Italia dagli occhi di Decina: Sabado a Civittanova

Sto scrivando questo in inglese perche le molte parole no so in italiano per questo entra. Mi dispiacce.

I’m writing this in English because many of the words I do not know in Italian for this entry. Sorry.

Civittanova is a somewhat small port town on the Adriatic that is the second largest fish port in Italy and the best for quality. 1.3 million kilos of fish go through this port yearly. I am pretty sure that is a lot. Civittanova is also known for its amazing markets and shopping. When we went there were tons and tons of shoe vendors and clothes vendors. I posted a few pictures of the outdoor markets and of a boat for fishing in the Adriatic. We walked around with professor Filiberto and one of his friends who used to be a mayor or something similar to that. We got to see how the fish market works with buyers and sellers and many other things.

This is a fantastic building I saw near of the main piazza in Civittanova. The structure is poured concrete that meets the ground at each end of the site creating arches for the roof. And each arch branches up to meet the arch next to it to create a saw tooth or butterfly effect. I think the coolest thing about this building (which I hope you can all see from the picture) is that those arches that meet the ground also act as the water shedding device for the building. The structure forms channels that carry the water from the top to the ground away from the building (how awesome).

Well the absolute best part of this trip to Civittanova was the lunch Filiberto gave to us. He knows a person who owns this restaurant and gave us an absolutely ridiculous discount for our meal. We paid 10 euro for this whole trip (about 4 euro for the train ride) and this meal alone could easily cost 40-50 euro a person. So if you are ever in Civittanova and are looking for a fantastic dish, go to this restaurant!!!

Try and follow along with these great courses. The first (which I regretfully didn’t take a picture of) was a smoked filleted salmon. It was cut extremely thin, almost like prosciutto is cut, and was drenched in home made olive oil and parsley. It was godly. Next we were given these huge pots with muscles, oysters and clams. By far the most tender and succulent seafood I have ever had. I was told that most of what we ate was less than a day old. After that dish we had seafood gnocchi. Intermixed with the pasta was shrimp and other seafoods that I can’t recall. After that we were given pasta with red sauce and more seafood. Once again, I wasn’t sure what kind of seafood was in the pasta, my best guess is clams or muscles because of the texture and size of the pieces. And by this point, we’ve had four different dishes and we’re all pretty much stuffed to the max, but the main dish hasn’t even arrived until now. The restaurant then brought out fried seafood, mostly minos, sardines, calamari, octopus, shrimp and scallops. They were unbelievable. We were completely spoiled. Next we got kebabs with slightly breaded and fried shrimp and scallops. They then gave us a side of French fries as a palate cleanser and finished us off with lemon ice sourbet and espressos. Imagine having plate on plate of each one of those dishes brought out to you. Everything was served family style so it isn’t like we each got our own small serving. The restaurant brought seconds and thirds of each course every time and someone had to eat it. It was amazing. I wish you all could experience it. Also at one point during dinner, the light coming through the clerestory created phenomenal lighting and we all went crazy taking pictures of the dishes and each other because it was such beautiful light, so I added a final picture to show you how beautiful the table was.