Each year, we take a family vacation to Italy. We usually visit in the summer and use the trip to catch up with family and friends and have our kids spend time with their grandparents. This year we attended a reception for my in laws 50^th wedding anniversary and spent a few days in Abruzzo. I started sharing my observations from these trips when I was working on an institutional trading desk during the Great Financial Crisis. I was always surprised by how closely these messages were read. Feel welcome to hit delete. What follows is mostly nonsense.

 

50 Years. My mother-in-law has an eye for detail and out did herself in the planning and execution of her wedding anniversary. The anniversary reception was held at vineyard just outside the mountain hamlet of Picinisco in central Italy. The views were incredible, and the food was excellent. However, if a meal has intermissions (plural) you are being served too much food. Luckily, I got to try the cake and desert the following day.

 

Pingataro, is a small town in central Italy. We had dinner at an excellent restaurant called L’Horto dei Semplici. The owner of the restaurant is a retired deep sea sport fisher and the Chef; his daughter trained under a Michelin Chef in Northern Italy before returning home. (I have no idea if any of this is true, but the food was excellent, and an uncle found a video of highlights of the father fishing). On the way to the restaurant we listened I forced the family to listen to a Founders podcast The Marketing Genius of the Michelin Brothers. I knew that Michelin Stars were devised to encourage drivers to wear out their tires, but the company’s story is clever and entertaining. The initial Michelin ratings were:

• One Star - an excellent community table,
• Two Stars - worthy of detour, and  
• Three Stars - worthy of a trip.

The restaurant is a very solid star (awarded by me) with a glass trap door entrance to its wine cellar that you traverse on the way to the restroom. The real magic was a wine list that featured aged and prominent Barolos at prices below their purchase price 10-20+ years ago. The owner acquired them in an estate sale, only sells them to diners, and is worried that he won’t get through his inventory.

 

Trump. “What do you think about Tr-UmP?” Was one of the most frequent questions I was asked on this trip. It is a challenging question to answer, if you are not sure if the question is being asked from a current event (did he just Tweet something?), social, political, personal, economic, trade, or markets perspective. I’ll spend more time on the US administration in a market focused post but for the trip, I’d go with “What do you think?,” which would help frame the context of the question.

 

Abruzzo. Is mid-boot on the Adriatic side of Italy. The region is agrarian and punctuated with vineyards where grapes grow on canopies. Abruzzo has been on our todo list for a while, and our visit was both excellent and more reasonably priced than I expected (not sure I’ve said that since COVID!). We stayed at a Fantini Winery (Brogo Baccile) where the staff and wines were delightful. We visited the Marramiero Vineyard where we learned they play classical music to their grapes as they age in barrels during daylight hours. We also had dinner in a Trabocco that had been converted into a restaurant. A Trabocco was a structure used for fishing that sits on stilts in the Adriatic Sea and is accessible by a long narrow pier. The restaurants have a single seating and keep their fixed menus for the evening secret. The food was excellent but there was an anxious moment when they brought out at pasta dish after seven appetizers; there was still a fish main and desert course to follow!

 

Lighting Round

• As I get older, I often feel like the places are frequent are getting younger. This is not the case in smaller Italian cities. They appear to be aging faster than I am.
• After spending a week in 40-degree-plus weather, 29-degrees is comfortable. We were telling our daughter to grab sweaters.
• I’ve said before that the best mozzarella in Italy is found between Frosinone to Caserta. I may have eaten by body weight in fresh mozzarella during my visit, and I continue to have strong conviction in this statement.
• The Avis car rental at the airport wanted two physical credit cards from different networks (Visa, Mastercard, …) but not two different issuers (CIBC, JP Morgan, …).
• The Audi we rented had a feature where the dashboard chimed three times when I exceed the speed limit. This feature encourages a significant amount of feedback on my driving.
• The ads on some of my podcasts were in Italian. Many were the exact same ad, just in Italian.
• The bottle caps don’t disconnect from water bottles. This wasn’t the case when we last visited central Italy two years ago. In less than a week this went from an annoying feature, to being recognized as brilliant, and finally inspired a disapproving head shake on the return flight as a cap disconnected from the water bottle I intended to drink.

 

I hope you've enjoyed my nonsense and summer is treating you well. If you'd like to read observations from previous years, you can find them here (2024, 2023, 2022-11). I'm a very guilty vacationer, so I welcome you to reach out to catch up.

 

All the best.

 

Delli (delli@cibc.com)

 

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