Fodor: "The Spy Who Loved Travel"

I know a guidebook writer. He claims the gig isn't quite as glamorous as you'd think. I'm inclined to believe him since, hey, travel writing isn't all daiquiris on beaches and Mai Thais on mountaintops, either. But Eugene Fodor, it turns out, was every bit as dashing and bad-ass as the rest of us travel scribes only pretend to be. 

He was a spy. And he hired other spies to write for him. No joke. From the AP: 

According to Hunt, Fodor had worked as a spy in Austria when the Office of Strategic Services became the CIA and continued in intelligence for 12 to 15 years. Fodor tried to keep the lid on in late 1974 and early `75, fearing relatives of his Czech-born wife could be put in danger. But pressed by the paper's expose, he acknowledged his covert work _ and his hiring of many guidebook writers who were CIA spies during the Cold War.

"But I told them to make sure and send me real writers, not civil engineers. I wanted to get some writing out of them. And I did, too," Fodor told the Times in June 1975.

In unrelated guidebook-related news, I was kind of amused by this post on Esquire.com about "Great Moments in Italian Food History," specifically this line:

1960 — Arthur Frommer's book Europe on $5 a Day becomes a bestseller; tens of thousands of young Americans travel to Italy

Truth. And Chef Boyardee, among others, piggybacked on the new American fascination with this sauce-covered deliciousness. For more on that, step right this way, please.

Outtakes: a time-warp deli in Rome

Cut from the Rome chapter. 

“Rome is a difficult town in which to find a budget restaurant,” Arthur Frommer writes in Europe on $5 a Day. “There are only three small areas in this entire large city where you'll discover anything resembling a cluster of good, low-cost eating spots.”

Thankfully, that's changed.Even when I found one of Arthur's recommendations still open, it turned out still to be budget-friendly—and good. Just now, I tracked down a place called Il Delfino for a late lunch. It's basically a Roman deli with, Arthur says, “a marvelous array of spit-roasted chickens, hors d'oeuvre counters, pizza ovens.” Exactly. Arthur commanded me to have pizza, and who was I to disobey? I munched contentedly as I soaked up the atmosphere: the conversations at a low-level buzz and, as far as I could tell, all in Italian (read: no tourists); the families with kids bearing sauce-enhanced grins; the endless array of foods spread behind the counter. It felt exactly like Arthur described it, like I'd stepped into a portal back to the 1960s. If Norman Rockwell were Italian, he would have painted this scene.

What do YOU think: Has travel gotten safer for women?

Help me out, won't you? I'm looking for some comments from women who have backpacked in Europe in the last few years. 

If you're new here (welcome) here's what the project documented on this blog is all about: last summer, I traveled around Europe using both a 1963 edition of Europe On Five Dollars a Day and copies of my mother's letters from her Grand Tour in '67. I was looking at How Things Have Changed (Or Haven't) on the backpacker trail since that time. Now I'm working on a book about the experience (forthcoming from Perigee, Spring 2012).

One of the things that Mom talked about--at length--was sleazy, sketchy, grabby Italian men. She encountered them all over the continent, not just in Italy. I've included one of her letters below. (I should note that she also met one or two totally wholesome Italian men, but they were, sad to say, the exception.)

Here's the thing: I'm not female. It's kind of hard, then, for me to say whether or not this has changed--or, for that matter, if Europe has become a safer, more comfortable place for women travelers (solo or otherwise) in other ways. Maybe everything is different. Maybe it's the same as ever. I realize that my Y chromosome makes it rather difficult for me to know for sure, no matter how much I tried to be aware of the goings-on around me. 

From conversations with my fellow travelers--and reading various travel blogs--I got the impression that, yes, things have changed, at least to a large degree. Travel is safer; scumbags are fewer. Elizabeth Gilbert echoed this sentiment in Eat, Pray, Love (also quoted below) But I'd like to hear more thoughts, more stories, if anyone would be willing to share. I'm genuinely curious to know what's changed; it's an important piece of the then-and-now comparison of the book, but one that I really can't fill in based on my own experiences.

I'd also love to hear any other thoughts on the specific topic of being a female traveler in Europe in the twenty-first century (or, for that matter, in any era).


So. I'd really appreciate any stories, observations, or insight anyone would care to share. It'll help make for a better (and more accurate) book. If you're comfortable sharing your thoughts, please comment below or, better yet, e-mail me at doug@douglasmack.net. And, of course, I'll only quote you with permission. Thanks in advance!

And now, here's what Mom had to say in one of her letters (and I should note that this story is just one of many):

Dear Bob,

Do you know why Italian men are so awful? Because they start very young. Tonight we had a hysterically funny experience. We walked to the train station to find out what time our train leaves tomorrow. On the way back we were “blessed” with the escort of 4 young men—whose ages we estimate to have averaged 15 (at the very oldest) . . . At one point there were also 2 soldiers (Italiano) and one other guy, but they left 2/3 of the way back here. Bob, these kids ended up walking us home from the station—which is about a mile—all the way Ann and I spoke French to each other and these little boys were trying to address us in various languages—French, Italian, English, and German. Poor kids—we really frustrated their attempts to communicate. Ever been told “I love you” in 3 diff. languages by a 14-year-old? I hope you appreciate the humor of the situation, for Ann and I are still laughing. When we got to our pensione, Ann invited them up to meet our father, an invitation which they declined. 

Italian men are very ‘attentive.’ One just came over—ugh. . . . I cannot wait to see YOU.

Here's what Elizabeth Gilbert had to say on the same subject in Eat, Pray, Love: 

I ask around, and everybody here agrees that, yes, there's been a true shift in Italy in the last ten to fifteen years. Maybe it's a victory of feminism, or an evolution of culture, or the inevitable modernizing effects of having joined the European Union. Or maybe it's just simple embarrassment on the part of young men about the infamous lewdness of their fathers and grandfathers. Whatever the cause, though, it seems that Italy has decided as a society that this sort of stalking, pestering behavior toward women is no longer acceptable. 

So. Thoughts? Really, seriously: I appreciate any comments anyone cares to offer. This book will be a lot better for it. 

Quote of the day: information overloaded in 1844

"There is, probably, not a famous picture or statue in all Italy, but could not easily be buried under a mountain of printed paper devoted to dissertations on it."

-- Charles Dickens, Pictures From Italy


Click here for the full book on Google Books. 

Chef Boyardee and the meaning of authentic cuisine

One evening in Florence, I had some bold journalistic investigations to undertake. I needed to eat pizza.

Before we go on, please take a good look at these Life magazine ads from 1956:

"Your first taste of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee Ravioli lets you know this is the true Italian dish."

"That's the way they serve pizza in Amalfi!"

In 1944, a New York Times article about a just-opened pizzeria led with this description of the exotic foodstuff: “One of the most popular dishes in southern Italy, especially in the vicinity of Naples, is pizza—a pie made from a yeast dough and filled with any number of different centers, each one containing tomatoes. Cheese, mushrooms, anchovies, capers, onions and so on may be used.” Gosh, sounds appetizing, doesn’t it?

Twenty years after that rather detached, straightforward description appeared, pizza was so commonplace that in the menu phrasebook section of Europe on Five Dollars a Day, Arthur Frommer offers not a translation but a wiseacre wink: “You know this one.”

Now, another fifty years on, I settled myself into a corner table at one of Arthur’s recommended restaurants—he claimed, “no surprises; no cover,” but surprise, Arthur, there was a two-euro cover—and ordered my own “pie made from a yeast dough” to see how it measured up. It was good enough, with the crust slightly charred from the wood-fired oven and the slight saltiness of the prosciutto perfectly balancing with the creamy mozzarella and the earthy depth of the funghi.

But here’s what struck me: it wasn’t as good—or as authentic—as the pizza I can get at either of two different restaurants in my neighborhood back home in Minneapolis. With their imported San Marzano tomatoes, artisanal toppings, mozzarella di bufala, and sea salt-dusted crusts, these are marketed as paragons of the authentic Italian cuisine. One restaurant is a member of Vera Pizza Napoletana, the official and famously strict arbiter of true Neapolitan pizza. Even the decor and menu design of those pizzerias back home are superficially more authentic, more Old World Italian than the restaurants I visited in Florence.

Today, some of Arthur’s and my mother’s comments about Italian foods seem nearly as naive and wide-eyed as that 1944 Times article. Arthur lists fettuccine and risotto in the vegetable section, for example; most Americans today would probably not just recategorize them but smirk at the accurate-but-not-entirely translations of these as “noodles” and “rice,” of gelato as merely “ice cream,” and of prosciutto as simply “ham.” Mom explained the concept of a trattoria to my father in one of her letters and waxed rhapsodic about a particularly exotic dish that I immediately recognized, having seen it on multiple restaurant menus back home, as saltimbocca.

Though Arthur and my mother undoubtedly had their own preconceptions of Europe, based on photographs, books, and previous tourists’ tales, the information available to them before their trips was paltry compared to what today’s information-overloaded travelers have at their disposal. Mom didn’t have a hundred different guidebooks and a thousand different web sites telling her what to expect. Italian food hadn’t become so commonplace as to be cliché, as evidenced by Wendy’s recent short-lived line of sandwiches marketed under the Italian-by-way-of-focus-group name Frescata or, most of all, Fancy Feast's gourmet cat foods, which include both Florentine and Tuscany lines, apparently intended for the sophisticated, citizen-of-the-world felines: “Romance your cat's taste buds with Fancy Feast Tuscany wet cat food recipes. Tuscany recipes are accented with long grain rice and garden greens.”

The fact is, in any given urban area in the United States today, you can easily find food that is more authentically Italian than that found in most cafes in tourist areas of Italy. That wasn’t at all true in 1960s America, where “Italian” basically meant cheap wine and gummy spaghetti, or the previously-mentioned Chef Boyardee. Most travelers of that era likely had not experienced even the watered-down, theme park version of Italian cuisine presented, today, by the likes of Buca di Beppo and The Olive Garden. Their expectations of Italian cuisine in Italy—of Italian culture in general—were not the same, not as high, as modern tourists'. Mom and Frommer and their peers couldn’t presume to believe they knew exactly what to expect, which was probably for the better. They didn't expect their pizza to taste a certain way; they weren't measuring the tourist cafe against the better Italian food back home.


Put another way--and this applies to more than just food--back then they were ignorant; today we’re delusional. 

One more 1956 Chef Boyardee ad for you: 

"Chef is the one spaghetti this side of the ocean that makes a special point of following old-country traditions."

The lost glamour of the Hotel Texas (part I)

After the innumerable disappointments of Venice, I couldn't wait to get to Rome. I'd seen enough canals, thanks, not to mention an overload of oppressively impressive architecture. I wanted something more, some stories to go with my sites--and, oh yeah, the Eternal City has some seriously epic stories to tell. Also kick-ass ruins and artisanal gelato and absurdly elaborate fountains and gorgeous contessas blowing air-kisses from Vespas. 

This was where I was going to get my groove back. I even had an ace to play, a sure-fire groove restorer: Pensione Texas, a hotel that I'd been looking forward to since the day I opened Europe on Five Dollars a Day for the first time. Frommer spends nearly half a page describing the scene at this "glamorously-decorated" hotel, talking up its "really superb restaurant downstairs" and its worldly, intellectual clientele:

Whenever 6 p.m. approached last summer, Hope and I felt a genuine urge to rush back to the "Texas," to hear the exciting conversation that fills the cocktail-lounge of the pension (our fellow guests, among others: a member of the Minneapolis Philharmonic, and his wife; a professor from the Free China University on [sic] Formosa) ...

I so, so needed that. I was missing Lee. Missing intelligent conversation, missing hanging out in cocktail lounges (and, yeah, dive bars) and chatting the night away. One of the great frustrations of being a tourist is that your interactions tend to be fleeting, your discourse superficial. Here was my solution. If nothing else, it would at least offer a bit more comfort and, well, glamour than the spider-infested inns and boisterous hostels to which I'd become accustomed. 

After I checked in, I pulled out my book and showed the above passage to the desk clerk, Alfredo, a tall, middle-aged man, effortlessly dapper in that ineffably Italian way. He had a perpetually wistful expression on his face, as though forever recalling some long-lost, bittersweet memory, and it grew even more poignant and pronounced as he examined the book. 

"Yes," he said. "I remember this. We were in many books.  And the New York Times. Many publications. The president of Diner's Club International came here with his family. Elizabeth Taylor--Do you know Elizabeth Taylor?"

I did.

"She stayed here. She was at another hotel, more famous, but they all found out and were bothering her, the ... press, the ..."

"The paparazzi? She came here to hide from the paparazzi?"

"Yes." 

He held up a finger and nodded his head, remembering something, then opened a desk drawer and pulled out a brochure from the 1960s. "I show people this sometimes, so they can see what it was like."

[Click on the images for the full size.]

 

I could almost hear him thinking, as he pointed to the praise and listed other celebrities who had stayed here, Ah, those were the days.

In much of the rest of Europe, it had struck me that those rare Frommer-recommended places (hotels, restaurants) that were still around were almost exclusively those that were big and flashy and somehow fit tourist stereotypes of the culture--beer halls in Munich, hangar-sized cafés in Paris.  Frommer's description of the Hotel Texas, paired with the fact that it was still in operation, made me assume that this was the case here, too. It would be a gloriously and disconcertingly theme park version of a historic Roman hotel, grand and tacky all at once, overstuffed with Rococo furnishings and enormous artwork and hypersaturated color schemes--more or less what you see in the brochure.

But ...

[To be continued, because I'm a jerk like that and because other non-writing duties are calling right now. Trust me, though: it's a good story, worth the wait, and with a special twist ending involving--no lie--Mussolini. Are you familiar with Grey Gardens?]

Not-So-Flattering Views of Famous Places: Venice

Oh, sure, it looks pretty enough in the photo. Delightfully historic buildings. Placid canal. Ornate wrought iron railing on the bridge adding some visual contrast to the surrounding rectilinear forms. The bright blue of the gondola catching your eye, a delightfully dissonant counterpoint to the yellow/beige of the buildings. ... The Hard Rock Cafe in the background.

Yep. Hard Rock Cafe. This is one of those rare not-so-flattering photos where it's the details, not the broader shot, that makes it all the less flattering.  Here's the close-up: