A Little Bit of Italy in Nuremberg
Mr. B - Nuremberg Germany, July 2024
I spent the rainy morning at the Nuremberg Trial Museum, with my German travel buddies, starting my day there around 10 before the hordes of school and tour groups ascended and my senses were craving something a bit more uplifting to even me back out. It was a lot to process, but history isn’t designed to be comfortable.
The museum itself was sitting on Bärenschanzstrasse, no blazing billboards announcing the location, and my friends and I had to rely on Google Maps to find it. Just a quiet brown building with the American, British, French, and former Soviet flags that framed a small placard identifying the entry. The quiet nature of the building and location did nothing to diminish the magnitude of what happened there almost 80 years prior. I’d argue it emphasized the somber historical significance, the sense of “place,” one feels upon the approach.
My Dad had always wanted to visit this place. He had been a career prosecutor, from child abuse cases to an Appalachian snake handling preacher who murdered his wife with said snakes. I could feel him there, over my shoulder, with me to experience the residual energy still present in Courtroom 600. The inhumanity of the accused who, filled with the same hate and power that still manifests itself in our world today, is contrasted by the light emanating from those who bravely bore witness to the unimaginable horrors suffered by tens of millions of people. It stands as a reminder what can happen when political power goes unchecked. My dad couldn’t make it there. I did.
Nuremberg Trail Memorial, July 2024
The rain had broken by the time we left the museum. My friends and I parted ways, they to return to the hotel for a little rest and I to go explore some of the old town on my own and process the heaviness of the morning’s subject matter. I hoped the U-Bahn to Opernhaus station, moseyed over the old moat to Frauentormauer and entered the old town via Grasersgasse. In no time, I found myself at the cobblestoned Hauptmarkt around the Frauenkirche in all its 14th century charm.
I milled about the vegetable stands scattered around the square wishing I had a kitchen in which to cook. Sausage stands manned by Turkish families selling the local bratwurst, which, fun German fact, must be no longer than 9 centimeters and weigh no more than 25 grams and must contain mace, pepper and marjoram. The smell of those little piggie links frying mixed with the fresh pretzels baking nearby reminded me that the morning’s Brötchen had long since done its duty. I was ready for lunch.
The day before, I had noticed the small Italian café on the corner seemed to have a steady stream of customers comprised of both tourists and locals enjoying the terrace and lined up for take-out. Seemed like a good indicator that the food would be good and the chances of my German friends and I having Italian later that evening was slim at best. One friend has the culinary curiosity of a doorknob. I wait for the little tourist train full of kaki wearing Brits and baseball cap wearing Americans to pass and I make my way over.
Unclear as to whether it was an “order at the counter and we’ll bring it to you” or table service kind of joint, I popped into the entrance to be bombarded by the rich sweetish sour smell of yeast dough rising, one of my favorite aromas, to ask. Two middle aged men were behind the counter, one was tossing pizza dough in the air and the other was counting money for the register till, both shouting in Italian, the money counting fella stopping only to wave his wad of 20 euro bills at the pizza dough dude. As I wait for a pause in the discussion, a thick accented young lady sees me and asks, “for here or take away?”
“For here, please.”
“Please seat and I to you come.”
“Grazie.”
I found a seat at a table under one of several large green “Peroni” café umbrellas. To my right I can see through the store front window at a counter full of pizzas ready for sale “by the slice,” behind which the money counting fella and pizza dough dude were continuing their discussion and waving and tossing for all to hear and see. There was a TV inside on the wall behind the kitchen showing a soccer match rerun of some night game that was played somewhere at some point in time by two teams I could not identify. There sat at the four-seater bar inside were four elder statesmen glued to the action, well on their way to a day drinking induced siesta in an hour or so.
She came with the menu and leaves returning after several minutes to take my order for a salame e funghi pizza and beer. Approving smile. Perfetto.
Four younger fellas, all wearing Adidas track suit pants and white soccer shirts with “Emirates” splashed across the front obliterating any indication of the team, each with a different player’s number represented sit down at a table and light cigarettes. The server approaches and sits a bottle of wine on the table with four small glasses. Everyone is speaking at the same time, laughing, cigarettes waving, familiar. The money counting fella, still waving his stack of 20 euros, shouts something from the door at the guys who all wave him down in dismissal.
It is at this point I notice through the window; the pizza dough man was mixing a massive amount of spaghetti in a hollowed-out wheel of Parmigiano Reggiano. Pasta alla ruota. I had only ever seen it on YouTube and had always wanted to try it. Despite the fact I had not seen it on the menu, it was too late to change my order. The more it was stirred by pizza dough dude the creamier and creamier the steaming pasta got. I could smell it; I was dying.
Pasta Alla Ruota
My pizza arrived as a sun-glassed couple with a baby stroller pulled up to the table next to the four footballers. With great fanfare, money counting fella busts out of the front door to scoop up and shower the baby with kisses. The energy level of the couple is far under those of the other patrons who proceed to pass the baby around, the sunglasses serving not only to shield from the blazing Bavarian sun but to hide the baby induced several month’s scarcity of sleep.
The server brings plates for the footballers and new parents, who have pulled their small table up to create one long table for six and a baby stroller. After placing the plates and cutlery on the table, she takes the baby and walks inside to the sound of adoration from the four elder statesmen at the bar as though a goal had been scored in the match playing on the TV.
Another round of cigarettes is lit at the table as the pizza dough dude arrives with large bowls of the pasta alla ruota stacked up on his arm. He lays them in front of the diners as flowery sounding romance language praises erupt into the air giving my ear a tickle against the morning’s harder staccato of German and English. They begin to pass the bowls around to spoon the creamy deliciousness onto the plates of their dining neighbor.
The server arrives back to the table, baby on her hip now sucking on a bottle filled with what appears to be baby formula and sits down at the table as well to offer her “Buon Appetito!”
“Buon Appetito!” everyone says in unison as they make the Sign of the Cross over their hearts and dive into the creamy deliciousness set forth in front of them.
Throughout all of this, I was beginning to feel a bit more balance between the gravity of the morning’s subject matter and the beauty life has to offer. I’m reminded again of my Dad who would have loved all of this experience and in no time would have certainly become the fifth elder statesmen watching the match inside.
I was making up stories in my head about what was unfolding. In my people watching story, the four footballers were cousins, two were sons of the money counting fella, the other two were sons of the pizza dough dude. The server was the daughter of the sister of the fella and the dude. The couple with the baby had to be visiting relatives up from, I dunno, Palermo, who had been out exploring Nuremberg with the baby. There was just a level of familiarity that strangers simply didn’t share. At least not where I come from.
It was all worked out in my mental novel. All over a pepperoni and mushroom pizza while jealous of my subject’s pasta. Had I a white board handy, I could’ve written the entire family tree and timeline. How this family got from Italy to Germany and opened up this very café in the Hauptmarkt making money off tourists upon whom the magic of pasta alla ruota was lost. How it was from this perspective in the square this family marked the chapters of their life, births and deaths, generation after generation.
Within an hour, the new parents kissed farewell, twice on each cheek of the footballers who in turn kissed the baby, and they headed back out into their day. Amongst the empty plates and three empty bottles of wine, the footballers gathered themselves shouting at the money counting fella and pizza dough dude, hands waving, kissing the server ciao. I never saw anyone pay for anything, as though they had all stopped by their Noni’s for a lunch that would carry them full the rest of the day.
After a few moments, the server noticed me for the first time since laying the pizza in front of me. She pulls the metal pizza plate from the table and asks “café?”
“No thanks, just the check please.”
“Yes, you pay inside.”
“Okay. Look, I have a question if I may?”
She looked at me with a half-smile as though I was about to ask where the notorious Nuremberg tourist train started and said “of course!”
“Those people that were here, are you all family? Do you all know each other?” I point to the empty table still filled with plates and empty wine glasses.
“Oh, no! We have never, how do you say, see to know each other before in life.” She smiled and walked away.
Hmmm.
And just like that, my mental novel evaporated. I went in and paid the money counting fella as the server shouted to him “SALAME E FUNGHI!”
My mental novel may have evaporated. But I think I may just like my version better. Because I think she was lying because I was, after all, an outsider. In any case, it wasn’t how I thought I would spend a couple hours at lunch in Nuremberg.
