The Marubini Chronicles: A Memoir

My other lives as Cremonese, Tortello Cremasco, Jackson, and my three-decade relationship with a stuffed pasta, and a village in Lombardia.

As we move into summer days, I always think about a certain June when I first arrived in a certain village in Italy. Today, I am reposting my essay about my three-decade relationship with that place.

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There’s a saying in Cremonese dialect: En piàt de marubéen el fa resusitàa àan i mòort—“a plate of marubini can bring the dead back to life.” Marubini is the stuffed pasta of Cremona, the province in Lombardia along the Po River where I lived when I was 19. Marubini are plump little rings similar to tortellini, filled with a rich, hearty mix of meats and cheese—each Cremonese family has its own unwritten recipe for the stuffing, or ripieno. They’re very labor intensive, which is likely why marubini is best known now as a dish for holidays and special occasions.

Anna Bernabe made marubini almost every weekend, a monotonous hours-long process crafting each tiny pasta with her fingertips. The result, served simply either in a meat broth or with brown butter and sage, made for a wonderful Sunday lunch. Would it be too much to say that these lunches were the sort of experience that changed the course of one dopey, suburban American boy’s life? Would that sort of hyperbole make me an unreliable or insufferable narrator? Maybe, maybe not. Let’s just say that, as a writer, marubini is my own Proustian madeleine.

Cremona is a lovely city of around 70,000 citizens—a well-kept, bourgeois, mercantile place with amazing food, at the center of one of Italy’s most important agricultural areas, particularly for dairy farming. But among Italians, it’s seen as somewhat parochial, perhaps the equivalent of, say, Des Moines. There is no local wine region. There are no grandiose must-see sights. In Italy, Cremona is known as the city of “torrone, torrazzo, e tettone”—torrone for its famed nougat candy, torrazzo for it’s iconic 14th century bell tower, and tettone for…well, you can translate that for yourself, and I will not be commenting on whether or not that’s true.

When I meet Italians from other regions, they’re always surprised and amused to learn that I studied in Cremona. The incredulous response is generally: “Cremona? Why Cremona? Of all the cities in Italy?” Before I can answer, the next question is almost always “Do you play the violin?” That’s because the most famous thing about Cremona is violins. The city is the birthplace of Stradivarius. The Cremonese method of making violins dates back to Andrea Amati, “father of the violin” in the 16th century, and to the Guarneri family in the 17th and 18th centuries. The craft is protected by UNESCO and celebrated by a great modern museum. There are still more than 100 violin-makers’ studios in Cremona. [I wrote a travel feature about all this for the New York Times a decade ago.]

In any case, I do not play the violin and never have. But several Italian friends teasingly refer to me by the nickname “Cremonese.”

When I arrived to Cremona—wearing Birkenstocks, a tie-dyed University of Vermont Bong Team T-shirt, and a backpack redolent of patchouli—I was informed I would actually be staying in Pieve San Giacomo, a village about 20 minutes from the city of Cremona. I would be living with the Bernabe family: Anna, her husband Paolo, and their daughter Daniela, who was several years older than me.

The Bernabes lived in an aging, rustic but warm and tidy farmhouse with a stone fountain in the garden, and with dark antique furniture and yapping dogs. The chickens, or at least the rooster, in the coop outside my window woke me early in the morning. When I came to the breakfast, Anna was busy in the kitchen and Paolo was taking his caffè corretto, coffee with a little nip of grappa—he’d already been working in the farm for hours. I took the train into Cremona for school, stopping to have a macchiato at the same place, Caffè Tubino, every morning.

In the afternoons, I would have a drink with my classmates in Cremona’s piazza or snack on pizza or tramezzini. Or perhaps visit the studio of Massimo, Daniela’s artist boyfriend. But eventually I had to catch the train back to the village. There wasn’t a whole lot going on in Pieve San Giacomo, besides the Auricchio cheese factory, but I’d play soccer with the local boys or ride my bike through the village, or flirt with one of the Bernabes’ nieces, who was my age.

Every night, Paolo sliced a plateful of prosciutto and cut a hunk from a wheel of Grana Padano. Then he uncorked and poured a fizzy red, chilled, from an unlabeled liter bottle he’d fetched from a dark corner of the barn—the same barn I’d wandered into one morning and saw him butchering a cow. Paolo didn’t go for fancy wine glasses, but rather used what we would have called “juice” glasses back home. Beyond sliced meat, cheese, and wine, men were otherwise forbidden from Anna’s kitchen. So while Anna prepared handmade pasta, meat from their animals, vegetables from the garden, Paolo and I would sip our cool, fizzy red wine from our juice glasses on those hot evenings. As I wrote about this wine, Gutturnio, in Godforsaken Grapes:

I had never tasted or witnessed a wine like this. The liquid was bright purple, with a thick pink foam that formed as it was poured. Paolo’s wine certainly tasted fruity, though it was more tangy than sweet, and what made it strange to me was the aroma. At home, my father’s wines from Napa or Sonoma smelled like identifiable fruits—plums, cherries, berries. But this fizzy wine was a little stinky, to be honest, though in a very pleasant way. I didn’t have the language back then, but in my memory the aroma smelled earthy, rustic, fertile, alive, almost like the essence of the farm and dusty streets of the village. Back then, it simply smelled and tasted like the Old Europe I had hoped to find. [You can read the whole passage about Gutturnio here.]

We drank this same wine with whatever Anna made for dinner. Depending on the night, it might cotoletta milanese, risotto milanese, guinea fowl baked in clay with pancetta and mushrooms, osso buco, or bollito misto (a stew of boiled meats and poultry), served with Cremona’s famed mostarda. I always looked forward to the pasta, of course. Since Pieve San Giacomo is close to the border of Mantova province, Anna also made a lot of Mantova’s famous stuffed pasta, tortelli di zucca. But marubini was always my favorite.

It was all pastoral and wholesome and lovely. Still, I was 19, and used to my independence. Back home in the States I’d already been living on my own, and I definitely enjoyed being out late and “looking for trouble,” as my mother might say. (My mother once reprimanded my brother and I as “dirty stay outs.”) In Italy, I would get slightly jealous of my classmates who lived in Cremona proper, where I imagined there was more action (there wasn’t). A few times, I ended up staying for a few more drinks with friends, barely catching the last train back to Pieve San Giacomo. Once, I had made a plan to rendezvous with some local girl, and missed my train. Tipsy, I had to call Anna from a pay phone. She scolded me (“How could you miss dinner! We thought you might be dead!”) and sent Paolo to fetch me in the car. “Have a good time?” he grunted and drove the rest of the way home in silence. There was a plate of food waiting for me on the table. I never heard the end of this. Anna reminded me of the train schedule every morning before I left for school. “Oh, Jason likes to drink beer,” she’d tell friends that dropped by, with a smirk. So, basically, Anna treated me as a mischievous teenager the same as my own mother.

One afternoon before I left Pieve San Giacomo, a vivid meal took place. Paolo was working in his fields, and Daniela was working in Milan, so Anna and I rode our bikes to visit the family’s recently widowed Aunt Gina, who, as a surprise, had prepared a tremendous feast in my honor, with tables teeming with food in the sunny courtyard. Naturally, there was marubini.

At the end of the hours-long meal, when I could eat no more, Aunt Gina insisted that we tour her house. The three of us entered the cool, dark living room. Aunt Gina fidgeted with a yellowed photograph of a young man in a soldier’s uniform and told me it was her husband. There were no other photos of sons or daughters, only a crucifix and an image of Jesus Christ hanging over the sofa.

Aunt Gina motioned for me to stay where I was and shuffled down a long hallway. Anna whispered and crossed herself. We waited for what seemed like 20 minutes and could hear the older woman rummaging through the bedroom. Finally, she emerged from the hallway cradling her dead husband’s bathrobe. She thrust it into my hands and urged me to slide it on over my clothes. I hesitated and looked wide-eyed at Anna, who also urged me to try it on, so I wrapped it around my Grateful Dead T-shirt. Silence enveloped the room. I stood with my arms wide, modeling the robe that presumably her husband had worn most mornings while he sipped his caffè corretto. I stood dumbfounded, staring at the sleeves of the heavy floral-patterned robe—cut too big, less than absorbent, pocket sitting too high for a hand to rest in.

“So elegant! Handsome!” Aunt Gina exclaimed. She then burst into tears and hugged Anna, whose eyes also welled up.

What the hell was I going to do with this bathrobe? Could this whole presentation possibly have been all just for me? The one preparing to shove off in a few days with a rail pass and a hostel itinerary? “You’ll promise to wear it?” asked Aunt Gina.

I knew I had no choice but to smash down what I could in my already stuffed backpack and leave some of my belongings behind. Even as a stupid young American, I knew you didn’t refuse gifts from Italian widows who’d just prepared you an afternoon banquet.

The robe, la stazione, the wine.

Over the next 30 years, I kept in touch with the Bernabe family, and visited every few years. By the late 1990s, Paolo and Aunt Gina had both passed away, but Anna remained in good health and Daniela, now teaching in Cremona, still lived at home with her mother.

My own family spent time there when my sons were babies and then again as pre-teens. I can mark major events in Pieve San Giacomo. I was there when the terrorist attacks happened on 9/11, during the space shuttle Columbia disaster, and during that time the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull shut down air travel in Europe. Guys I had played soccer with were now married to women from the village. It got to the point where I could randomly walk into one of the village’s two bars—La Quercia or Night n’ Day—and the bartender would know my drink order.

Anna made marubini every time I visited. I always wanted to help—in large part because I really wanted to know how to make them. She let me try only once. I couldn’t get the shape correct, something Anna could do with the flick of a finger. Once I’d messed up too many, she shooed me out of the kitchen, never to be invited again.

In fact, the only time Anna had let me cook anything in her kitchen was kind of a disaster. I’d become obsessed with this weird pasta that was traditional in the neighboring town of Crema, called tortelli cremaschi. While the pasta itself follows the basic egg-and-flour recipe, the ingredient list for the filling reads like an absurdist creation: amaretto cookies (nearly a pound); candied citrus; mint candies; raisins; egg yolk; grated lemon zest; grated cheese; nutmeg; Marsala wine; mostaccino, a local cookie that is sort of like a ginger snap. It’s like a stuffed pasta a kindergartner would design.

Yet tortelli cremaschi is real and dates back to at least the 16th century, when Crema was under the rule of the Republic of Venice. There is even a Brotherhood of the Tortello Cremasco (“To defend, enhance and promote the Tortello Cremasco”) and an annual festival. In fact, it’s fairly typical of pastas dating back to the Renaissance, which were historically sweet. The dish fit with the types of spices and candied fruit that Venice’s traders imported from the East.

None of this mattered to Anna. No proper kitchen outside of Crema would ever prepare tortelli cremaschi. So if I wanted to introduce this heresy into her home, I was told to make it myself. The only place I could buy all of the random ingredients for tortelli cremaschi was at one old-fashioned drogheria in Crema’s town center. When I returned home, she shook her head. “Matto,” she said. She tossed me an apron and handed me her mezzaluna knife. As I chopped the cookies, and the candied fruit, and the mint, and everything else—all while Anna watched, bemused—I grew nervous. As I added the chopped mint candies to my filling, and then the egg yolk, it dawned on me that I would likely not be invited into the kitchen ever again. Anna helped me shape them into proper tortelli. “What do we serve with these?” she asked. “Broth? Butter? Sage?”

Marubini in brodo.

To make matters more stressful, Daniela had invited a couple of sophisticated friends from Milan to join us for dinner. The husband, who worked in finance, had just come from the golf course. Daniela told him I was an American food writer, and he seemed extremely skeptical. Anna and I served the tortelli cremaschi, with butter and sage, as a first course. Everyone sat and took a bite. Silence. The guy from Milan winced a little. Everyone gingerly took another bite. Oh my, yes, it was very sweet. And gooey. Anna and Daniela spoke quietly in dialect. Eyes around the table darted at me. Anna looked at me and said, “Troppo dolce.”

Everyone began chuckling at the quirky American. “Ah, our Jason!” said Anna, making that Italian hand gesture that basically translates to “this knucklehead!” Anna still treated me exactly as my own mother does. No matter how old I’d get, in her eyes I will forever be a silly 19-year-old, the same boy who arrived at her door wearing a tie-dyed shirt, a man-child with a shaky grasp of Italian grammar.

“Wait a minute!” I protested. “I didn’t invent this dish! You can’t blame me for this recipe! Blame the Venetians who ruled Crema!” Everyone nodded. It was agreed that the people of Crema must be completely crazy.

“However,” said the guy from Milan, in English. “Your new nickname will be Tortello Cremasco from now on. You should use that as your alias when you review restaurants. Or when you appear in pornographic movies.”

After the Tortello Cremaso fiasco life got more complicated and I began to visit Pieve San Giacomo less and less. I had been scheduled to visit in spring 2020, but the pandemic and its travel bans scuttled that trip. When travel started up again, my work travel took me in other directions, as did family and life. It would be years before I returned.

In fact, I did not return to Pieve San Giacomo until this past winter. That’s when Daniela messaged me with the news that Anna had died, only a few weeks before her 90th birthday.

Postmodern pizza and wine at I Tigli

Before I returned to Pieve San Giacomo, I spent the evening in Soave, which is a seminal region of my wine journey (I wrote a feature about Soave for Wine Enthusiast.) I ate dinner alone in neighboring San Bonifacio, at the bar of iconic, new-wave pizzeria I Tigli—long before that overpriced place popped up in your gentrified neighborhood, I Tigli was already serving postmodern pizza and natural wine. I drank a skin-contact garganega from natural wine OG, Angiolino Maule. I ate one half pizza topped with snails, pancetta, and radish greens, and another half topped with pigeon, artichoke, and mozzarella.

Everything was delicious, yet I was lost in thought about how far removed it all was from the very traditional Italian food and wine I had first known in the early 1990s, from Anna’s kitchen. As Italy becomes even more and more popular for American travelers, I find it incredibly difficult to explain to people how much Italy has changed in even just the last 15 or 20 years.

When I first arrived there, and for at least two decades afterward, many Italians could not pronounce my first name correctly. Even to this day, when I introduce myself as “Jason” to an older, non-English-speaking Italian, there’s a slight chance he or she will reply: “Jackson?” Actually, for a long time, what many people said was: “Jackson? Like Michael Jackson?” And they would often raise an eyebrow, and smirk. The Michael Jackson line doesn’t really happen anymore. But until only the past few years, whenever I booked a hotel or made dinner reservations, or told my phone number to someone as they typed it into a phone, it was still a 60-40 chance that I would be identified as Jackson Wilson.

One night, about a decade ago, Anna, and Daniela and two of her cousins took me to a pizzeria near Pieve San Giacomo. We were looking at a huge chalkboard full of pizza choices. Everyone ordered, and I was taking a little too long with my decision-making, and so they began to fuss in that endearing Italian way. “What? You don’t see anything you like? Do you need a translation? Should we order for you?” Finally, Daniela said, a tad impatiently, “If you don’t see a pizza you like, they’ll make any pizza you want.” The waiter, also impatiently, reiterated this.

At that moment, for some reason, my eye lighted on the word “gorgonzola” and then the word “pear” flittered into my brain. Gorgonzola and pears. That sounded good. It didn’t seem any stranger than the “Hawaii” Pizza or the “Texas BBQ” Pizza on the chalkboard. And so I verbalized this: “May I have my pizza with gorgonzola and pear?”

All conversation stopped. The waiter looked at me like I may be mentally ill. He looked beseechingly at Anna and Daniela as if I needed special help with my Italian. But no, I repeated my order. He rubbed his stomach and winced. Everyone at the table burst out laughing. Whoever heard of a pizza like that? Gorgonzola! And pears! That’s the craziest pizza we’ve ever heard of! Ah, Jason! Always the mischief-maker! Perpetually the dopey 19 year old!

All through dinner, it went on. Every time the waiter came over, the family laughed and apologized: “Ah, he’s American, you see. Don’t be alarmed.” I offered samples to everyone at the table, just to show them how good the pizza really was—and it was very good. But none of them would entertain one bite.

Near the end of the meal, the chef came out of the kitchen to see who was actually eating a pizza with gorgonzola and pears. That’s when everyone suggested, with a laugh, that this pizza should have a name: “Pizza Jason.”

Except here’s the thing—when the chef repeated the name, he called it “Pizza Jackson” and wrote it on the chalkboard just like that. So, if you happened to be at this pizzeria in the province of Cremona, and for some reason you wanted my pizza that has gorgonzola and pear, you had to ask for a Pizza Jackson.

God and Pesto are Dead

I tell that story for a couple of reasons. The first being to underline how resistant to outside innovation, ingredients, and ideas that Italian food and wine was, even just a decade ago. It’s a topic I’ve explored before, particularly in “God and Pesto are Dead” and my essay on Verona’s crackdown of kebab shops.

But secondly, I’d like to say that I’ve always enjoyed being called Jackson in Italy—and don’t usually correct it. Being called Jackson reminds me that Italy, despite its familiarity to Americans, is still a strange and foreign place, still full of surprises and new discoveries. In a sense, becoming Jackson re-mystifies Italy for me.

I finally made it to Cremona the evening after my dinner at I Tigli, a Friday. I picked Daniela up at school, where she’s now head of the foreign language department. We drove to Pieve San Giacomo along the dark but familiar Via Postumia—a road that has existed since the Romans built it in 148 B.C. to connect Genoa with the Adriatic.

Daniela seemed to still be in shock over her mother’s death, which even though Anna was almost 90 had come as a surprise. Daniela spent her whole adult life living with her mother in the village, taking the train to and from work every day. Now, she honestly didn’t know what she was going to do, or how she would take care of the old house.

The family property had changed over the years, with some of it sold off and developed. We ate dinner next door, at a relatively new restaurant called Osteria del Miglio, which is cited as “Bib Gourmand” in the Michelin guide. Osteria del Miglio is literally in the old barn where Paolo kept his wine and where I’d seen him butcher a cow.

Dinner at Osteria del Miglio was fantastic, like no place that ever existed in the Pieve San Giacomo I’ve known, beginning with the first wine, a Portuguese sparkler from Filipa Pato. My secondo piatto of roasted germano—or local mallard duck—was classic, but my primo was a very non-traditional pasta: tortelli al cacao (yes, a pasta with cacao) stuffed with oxtail. Tortelli al cacao was savory and delicious, but Daniela and I chuckled that Anna would not have approved of such experimentation. “Let’s not forget tortelli cremaschi,” Daniela said, with a wink.

After dinner, we talked about making marubini for Sunday lunch, in honor of Anna. It seemed like a lot. Both the pasta and the ripieno presented challenges.

Anna’s recipe for the stuffing was straightforward, yet vague. “I can tell you ingredients but not quantity as it depends on how you feel the filling,” Daniela said. The meats: grilled veal chop; grilled pork loin; boiled turkey or chicken breast; a thick slice of mortadella. Basically, these would have been the meats that Anna would have cooked for lunches or dinners over the course of the week, and the leftovers would be ground together on the weekend for the ripieno. Grana Padano cheese, grated nutmeg, egg, and salt were added to the meat. “You mix everything and wait for a while. A friend of Anna’s leaves her filling on the windowsill outside at night,” said Daniela.

Making the pasta itself was also straightforward, but neither of us had mastered the shape. During the pandemic, I’d tried making marubini and I could never get it right. I’d scoop too much ripieno onto a fresh-cut pasta square, fold it, and immediately it would fall apart. The next I’d do would have too little meat and too much dough. I ended forming the pasta into what I could manage: the shape of maybe a tiny hat, sort of like cappelletti, but not exactly that either.

Preparing marubini, correctly.

When I’d sent Daniela a picture of my marubini on WhatsApp, she was generous. “Anna approved,” she messaged. “Even the shape fits the time. It’s like a crown. So let’s call them Corona Marubini.”

At Osteria del Miglio, we talked about how, across Italy, things like homemade marubini may be disappearing faster than any of us can fathom. Italy has the oldest population in Europe, with almost a quarter of its citizens over 65 years old. Nearly 180,000 Italians over age 60 died due to COVID. That is the generation born into the postwar Italy that we’ve long mythologized and now lives mostly in memories. What will die with these septuagenarians and octogenarians?

The next morning, we walked through the village to the cemetery, and inside the Bernabe family mausoleum, and I paid my respects to Anna, as well as to Paolo and to Aunt Gina. We stopped for pastries in the center of Pieve San Giacomo, and I noticed that the two bars, La Quercia and Night n’ Day, had both closed.

In the afternoon, we made a day trip into Cremona, wandering the city, stopping at old haunts. We went to Ugo Grill, a little storefront that’s famous for its tramezzini, perfect little triangle-cut sandwiches with spongy white bread slathered with mayonnaise. I’ve always preferred prosciutto e carciofo or prosciutto e uvo on mine. Ugo Grill still swarms with both young and old. I’ve been eating tramezzini here since I was a student—it’s where I chatted up the girl who made me miss my train all those years ago.

Ugo Grill had changed owners, and offers more products than just tramezzini these days. In fact, they now sell fresh, housemade marubini. That’s when we decided not to make our own marubini, after all, and left it in Ugo Grill’s hands.

That night, I went with some old friends to a newer restaurant on the outskirts of Cremona called—in English—Food Factory. Normally, we would have finished at either La Quercia and Night n’ Day, but we had to go out in the city to find a bar.

On Sunday, the marubini preparation was easy. We cooked the premade ones from Ugo Grill and served half in broth, and half in brown butter sage. I opened a bottle of La Stoppa Trebbiolo, from the Colli Piacentini (as a hat tip to Paolo and his Piacenza wines) and we toasted Anna. Ugo Grill had opted for a very basic ravioli shape—not the more complicated tiny rings like Anna made. Still, the taste brought back a flood of memories. We didn’t talk much as we ate.

Early on Monday morning, I drove Daniela to work in Cremona. We had coffee and brioche at Pasticceria Dondeo near the train station, as we have many times before. When she left for the school, I drove on to Orio al Serio airport in Bergamo—the hub of Ryanair, which did not exist when I first came to Italy.

As I waited for my flight to Spain, where I am living more and more of my middle-aged life, I was a mixed bag of emotions. The main theme of those emotions seemed to be: I am old as fuck. I feel so far away from that 19-year-old who arrived in Cremona. I’ve been traveling almost nonstop in those three decades since.

Oddly, I also thought about my graduate creative writing program in Boston. This would have been less than three years after my Italian experience, and so I realized two things. First, I have been trying to write something meaningful about Pieve San Giacomo for a very long time. Also, I can clearly see how far away I am, now, from the kind of writer I had imagined I would be back then.

I thought about my old classmate Jhumpa Lahiri. As a writer, I was (and still am) a hack next to Jhumpa. Yet once, when she learned I spoke some Italian, she invited me to see a Fellini movie, Amarcord, with her at Coolidge Corner and then tea afterwards to discuss the film. I would never call this evening a “date” because even though I was enrolled in the same creative writing program, I was still very much a silly boy, and would be a silly boy for many years. Perhaps even still.

In any case, I have always loved and admired Jhumpa’s story “The Third and Final Continent,” from her exceptional collection, Interpreter of Maladies. Frankly, “The Third and Final Continent” may be the greatest American short story published in the last 30 years.

The story is deceptively simple, narrated by a Bengali man (based on her father) who tells the tale of his emigration to London, and then Boston. He rents a room for a short time from a 103-year-old woman, Mrs. Croft, while he’s waiting for his bride from an arranged marriage to come to America. He ends up having the same funny conversation with Mrs. Croft every evening. A little while after his new wife arrives and he’s moved into his own home, the narrator learns that Mrs. Croft died. Even though he’d only known her briefly, hers is “the first death I mourned in America.” As the story quietly closes, he humbly explains how he’s remained living in the U.S. for nearly 30 years.

As I grow older, it’s the last paragraph that stays with me. And it’s the one I thought of that afternoon as I left Italy:

Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

Cremonese, Tortello Cremasco, Jackson, the boy with the tie-dyed shirt, they’re all the people I used to be, the parts of me that often feel as though they might be gone forever, or even dead. But they aren’t. As the old saying goes, “A plate of marubini can bring the dead back to life.” If there’s anything I know to be true, it’s this.