Best Free Guide for Italian Food in London

 

Ciao! This guide features my top picks of Italian restaurants, bakeries, and street food spots that I absolutely love to visit in London.

Food guide https://docs.google.com/document/d/10jZzUZ_xoF9pIBRzxfmB1FoviiC_kAzYUzdnhUUntys/edit?usp=sharing

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/10jZzUZ_xoF9pIBRzxfmB1FoviiC_kAzYUzdnhUUntys/edit?usp=sharing

Memoirs of London - 12

 Other street traders I knew in London were "the mirrors sellers". Except for a few apart in  some isolated places, the mirrors sellers were mostly located in a narrow net of roads around the famous Carnaby Street, the real commercial hub of London’s tourist and rolling on since the epic of the Beatles.

 A little already decayed, but still a great attraction in the second half of the seventies. All the range of the consumer’s  symbols and the new western mythology, which also might be found in the T-shirts sold as souvenirs in the many stores that occupied the short road, the kingdom of cheap and quick tourist shopping , alltogether with the symbols of London, were reproduced on mirrors of different formed and sold on the street in front of those stores, which also constituted their store and warehouse.

From  Marylin Monroe to Humphrey Bogart; from Gin Beef Heart to Coca Cola; from the stylized liberty models to Union Jack, passing through the Irish beers Scottish whiskey, rock bands and even the Royal Family, everything was reproduced on those colored mirrors, gently framed and sold from a minimum of 99 pence to a maximum of £ 20 depending on their size and from  the buyer's tourist wallet and luggage.

The mirrors sellers of this area were almost all Italians or Spanish people.

Young people who had come  up to London in order to study English  language and know the city.  Or may be escaped from the economic and political climate of reflux and, in any case, all invoked by the great fascination that London's capital of Rock Music still exercised on the young people of that poorer Europe and they sought, together with greater freedom, a job that allowed them to   live in a decent way, relying only on their strength and without weighing on the family. Among the Italians stood the young freak looking , distinguished by the seemingly cluttered appearance .

I called them the minor brothers of the sixty-nine revolutioners. But among the mirrors sellers  of Carnaby Street there was an authentic and remarkable representative of the former young’s revolution whose name was Tommy.

12. to be continued...

Memoirs of London - 2

The next Monday I started working for Emilio’s Pizza Factory. The factory was set in Farringdon, East London, somewhere in Smithfield Rd, if I’m not wrong. We made packaged pizzas for big markets, Sainsbury, Tesco, things like that, if you know what I mean. The staff was all made by a small group of Egyptian Copts, a bunch of Italian guys, an old Portuguese named Pinto (who was often kidding the Egyptians in a mixed of Portuguese and   English but  spoken  with marked Iberian pronunciation ) and a retired old Easter Londoner, who was able to mark with  three or four fucking  a speech of five or six words. It was him that I first started with my job that Monday of August 1977. Our duty was to cut the cheddar cheese (which took the place of Italian soft mozzarella in packaged pizzas, and not only, as I quickly learned in London) and send it upstairs, through the lift.

-“ Fuck you, and fucking shut, ‘you know, the fucking door!” he used to shout from

underground space, in order to call the elevator and send the cheese up.

The cheese was kept in a large fridge, down there. Old Jim (that was his name) didn’t allow me to get in the fridge. He did, all the time. It was stocked in big packages of fifty pounds. We were busy on cutting them, by means of wooden handles sharp iron,  on strict, long  slices to be shred in the electric grater before to be sent upstairs on big plastic hampers.

Upstairs there was the production chain.

In a large electric mixer they put flour, yeast, salt and water. After an hour and a half the kneading was ready. Then it had to be pressed to obtain a plain leaf from which they made a circles of five inches diameter. With a trolley they had taken and put in the oven for about ten, fifteen minutes. With the same trolleys, after the baking,  a boy took them

on the assembly chain where the round pizza was flavored with tomatoes juice, cheese and some spices ( besides the plain pizza, we made mushroom and yellow or red pepper’s). In the end we put a brown preservative powder (the only ingredient we avoid when, at lunch time, we made our own pizzas). Finally they were wrapped in cellophane with the seller’s mark, and good appetite.

We went on that way from height  a.m. till 4 p.m..

At that time I had a thick beard and I talked to none, a part those few words with Jim, needed for unroll the work.

When later, I made friendship with the Italian colleagues, they  confess had thought I was a sort of fugitive man, hiding himself to escape from someone or something.

As a matter of fact I was just escaping from myself, and  I was too shy and insecure to make friendship easily.

After a couple of months I asked the boss to go upstairs and he wanted to please me.

2.     To be continued…

Dante and his time - II

 

Dante is the founder of a new way to see and to write about love; he shares this role of founder of  this new literary current, called “the sweet new style” (dolce stilnovo) with Guido Cavalcanti and Cino da Pistoia.

Dante lives in a period which sees the end of an world: the balance between the Papacy and the Empire is at his end.

When Charles the Valois enters in Florence, in 1301, at the head of the Black Guelphs, Dante (belonging to the White Faction of the same Guelph party, traditional enemy of the imperialist Ghibeline’s party) is condemned and exiled; he never will see its town again.

The White Faction were neither for the Emperor nor for the Pope; they were just for the total autonomy of the Communes from both the institutions headed by the Germans and by the Roman Church.

If we don’t keep in mind this fundamental detail, we risk to  make the same mistake has committed A.N. Wilson in his last book we have already reviewed in this blog (but  you can find more complete reviews on line: especially by the main news papers: the Indipendent, the Observer, the Telegraph, The Guardian etc) defining the great Italian poet, incoherent and even political instable till madness.

As acutely has pointed out a well founded Italian writer, Angelo Ruggeri (who, by the way, is writing an exhaustive answer to the Wilson’s Dante in love) it must be observed that Dante, in his last 20 years of his life, was an exiled man, sued by the Roman Inquisitors as heretic, with great risks, not only  for his liberty, but also for his life.

That’s the main reason, according to Angelo Ruggeri’s theory, why Dante made alliances with Ghibelines, in order to be protected, better than with the same Guelph’s partisans (which black’s fraction, by the way, was responsible of his political and personal disgrace).

… to be continued…