The early sun is just touching the far shore of Lake Maggiore, lighting it up with a clear golden glow at odds with the chill breeze in the air. A cold front has blustered its way in over night, and though the sun is out it will be a leather jacket kind of day.

This last week has been amazing. Wish I’d been doing a better job of documenting, but it’s that old dilemma – live life or write about it? Usually I make way for both by carving the time out of sleep but I’ve been fighting a head cold this week and decided not to push it. I’m healthy now, but there’s a whole trip left  to blog and we leave Italy tomorrow (Saturday.)

One of the best parts of the trip was spending time with our friends R and E. I go way back with these guys. R and I were aiding and abetting each other in all kinds of teenage shenanigans back when Simon and Garfunkel were laying themselves down like a bridge over troubled water and Don McLean drove the Chevy to the levy. Way, way back. Good times.

Part of the trip included two much newer (and younger) friends who have a wonderful restaurant in Bloomington  (Restaurant Tallent.) I’ve written about Dave’s cooking before in this blog. He’s also one of the mainstays of Slow Food Bloomington.

The six of us decided to play hooky from the Salone and Terra Madre for a couple of days and take to the hills of Piemonte. Because we don’t speak the language and don’t know enough to fake it, I decided to find someone to show us around.  Before we left home I hit the internet and discovered
 La Dolce Vita Wine Tours.

I cannot say enough good things about this company, run by Italian Claudio Bisio and his American journalist wife Patricia Thomson. Claudio himself was our guide and he was a gem – knowledgeable and funny and smart, mixing availability and unobtrusiveness in exactly the right measure. He also did his homework to a degree that astonished me. When I overrode his restaurant recommendations to pick a place on my own he obligingly booked it for us, then ate there himself so he could be sure I wasn’t making a mistake. (I wasn’t, as it turns out, but I easily could have been judging by my picks in Torino.)

Claudio and his assistant Esther met us on an early Saturday in Asti where we had taken the train to avoid the unbelievable clog of morning traffic in Torino.  The  fog was just burning off the hills as we drove the short distance to Alba, where Claudio set us loose with a map.

No doubt about where we were headed. A market crowded the streets of the small town with stalls of boots and jeans, and vegetables, fish, and cheese, but our goal was more specialized – the Mercato di Tartufo Bianco, the famed white truffle market.

I had been there four years ago when it was a pretty basic affair. Big showy banner draped across the road, but the market itself was mostly a white tent with tables set up, displaying the stinky lumps and knobs that are the highly prized tartufo bianco. I guess food tourism has come light years since then. For one thing, we had to pay a one Euro admission fee to get in, and then we traversed a long corridor of cheese and salami vendors, offering us tastes of products that, no matter how wonderful (and some of them were), were not truffles. What was up with this?

But at the end of the corridor and around a sharp corner, there they were, vendor after vendor displaying their oh-so-precious wares. The smell hits you first, and then you see them, in all their warty glory. Not just truffles, but oils, butters, creams, preserved cheeses and fresh raviolis. Truffle heaven.

We decided we could not be there and not buy one, although at the time we had no clue what we would do with it, You can’t exactly eat a truffle out of hand like an apple, and even though we had an ace chef with us, he had no kitchen. Still the smell was enticing us to open our wallets. Each of the three couples ponied up 40 Euros and we went on the hunt.

Vendors lured us, holding out likely specimens for us to smell. We sniffed and looked and sniffed again, checking out each other’s faces. Did any of us have a clue what we were looking for? They all smelled great. Sniff, look, sniff. Somehow, we knew when we had found it.

Beauty in truffles is perhaps like the beauty of a homely child to its loving mother, but I don’t think so. Ours really was much more lovely than the rest. We forked over a handful of bills and it was ours.

What did we do with it? That’s a tale of its own. But in the meantime, there were wineries to visit and an amazing dinner to be eaten at the end of the day. More on that when we get to Amsterdam on Saturday, en route to home.