Pizza is so important. I feel confident this is true for many people. Why it is such a foundational part of those who subscribe to this mindset?
I have vivid recall of eating pizza at John’s on Bleecker in NYC with my dad in the early 1970’s when he lived alone in a cold water flat a few doors down. I also remember eating full sized pies from Danny’s in Montclair, NJ after school merely as a teenage “snack”.
Of course at work in the motion picture business pizza lore abounds. Be it reveling in memories of your best pie or the I ignominious call outs on pizza being used as a second meal (when the producing team does not want to to have a thirty minute sit down meal break they often bring in take out food), exclaiming : “Rubber flats are here!” or “The wheels of death have arrived!”.
Of course we make pizza at home. Even own (with mixed feelings) an Ooni. We use Nancy Silverton’s Mozza Pizzeria dough recipe, (most of the time). It is all part of a never ending supply/demand love of this particular, usually circular food. Here is a very small gathering of pizza we have made over the years.
But the piece of pizza I remember best, is what has become known to me as the best pizza I have ever ate. (Certainly it can’t be the actual best, who knows what that even is!), but this particular slice resonates with me and reminds me of a time and a mindset. It was not until I recently found a selection of 35mm slides that had never been scanned (in my ongoing commitment to scan my life), low and behold, there it was, the slice of my life!
Like everything I write here, it tends to meander (a lot). My choice for best slice is also a signpost for a trip to Italy and the hay day of me meticulously creating my own maps, lists and guides while on the road, all channeled through my love of the ACCESS Travel guides.
The ACCESS guides were created by Richard Saul Wurman an architect, graphic designer, free thinker, who was also the creator of the then incipient TED conferences. In 2007 the TED conferences were just becoming “known”. These think tank events where for $7000 you could rub noses with the likes of Steve Jobs and Steven Hawking, get a then newly minted ipod in your gift basket before anyone in the world even knew what an ipod was and listen to lectures about the future of technology.
One of the ideas that Wurman had and was implemented in the Acces Guides a system of collating information called LATCH or “Five Hat Racks”, offering a framework for organizing information. LATCH, an acronym, stands for Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, and Hierarchy. These principles provide a finite set of ways to structure information, regardless of the subject matter, making it easier to understand and navigate.
The TED website now has many, many of these unbelievably brilliant presentations available to view, and all for FREE. Every time I take an opportunity to watch one I am blown away.
The “Access” guides were an inseparable part of all my travels until the advent of the iPhone. These travel guides did almost exactly what I thought a perfect travel book should do. They were clear, thoughful, fun and much better than the popular Lonely Planet, Let’s Go or Rough Guides.
A little poking around shows that I was not alone in my love of this series. I still have some of my Access guides, each one highly annotated with special moments and additional fold out maps that I put in becasue what was there was never enough for an obsessive traveler like me. Funny to see that there are still uses copies for sale Access Guides available on Amazon. In order to have full disclosure it is important to note that the Access Travel guides design prowess declined dramtically later in life as outlined by this paper The Access Guides and the Contradictions of Design
But of course they were still imperfect in my mind nad I had augemnt them. I would lay in my own maps over the book to to create more detail and a X-Y graphicalical coordination. It was all a bit insane, but it was just a way I loved to travel. It gave me a reason to explore each day, gather intel and ingest it into my expanding system.
For me the all-in-one-place, lots of cross referencing, visually exciting bound information had been nurtured through my love of the Filofax. The Filofax personal diary system was the iPhone of the pre-digital (2007) era. It had a ruler, reference tables, maps, maps, maps, notes, address book and so much more! I doted on mine many years, it was a representation of who I was, and of course Istill have my last one.
So, it was my Access Guides and highly customized Filofax I would set out into the world to discover, annotate, review, and preserve my travel adventures. And it was in Florence, Italy. I found the aforementioned pizza of my dreams.
Its still there, everything in Italy is still there.
Forno Sartoni
Google says: Down-to-earth bakeshop turning out traditional cookies, pastries & savory bites, such as pizza.
Via dei Cerchi, 34R, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy
but who knows if they are still serving the best pizza in the world? Were they ever? Memories are constantly evolving. Perhaps one day I will go back and find out.