MARJORIE SHAW: INSIDER’S ITALY ONLY A CLICK AWAY

I’ve lived in Rome for almost half a century but my connection to Italy goes back another ten years to 1957, when I boarded the SS Saturnia to travel to Naples, Pompei, Paestum, Rome, Turin, the Val Pellice, and Venice. My close friend Marjorie Shaw’s connection goes back much much farther. It’s almost 100 years now since her maternal grandfather, Algernon Ashburner Osborne, arrived in Rome in 1919 to be the commercial attaché at the US Embassy.

He and his wife, Marjorie Adams Osborne, brought up three children, Isabel, Louis, and Chrissy, here.

 

Isabel returned almost immediately after World War II, married a fellow US diplomat Howard Shaw, and has lived in Rome ever since. Their daughter Marjorie, also born in Rome, is the founder and owner of New-York-based “Marjorie Shaw’s Insider’s Italy”. I know no other born-in-Rome American ex-pat, whose mother and whose daughter were also born in Rome. So if you’re planning to visit Italy and have specific requests, contact Marjorie at www.insidersitaly.com. Her knowledge is encyclopedic.

You are the founder and the owner of New-York-based “Marjorie Shaw’s Insider’s Italy”, can you tell Epicurean Traveler’s readers exactly what you do? Initially I specialized gastronomic walking tours but it quickly became apparent that people needed a lot more help than simply gastronomically. In 1989 pre-internet, pre-FAX machine, there were very few resources for people who wanted to make eclectic trips in depth to anywhere. So I envisaged a company, which would help people organize specialized trips to Italy based on their own interests and budgets. That’s essentially what I still do. Mine are bespoke trips for small groups, friends, families, couples, who want to take trips that are entirely tailor-made to destinations of their interests and who want assistance with very special hotels, villas, restaurants, and transportation planning, and most of all wonderful itineraries. The company is now 28 years old.

What is your clients’ most popular destination? Rome by a long shot, but it’s also the most difficult because it’s so easy to do Rome badly. Rome is by far the most complex city we plan for. After London, I think it’s the most visited city in Europe. You can have a wonderful time in Rome, but you can also have a terrible time. We want to make sure it’s the former. After Rome, our specialties are small towns and country locations in Tuscany and Umbria, the Amalfi Coast, Sicily, the Veneto, Florence, Venice, and the Dolomites.

Why do your clients choose Italy over other European destinations? In size Italy is somewhere between Arizona and New Mexico, but offers inexhaustible variety in its geography, architecture, gastronomy, wines, history, culture, artisan production, climate, and dialects. A classic two-week trip to Italy might include Venice, Sicily and Umbria, each one of which is a country in itself. A trip to Italy seems like numerous trips. Even France, twice Italy’s size, cannot offer such a remarkable variety on so many levels.

What percent come for the art? Some clients say that they’re coming specifically for the art, but then what most moves them is Italy’s inimitable landscape or a personal experience with a winemaker or an artisan, or with one of our guides. A fifth of our trips have an art theme — for examples, Piero della Francesca, Michelangelo or (and these we love to plan) introducing kids to the Renaissance or to Roman architecture. Once we planned a trip for children to castles in three regions — Puglia, Tuscany and Alto Adige; that was exciting to develop!

What percent come for the food? Everyone comes for the food, and especially Slow Food. We try to include almost exclusively restaurants where local and seasonal traditions and foods are celebrated. We build into almost all countryside trips visits to local and traditional food producers. Everyone spends much more time at the table than they expect! Occasionally we plan a trip that is entirely gastronomic — for example in Emilia Romagna. In between meals and visits to Parmesan dairies, prosciutto producers, vineyards and balsamic vinegar makers, clients can also admire art and architecture, and try to work up their appetites for the next feast! One trip we planned was for two couples who were vegetarians and adored legumes; we had them visiting Tuscany, Campania and Puglia. Each day they tried a different restaurant with bean specialties, each one completely different from the other in terms of shapes, colors, flavors and preparation. Many of the varieties they sampled are at risk of extinction, and so it was for them compelling, besides being delicious, to sample and purchase the legumes on site, and learn about how and where they grow. One meal, near Salerno, included fauciariello, lardariello, suscella and minichella beans, names as musical as the flavors!

Dario Franceschini, Italy’s Minister of Culture and Tourism, has declared 2018 the year of “gastronomic tourism”; which region’s food is the most popular with your clients? Everyone seems to think that the last region they visited had the best food! I think that for many clients, the coasts offer the greatest joy at the table because of vegetables for 12 months of the year, plus local fish with flavors and preparations that are specific to the place.
As the concept of diversity is central to Franceschini’s declaration, I enthusiastically support it by actively promoting Italy’s unparalleled culinary variety.

What percent come to get married? We’ve planned Tuscan and Amalfi weddings twice, once intimately and once with a large family group, but also and more often, we’ve organized engagement celebrations, including surprise ones. These are wonderful fun. During the last one we planned, in the square of St. Peter’s in Rome, the groom surprised his amazed bride by kneeling before her with a ring. She was sightseeing with her family and didn’t even know that her fiancé was in Italy. We then planned four days of special celebrations.

Neither you nor I have Italian blood, but what percent come to trace their Italian ancestry?  Not as many as years past probably because with each generation the attachment gets more remote and because there are so many internet programs for this service. In any case, baptismal records at local churches, which can go back several centuries, are the best source for such information.

Do travelers ever come only to eat a certain seasonal food like white truffles in Piemonte during the autumn or soft-shell crabs (moeche) during April and May in Venice?  Yes. We recently planned a late September trip for a Canadian client, its theme being the flavors of the figs of his childhood (he grew up in the Mediterranean). He and his wife spent a week on the Amalfi Coast with our special guide Giocondo and sampled and foraged for magnificent figs of 12 different varieties, all the while, of course, also walking among the lemon groves, swimming, exploring Paestum and Oplontis, and trekking in the mountains. We’ve planned truffle trips and, a favorite, new-season olive oil trips (picking olives, making oil and tasting).                                       

What about for festivals like Spoleto, jazz in Perugia, Rossini in Pesaro or carnival in Venice or Viareggio?  Yes, clients have come to participate in festivals including the Black Celery in Trevi, the Gaite or medieval market in Bevagna and the Palio in Siena. We’ve planned trips for travelers who’ve joined the Transumanza, the migration of sheep to and from pastures near Rome to those in the abruzzesi mountains. We often join in too; it’s one of the greatest walks in the world!

Have you sent clients to every region of Italy?  Yes, with one exception, Valle d’Aosta, the only Italian region I haven’t yet visited.

I’d be curious to know if someone has chosen Basilicata, Calabria, or the Marches, and if yes, why?  For the very reasons you and I love to explore these off-the-beaten-track regions! So much of Italy is over-touristy and environmentally fragile. I think immediately of areas like Venice, Positano and Cinque Terre. We suggest that travelers visit these more obvious areas of Italy — including all major cities, and Cinque Terre — only between November and Easter. Venice, for example, is a dream during December and January. And in between Easter and October, we suggest focusing on regions that are off-the-beaten-track and that offer, when travels are well-planned, tremendous rewards. However, you don’t necessarily have to go so far afield as the Abruzzi and Marches when Viterbo is an example, just outside of Rome, of an unknown destination. The town’s medieval walls are superb, some of the best preserved in Italy, and the towers are tall and dramatic. Viterbo’s San Pellegrino district is one of the best places in Italy to get the feel of the Middle Ages, seeing how daily life is carried on in an architectural setting that is remarkably unchanged over the centuries. During the period when towns in Tuscany of comparable interest are over-run by tourists, here you can wander from one atmospheric square to the next, each one of a different shape and size, and each with a church, a fountain and one important palace. And no one is there.

What percent of your clients return?  About 50%. The business is almost exclusively word-of-mouth because we haven’t advertised since 1996.

What has been your most outlandish client request? To close St. Mark’s Square so he could propose to his girl friend. That was impossible to achieve because a doge in the 1600s prohibited the closing of St. Mark’s Square for any occasion.

What has been your most rewarding client request? I think I burst with pride with every trip. It’s a business which is hugely gratifying because clients start as clients and then invariably become friends. For example, when we married, half of our guests were clients. The nature of travel planning requires an intimacy and a sharing which is very valuable in both directions.

If you were your client where would you choose to go? Destination? Museum? Hotel? Restaurant? Sardinia because I’ve hardly ever been there and Marcella Hazan always piqued my curiosity in an wonderful interview once about its food. As for a museum, that’s a difficult one, but I think the Palazzo Davanzati in Florence; it’s the Museum of the Florentine House. My favorite restaurant would be a small, family-run restaurant well-off-the-beaten-track. It has to combine passion with wonderful food and much of what they serve must be produced by them. I can think of about 80 that I love. One that could epitomize them might be in Trevi, “La Vecchia Posta”. As for hotels, the Belmond Grand Hotel Timeo in Taormina, which I’ve stayed in and I recommend. It represents everything which is great about Italian hotels: warm, sincere service; marvelous old-fashioned rooms but with exceptional practical comforts; old-fashioned touches like outstanding fruit in the room to greet you; sheets of the best-quality linen, soaps with the smells you dream of.

You’ve lived in Rome almost all your life; all of us long-term residents know how it’s changed for the worse: garbage, potholes, broken sidewalks, crime increase, unreliable public transport, no subway for such a large city, but have there been any changes for the better? Lots. A variety of museums are open for longer hours even into the evening or during the evening. They used to close at 2 PM.
Although very few people may agree, I think you eat better than 15 years ago. In our neighborhood, there is a growing number of delicious and varied good stores easily accessible on foot. There is considerably more talking about food production, much more consciousness of food traditions that must be cherished and maintained. There’s such more access to organic and biodynamic ingredients. I think there is a real sense of the necessity to eat superbly to make sure we don’t lose these traditions. This is certainly true of Rome. I’m talking here only about Italian foods that you can cook because I don’t cook anything else. There’s much more conversation about food and access to ingredients than when I was a child.

Do you think then that the Romans are more open about other topics? No, I think they are as stubborn and as provincial as they ever were. And they would say the same about themselves.

Your husband Robert  Stark is also American, but, as an adult, has lived in Poland, Latvia, Sweden, and The Netherlands, before your marriage; if not Rome, where in Italy would you like to live and why? If not Italy, where? I think we’d like to live in Lucca or in Rovereto. If not in Italy, NO PLACE.

You have two teenage children, Nathan and Isabel, how American or how Italian do they feel?
They call themselves, “Americani di Roma”. The only full-blooded Italian in our household is Teddy, our beloved lagotto, the ancestral breed of poodles. He comes from Romagna, south of the Po delta.