Yesterday, as our Easter holiday, we took a day trip to Cuneo (or Côni as the locals here call it). The train journey took us through Nice, Monaco, Menton and Ventimiglia, where we changed to a tiny boggler with a mighty engine and powerful brakes, and headed up through the vertiginous mountain passes. Very soon there was snow all round. The track is amazing, with spiral tunnel ramps to gain altitude, so that when you finally emerge into sunlight you can see the rails you have just rolled along hundreds of metres below you.
Cuneo is an elegant, small but very monumental town, whose charms had been eloquently catalogued by that pioneering pair, O and S. They also recommended the charming and atmospheric Osteria della Chiocciola, which in addition to a frighteningly good wine selection for sale, does very tasty and reasonably priced meals upstairs. We had starters of spring vegetables and savoy cabbage wrapped in thin pastry, deep fried and served with what I guess was Fontina cheese sauce. Each mouthful was a papillary delight. This was followed by baked kid with Taggiasca olives. Real Easter fare! The desserts lived up to the previous courses, the BH opted for a zuccotto di pere (pear charlotte with hazelnut cream) and I had an apple, pinenut and raisin tart. The wines, by the (enormous) glass were Nebbiolo, very tanniny, and Grignolino, like a light burgundy.
The real reason why people flock to Cuneo is the pilgrimage to San Cioccolato. Cuneo must make the best chocolates in the world (though Brussels may argue the toss). The speciality is the cuneese, a chocolate filled with hazelnut ganache, flavoured traditionally with rum, but now also offered with a range of other, often alcoholic, flavours. When Ernest Hemingway stopped by at the Pasticceria Arione, I'm sure it was the rum content rather than the (elevated) chocolate content which caught his fancy. The shop's celebrated cuneesi leave your mouth in an agreeable state of anaesthesia for a second or two, followed by a flood of subtle aftertastes. Worth a pilgrimage, even on one's knees...
On the way back, we refreshed ourselves at the station refreshment hall, last refurbished around 1910, I would guess, and still the theatre of impossibly animated card games, for derisory stakes, by senior citizens. The clock had stopped, both literally and metaphorically. Good job, too, for on the way back we got stuck in Nice, courtesy of a wildcat SNCF strike.
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