the combination of balsamic vinegar and vanilla icecream went really well.

At the end of all this we were pretty happy. This was the kind of food we had been expecting and looking for in Italy. Nothing over the top fancy, but tasty pasta and good food.

We finished it off with some macaroons, and then had the 1 hour drive back to Bologna.