Day 9 Feasting from an Italian supermarket

In Italy you don’t have to eat at a ristorante to enjoy good food. After leaving Bologna we enjoyed an uneventful train ride to Trento in the Italian Alps. Our local hotel is on the Piazza Duomo with a wonderful view of the Cathedral in the foreground and the snow capped Alps in the background. Walking to our hotel we noticed a little supermarket on the corner of our street, so decided to go back there to find some lunch.

Lunch was a feast. Four small bread rolls, left over from breakfast, were supplemented by fresh Italian cold meat. Richard with the aid of pen and paper asked the girl in the deli to slice 100 grams of prosciutto, which was a quarter of the price that we pay for it for at home. Fresh milk, fresh dates and a ripe tomato, and some nice cakes set us back €6 or a little under $8.

 

Of course lunch could only happen because of a couple of our traveling secrets. Firstly, although we try to travel light we do carry two plastic plates and a sharp knife as well as our trusty traveling kettle, so that we can make a cup of tea.  Weighing about 400 grams this is invaluable as cheap hotels and hostels in Europe rarely have tea or coffee making facilities.  Secondly we have learnt how to keep the milk cold without a fridge – we simply put the milk on the window ledge and as the day temperature was about 1 degree and the overnight temperature was -4 this is fine. Later in the day we even notice some locals who do this as well.

 

For dinner, we manage to eek out a meal from the supermarket, once again. We have a Cuppa-soup bought previously (again we need our travel kettle) along with a fresh bread roll made with olives, left over prosciutto from lunch, ricotta cake for dessert (also from the supermarket), a cup of tea and a small portion of dark Italian chocolate which only cost about €0.40. Dinner costs less than €5.

We are therefore able to feast for less than $15 dollars a day, for both of us, from an Italian supermarket. Richard’s only disappointment is that we do not have a fry pan so he could fry up the pre-cooked polenta that costs only €2 a kilo.