You may have the universe if I may have Italy

Garganelli

A man is making pasta, a volcano of flour
is filled with a dozen yolks sprinkled with salt.
He whisks these until every egg is broken and blended
into a smooth golden cream and then the sides
of the cone are folded into this center. Once
every dry ingredient has become moist he kneads
the mass smooth.  He forms the dough into a ball,
cuts a third of it away and feeds it into a pasta press.
These he refeeds until he has a
saffron sheet that looks like fine cloth. From here
he works like a seamstress, cutting equilateral
squares no more than two inches per side.
The blend of sciences then become art as he
takes a corner, spools it around a dowel
and then rolls it across a board
called a comb that creates grooved
tube of pasta. And like that he has food. 

Science, magic, precision. Mangia!

I was reading a travel article today from the New York Times about Capri and Procida. Capri holds a special place in my heart because that's where Jerry and I went on our first date. In 2015 we went back and spent a weekend to mark the 30th anniversary of that date. Procida, I never visited but I sent a money order there every month for our first year in Formia as that's where my landlady lived.

The article mentions Ischia, which was an island I also visited a number of times. During one of the best visits, my friend, Kathy and I, stayed in a hotel that was run by a couple born in Italy, then they went to the states and spent forty years and then returned to Ischia and ran this very small hotel and trattoria. They were fantastic. Their son was a Marine and so they were very happy to have two sailors stay. The first morning we were there (we’d come in late the night before on a small boat full of German tourists) they woke us early so we wouldn’t miss any beach time. And when we came back from the beach, they had lunch ready – and finally we were able to get some sleep during riposo.  We spent that evening talking to them on their balcony, even though the father, call me Papa, was trying to get us to go out dancing (no, not with him!) because we were young and in Italy and the local boys were so nice. But we never went out dancing, we went for gelato, we listened to some families singing, we went and slept well before Papa came to get us: the sun is up, the beach is waiting, the sea is calling!