Limoncello Pt.2 - It's Limoncino!

Limoncello Pt.2 - É Limoncino!

We had a visit the other day from the family professore who gave me the recipe for this post.

He and his wife popped over for lunch and he brought with him a typed version of the recipe, a bottle of the resulting liquor, an instruction and a challenge...

The bottle's chilling in the freezer and the instructions are up on the fridge door.

The instruction was simple: this is a recipe for Limoncino. The other 'L' word is used by the folks further south - round here we call it something else. So the recipe has now been christened Limoncino alla Mario.

Something to follow when making 'Limoncino alla Mario'

And the challenge was quite simple:

"If you follow the recipe and it doesn't turn out like this bottle I'm giving you ...you didn't follow the recipe."

I'm going to give it a try pretty soon and attempt to document the process here.

Salute!

Grant Benson - My New Hero

Grant Benson - il mio nuovo eroe

In my new life as an English Language teacher I find myself having to do a lot more driving than I used to.

Back in Croydon I commuted into London each day on the train, but here you can't live without wheeled transport. I'll be doing up Thunderbird 7 for the summer, but right now I bomb around the countryside in a battered Fiat Bravo.

Over the weeks I've sampled a lot of radio stations, but I quickly settled on Milan's Radio Number One as my favourite. Partly because the playlist mixes new tunes from Italy and elsewhere with decades of classics and a good slice of euro-cheese, partly because the reception is good from Verona down to Castagnaro, but mainly because of the show Gli Inaffidabili and one of its hosts: Grant Benson.

Grant Benson at Radio Number One

Gli Inaffidabili ('The Unreliables') is on from 9am till 1pm and reminds me most of Radio 1's morning show in the UK when I was stacking Wonderbras for Topshop in the early 90's. Grant may be from Watford, but he presents the show in Italian alongside long-time friend and sparring partner Luca Viscardi. It's just that his version of Italian is nothing like Luca's and ...a lot more like mine! Even his biog on the Radio Number One site reads "He says he's been here 30 years, but it sounds more like 30 days."

What's more, the most loveable thing about him is his presenting style. For here we have old-school, Smashy & Nicey don't-crash-the-vocal-mate presenting at its finest: Just in Italian.

Left: not Grant Benson
Right: not him either

Wikipedia reveals that before working in Italy he broadcast on pirate radio in the 80's; first in Israel and then on Radio Caroline. This might go some way towards explaining his on-air personality, with so many of the Hairy Cornflake-era and beyond starting out in the same way.

GB in his Radio Caroline days

I reckon it's because he's an expat. Not that I'm one to talk, because:
a) I'm one, too and
b) Not a very good example because I'm fresh off the boat
But I get the impression that he's taken what he was used to and kept it pretty much the same whilst joking along in his second language. The result is a charming, left-field time warp. The Captain America back story in a corduroy jacket.

Cord jacket to keep out the mountain air? Check.
Mic in top pocket? Check. Catering? Check.

Luca keeps him on the straight and narrow on their show, gently taking the piss whilst Grant goes off on long linguistic tangents trying to make off-colour remarks that will never be funny in Italian about some chart-topping starlet in hot pants. He keeps trying. They banter.

Then as the intro fades up, the mighty Grant Benson times his "...sul Radio Number One!" perfectly. He doesn't crash the vocal and you can hear him smile.