Eating my way through Florence

For years I had pictured Florence before ever setting foot in it, piecing the city together from everything I had read about its history, its art and its culture. What finally got me on a plane was a conference. The trip was arranged around work, but the food turned out to be the part I remember most.

I walked for hours, took wrong turns, asked strangers for directions and sometimes stayed talking long after the directions were done. I have photographs and memories of Florence and Pisa that deserve their own post. This one is about what I ate.

There are not many good pictures of the food, I am afraid. I was usually too busy eating to reach for the camera.

Street food I had to skip

The commonest street food I saw was lampredotto, sold from carts all over the city, usually as a sandwich, and always with a crowd around it. The other fixture was trippa. Both are made from offal, so I left them alone. That is no judgement on the cooking: I heard plenty of praise from people eating beside me, and anyone who enjoys that kind of food should try both.

Pizza, including one with potatoes

Pizza and Italy belong together, and pasta does too. What delighted me was how consistently thin and good the pizza was in Florence. Almost anywhere you walk in, it seems, the base is right.

I looked up the history one evening out of curiosity. The ancient Greeks are said to have eaten a similar flatbread with toppings, while the word pizza is thought to have been coined in Italy in 997 AD. The modern version, Pizza Margherita, has its roots in Naples in the 1800s. Everyone tells me the pizza in Naples is even better, so that city has gone onto my list. The Florentine version reminded me, oddly, of tandoor bread back in India.

I ate pizza most days: at the restaurant beside my hotel, at Mercato Centrale, and at whatever place looked good in the centre. A friend who had visited a few months earlier told me to look out for potato pizza. It sounded strange, she admitted, but it is nothing fancy, turns up in small bakeries and tastes far better than it sounds.

So I kept my eyes open while walking and eventually found a little shop selling it. They had many kinds of pizza and sold slices by weight. Mine cost about 2 euros, and it was very good. I was too hungry to photograph it properly.

Wine, taken slowly

Florence sits in Tuscany, and the region's wines deserve their reputation. I went to a tasting where each wine was paired with a food item placed beside it. The instruction was to feel the taste of the wine, with the food there to lift the flavour — and, if you ask me, to soothe the senses between glasses. I took no photographs and regretted it afterwards, because the evening was excellent.

One piece of advice from that night: if you go to a tasting, do not drink all six glasses in half an hour. The point is the taste and the room, not the speed.

The pasta I still think about

A friend had recommended a restaurant called Lo Scudo, insisting it served the best food she had ever eaten. It sits close to the Duomo, which is a magnificent cathedral in its own right and worth a look before or after lunch.

Following her advice, I ordered the blue-cheese and pear tortellini. It tasted unlike any pasta I had eaten before, and I have thought about it since. The other pastas were good too. Ask the staff to suggest a house wine or a local bottle that suits what you order; they know the pairings better than you do.

Gelato, and how to judge a gelateria

No trip to Florence ends without gelato, and the city has gelaterias on almost every corner. There are long lists online of the places to try; short of time, I walked into one near the church of Santa Maria Novella.

My blogger friend Jasmine, who writes at Queste Dolce Vita, has a better method than any list. Avoid shops where the colours look unnaturally bright, she says, or where the flavours are written in English rather than Italian. Be suspicious of elaborate cone towers and of gelato piled absurdly high. When it is genuinely good, it needs no decoration to advertise itself.

She has also posted a recipe for mint gelato that is worth trying at home. And while you are in Italy, learn to order coffee the Italian way.

Why a food tour helps

It makes a difference to know what to look for when you arrive in a new city. A food tour at the start of a trip solves that: you learn the names, the neighbourhoods and the places you would otherwise walk past.

I did not look into tours before Florence, but I joined Devour Barcelona Food tours on a later trip to Spain, and it was one of the highlights of that stay. Left alone, I would never have found the small places we visited, or heard the stories that hold the Gracia neighbourhood together.

If you are going to Florence, the Emilia Delizia food tour is one option. It is led by a long-term expat who has lived in the city for 30 years, lasts four hours, costs 16 euros per person and takes groups of fewer than eight.

If you have been to Florence, tell me what you ate and what I should try next time. I suspect Rome will come before a second visit, but the list is long. And if you have not been yet, what would you most want to do there?

This post was written in cooperation with Emilia Delizia. All opinions are, as usual, my own.