Charmed By the Cheese Man

I didn’t go to the market looking for cheese. In fact, I didn’t go looking for anything in particular, but what I found was Urbano and Urbano sold cheese.

I had always been too afraid to shop at the open air markets in Florence. It was the one place where I stuck out the most as a foreigner. I stumbled over the Italian plural forms of the vegetables and I was stupefied by the measurements. With no concept at all of grams or chilos, I reverted to asking for pieces. As if Italian isn’t already complicated enough, let’s add the metric system.

However, after the Florentine quarantine restrictions were loosened, I felt I needed to immerse myself even deeper in the culture and support the locals. And that meant shopping at the market.

As I wandered to the end of one of the alleys, I eyed the fresh fish, some of them eyeing me back. Feeling discouraged about how to ask for it or how much it would cost, I was just about to turn around when someone bellowed “buongiorno,” in my direction. Tracing the greeting back to its source, I came eye to eye with the cheese man.

He had short gray hair, friendly blue eyes, and a grin that peaked out from the top of his mask which he wore around his chin. He gave me what I presumed to be his daily dairy spiel – pointing out some of the fresh new cheeses in the lineup – burrata, mozzarella, stracchino- each of the words somehow mimicking the flavor.

Before I could protest he handed me a sliver of what he declared was “the best parmesan in the world” on one of his gloved hands. I didn’t want to buy cheese and I was even less keen on eating it at 10 in the morning, but I didn’t have the heart to refuse the world’s best curd. So I took a bite, awkwardly shifting my mask down and back up to do so.

“It’s so good!” I told him.

“So are you.”

It didn’t make sense in Italian nor would it have in English, but I understood that Urbano’s lines were, in a word, cheesy.

He spreaded a thick dollop of stracchino on a piece of bread while laying the compliments on even thicker, telling me to take my time eating so that we could chat longer.

“I have a weakness for beautiful girls,” he said in Italian. “It has been a problem since I was young.”

I ended up buying the parmesan along with some fresh made yogurt – a whole new ballgame when compared to the watery supermarket versions – and a hunk of schiacciata. 

Whether he had a weakness for beauty or a strength for marketing, who can really say? All I know is that I’ve got the best parmesan in the world in my refrigerator.

You never know what could happen when you step out of your comfort zone and into the market. You just might accidentally get on a first name basis with a vendor of one of your favorite food groups or come home with a delicious hunk of something you didn’t need but somehow wanted.