How Pizza Margharita Got It’s Name PLUS Enchanting Dolceacqua

DA BRIDGE SIGN 5 That’s the Castello at Dolceacqua, alongside Claude Monet’s wonderful portrayal of it.  It stands at the start of the stone pathway that crosses the bridge and leads into this ancient, wonderful beehive where, since the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries people have lived, shopped and tolerated the tourists.

DA STAIRS 1

It’s a quiet, special treasure, a bit mysterious, mixing the distant past with today, and far more fun and exciting for us because we hadn’t expected much at all from this trip designed to get us out of the shopping center that is San Remo.

GIUSIANA 1NOW – about that Pizza Margharita.  Our wonderful guide, Giusiana, as we passed a statue of “Regina Margharita” added yet another factor to her wonderful narrative.  WHAT is the reason the much beloved Pizza Margharita bears her name?  A baker created it in the colors of the Italian flag: tomato sauce for red, basil for green and mozzarella for white — and dedicated it to her in thanks for her just and creative role as the first woman ruler of Italy.

And there you have it – another brief, photo-heavy offering.  It’s late again – and it was a wonderful day.  I am reminded every day as we move from place to place of the value of travel – learning the narratives and dreams and history of other cultures and finding within them lessons for our own.

 

Published by

Cynthia Samuels

Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families. For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million. She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings. She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com. Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World. A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.