Dolce vita

hot town, summer in the city

Forgive me if my English seems a little rusty, but this week, I have started thinking in Italian, which I have discovered is an excellent way to approach a hazy, hot and humid summer in the city.      

The week began with a truly delightful dinner al fresco at the new Enoteca Sociale, which really is just like a trip to Rome, complete with lightly chilled bottles of Sangiovese, small plates of bucatini all-amatriciana and cacio de pepe, and the car exhaust lightly perfuming your dinner out on Dundas Street. 

 Then it veered into a fun and fabulous mid-week  interview over a long and delicious lunch with architect Ralph Giannone of Giannone Petricone (who’ve done everything from Bar Italia to the Terroni on Adelaide)  and Terroni’s  Cosimo Mammoliti, the creative dream team behind the new Bettola di Terroni (look for it if you want the inside story of their longtime design collaboration on Saturday the 31st in the Weekend Living section of the Toronto Star)–before finally wrapping with a screening of Luca Guadagnino’s gorgeous, weepy ”I Am Love” (lo sonno l’amore) , starring Tilda Swinton as the repressed and Jil Sander-clad matriarch of a Milanese fashion dynasty.    

tragedy a la Milanese

It was beautiful–much prettier in my view, than Tom Ford’s much-discussed fashion movie, “The Single Man”, with fabulous, rust-hued velvet Italian fascist interiors reminiscent of Bertolucci’s “Garden of the Finzi Continis”–and deliciously erotic about sex and food (seduction and betrayal in this film actually happen in a dish of prawns and a bowl of soup, respectively), and ultimately wonderfully moving.  

Swinton plays the grown-up love of a mother with adult children with such convincing emotional truth, I was devastated by the inevitable tragedy. 

I don’t know if it was simply a reaction to the Italian opera of this lovely languid week, or just the ridiculous heat, but I just poured tears.