Gargantua in Mantua by Lee Marshall
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Villa Mangiacane
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Odd, really, that the local tourist board has never made a slogan out of Father Lawrence's words to Romeo: “Sojourn in Mantua!” Maybe it has something to do with the less than happy outcome of the lover boy's exile in the city of the Gonzagas.
They're keen to promote pumpkins, though. The “Di zucca in zucca” is a do-it-yourself pumpkin tour in the area around Mantua - or Mantova, as the natives call it. A colourful leaflet points pumpkin fans in the direction of twenty growers in the province, listing the different varieties they produce. There are recipes, nutritional tips and witty, pumpkin-related aphorisms in the local dialect. I happened upon this important cultural initiative on the last day of my stay; it was all I could do to stop myself careeing around the Po valley in the hire car and filling up the boot with huge misshapen gourds. Only the thought of the scene at the airport held me back.
To the locals, la zucca is a matter of some seriousness. It is, after all, the main ingredient of tortelli di zucca (pumpkin-filled pasta squares), the archetypal Mantuan dish, and one which distant communities of mantovani - in Brazil, or Australia - cling to like a tattered flag. In Mantua, the preparation of food is so central to questions of local pride and self-definition that it has become a subject of sociological study. An Italian university research group recently published a book dedicated to “social identity in Mantuan cuisine”, in which it is claimed that “in the territory of Mantua, tortelli di zucca have a sacral quality”.
The carpe diem inhabitants of Bologna and Parma like to boast that they have the best cuisine in Italy. Mantuans take a more cerebral approach. They know that theirs is the best. In recent years, they have seen others come around to this self-evident truth. Three restaurants within a twenty-five-mile radius of the city - Dal Pescatore in Canneto sull'Oglio, L'Ambasciata in Quistello, and Al Bersagliere in Goito - now share a total of eight Michelin stars, a concentration unequalled anywhere else in Italy. The leading Italian gourmet guides, the Gambero Rosso and L'Espresso, agree, placing Dal Pescatore and L'Amabasciata in their top tens, with Al Bersagliere not far behind.
Mantuan cuisine is like the city itself: rooted in the land, but made strong by water (until the eighteenth century Mantua was a virtual island, and lakes still surround the town on three sides). First courses rely on rice quite as much as pasta - the hard-centred risotto rice, Vialone Nano, grown in paddy fields to the east, on the border with the Veneto. Traditionally, anything edible found in the water around the rice plants would end up in the risotto - frogs, freshwater shrimps, snails. Second courses rely heavily on waterbirds and freshwater fish - especially luccio (pike), which is exalted in Mantuan cuisine as nowhere else in Europe.
Meat, too, is likely to pass through water on its way to the table; a taste for bollito (boiled meat) was introduced by the Lombards who settled these regions in the Dark Ages. If tortelli di zucca are the most famous Manuan pasta dish, agnoli (or agnolini) in brodo run them a close second; little pasta parcels that look like frilly volcanoes, agnoli are living symbols of the heroic dedication of the Mantuan cook, who is prepared to braise and then boil a selection of raw and cured meats for hours to obtain a sauce which give flavour to the breadcrumbs that are rolled into a ball which, after cooling off in the fridge, is divided into bite-sized lumps that fill the pasta. Here, as in so many dishes, Mantuan cuisine is the gastronomic equivalent of the House that Jack Built.
Just like the Mantuan character, in fact: a complex sauce, long in the making, with nothing remotely nouvelle about it. From the Lombard heartland around Milan, to the west, comes a respect for the work ethic. The Veneto, just to the east, contributes a dogged individualism and a talent for irony. From pleasure-loving Emilia Romagna, south of the Po, comes a predilection for the good things of life. And from the Po itself, and its tributary the Mincio, which broadens into the three lakes that wrap themselves slothfully around the old town, comes fog - huge banks of it that make life cold and unfocussed between autumn and spring.
Romano Tamani - the avuncular cook of L'Ambasciata in Goito - told me that, in his youth, he had a job for a time as personal chef to a high-ranking London diplomat. One day, moved by the delicacy of the pasta, the diplomat asked the cook if he could sing “O sole mio” by way of accompaniment. Tamani had to explain that where he came from, in the wide, flat alluvial valley of the Po, there was more fog than sun. And “O nebbia mia” just doesn't sound the same.
Sun adds heat; the further south you travel in Italy, the more peperoncino is used to fire the palate. What fog seems to do - paradoxically - is to encourage a preference for strong, definite flavours, especially sweet and sour combinations. Tortelli di zucca extend over a large swathe of Po valley, but nowhere are they sweeter than in Mantua - where crumbled amaretti (almond macaroons) are added to the mix; the bitter aftertaste of parmesan - the essential accompaniment to the dish - takes the edge off all that sugar. The spicy fruit conserve known as mostarda (most emphatically not mustard) is eaten with meat and game.
Food for decadent palates, perhaps; certainly food for knowing gourmets. In Mantua, the stimulations offered by art and cooking intertwine. It comes as no surprise to learn that Antonio Santini, genial maitre d' at Dal Pescatore, owns one of only five extant first editions of De Honesta Voluptae et Valetudine by humanist scholar and Vatican librarian Platina - pseudonym of Bartolomeo Sacchi, who was born in the town of Piadena, west of Mantua, in 1421. This was, in effect, the first Italian cookbook - larded with pseudo-scientific observations and witty, Latinate appeals to the author's friends (“do not eat this cake, Cassio, you who suffer from colic”).
In fact, before eating in any of the high temples of Mantuan cuisine, it's a good idea to brush up on such topics as Renaissance humanism, the natural history of the Po valley and the Mannerist tradition in Lombardy and the Veneto, as you may well be examined on these and other subjects by the cook, the sommelier, or the waiter.
The three restaurants described below each justify a trip to Mantua. Unless you need to put on weight for your next role, don't try to eat in all three over three days. Choose one, book well in advance, and spend the rest of the time exploring humbler but no less interesting trattorie in Mantua or by the banks of the Po, in between bouts of culture.
A Mantua Primer
The Gonzagas
Perhaps only in Urbino does one pick up the same sense, in Italy, of absolute power in a confined space: this is a duchy that made a virtue of containment, a secret garden in the demesne of Medieval and Renaissance Europe. The Gonzagas, who ruled Mantua for three centuries from 1328, were able financial managers and even smarter diplomats - asserting their own independence even as they paid homage to the Sforza dynasty of Milan, experts at keeping one foot in the Papal camp and one in the court of the Emperor. They were also, at their peak, remarkably consistent patrons of the arts; leading painters invited to work at the Gonzaga court included Pisanello, Mantegna and Giulio Romano. Gianfrancesco Gonzaga invited classical scholar Vittorino da Feltre to set up a boys' school in the city inspired by humanist principles, where ducal scions mixed with talented plebs. His successor Ludovico (1444-78) gave Leon Battista Alberti, theorist of Renaissance architecture, carte blanche to redesign Mantua's most important church, Sant'Andrea, in a style that even today looks audaciously modernist.
Five Essential Sights in and around Mantua
Camera degli Sposi, Palazzo Ducale
There are other worthwhile sights inside the Palazzo Ducale, including a series of delicate, faded frescoes by Pisanello, imbued with the spirit of courtly romance. But while much in the Gonzaga HQ is charming, nothing holds the attention like Andrea Mantegna's frescoes in the Camera degli Sposi, painted between 1465 and 1474. Not only are they the first throroughgoing application of illusionistic effects in Renaissance art; they also offer a startlingly accurate depiction of the real players behind the Gonzaga cult of power.
Palazzo Te
Built by Federico II Gonzaga to entertain his lover - hence the punning name: “Tea Palace” and/or “You Palace”. Inside, Giulio Romano's tumbling Mannerist allegories (painted 1525-35) pull the carpet from under Gonzaga attempts to find mythological parallels for their rule. The mood is tongue-in-cheek: in one room, a self-important dinner service sits watching a scene of Bacchic revelry; in the next, a huddle of Titans cower amidst broken columns from the wrath of Jove, hamming it up for all they're worth
Teatro Accademico del Bibiena
One of the most perfect late Baroque theatres anywhere in Europe, designed by Antonio Bibiena in 1769. A cadenced curve of arched boxes undulates around the auditorium and continues in an arcade behind the stage. The 14-year-old Mozart played here in 1770, and was enchanted by the backdrop. Little-known; yet it deserves to be high on the list of Italy's top sights.
Sabbioneta
The area around Mantua is full of rural outposts that were transformed by visionary princes and dukes - and then went back to being rural outposts. The most ambitious was Sabbioneta, the fiefdom of Vespasiano Gonzaga, who belonged to a cadet branch of the Mantuan clan. Between 1551 and his death in 1591, Vespasiano set about makng this Po Valley village into his ideal city, giving it a rational groundplan and erecting public edifices that reflected the authority and culture of the scholar-prince. Not to be missed are Vincenzo Scamozzi's recently-restored Teatro - antecedent of the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza - and the long Galleria degli Antenati, full of classical references and abstruse number symbolism.
The Po
Italy's old man river is, apparently, full of chemicals; but it's also full of character. Anywhere a track runs down to the shore will do; park the car and watch egrets flapping lazily across the fat and sluggish stream. The occasional barge still chugs by, past mudflats that occasionally take themselves seriously enough to become islands. There are still a few memories of the past- wooden fishing shacks with cantilever nets and - just upstream on the Oglio, a tributary of the Po - one of the last pontoon bridges still in operation.
This article originally appeared in Conde Nast Traveller (UK)