All the pasta I ate in Palermo—and The Leopard

a travel interlude

If you follow me on Instagram, you know I just got back from Italy and that I’ve been in a mild shock since. Not because of a withdrawal from the country’s beauty (expected), or the food (also expected), but because of what happened after: I started cooking again, after a long rut, trying to recreate meals with varying degrees of success, less out of inspiration than hungry frustration.

Getting one thing out of the way: the famously grotesque American portion size is myth in nyc. Nowhere in Palermo (or Rome or Milan) did I feel shorted. Servings were mostly generous even at higher price points. Somewhere between a pasta al limone with pink peppercorns and my fifth free bowl of olives, I finally asked myself the question I’d been dodging: what am I still doing in new york?

• Movies

• Boob pastries and eggplant pasta

• Cooking with the Duchess

• The Leopard

• What I bought in Rome

SHORT TAKES

• ROTTING IN THE SUN (Sebastian Silva, 2023) is a nihilistic satire—like if Curb Your Enthusiasm had been directed by Buñuel and funded partially by OnlyFans. Silva, playing a version of himself, is a depressed filmmaker in Mexico City who stumbles into a reluctant friendship with Jordan Firstman (also playing himself), a hyper-online influencer with abs and ideas. Some of the sex is real, the nudity constant, the mood between farce and despair. One of the pleasing shocks of this messy, nervy story about art, ego, digital self-branding, ketamine, class tension is that it avoids being insufferable. Silva doesn’t mock his characters so much as let them implode.

• STRANGER BY THE LAKE (Alan Guirardie 2013) is a hushed erotic thriller set entirely at a nude beach in southern France, where men sunbathe, cruise, and occasionally drown. The water glints, then glooms. The trees don’t rustle; they lurk. Franck sees him drown a man, then decides to pursue him anyway—romantically, sexually, murder-adjacently. You get the sense that fear enhances the attraction instead of dulling it.

  • Stranger by the Lake is about the odd distance between attraction and logic, how easily the former can bulldoze the latter. Most of it takes place in long, languid shots: men wading, watching, vanishing into shrubs with other men. The sex scenes are staged like landscape photography—nothing leering or lewd. The real exposure is psychological. A few characters linger in the background, like Henri who sits apart from the others, pale and pensive, shaped like a man from another movie. The lake is his retreat. Or maybe his hiding place.

    Stream both films on MUBI and get a free month using mubi.com/elissa

• Monica Vitti is one of my favorite actresses of ALL TIME—and she’s the subject of a screening series at Film at Lincoln Center. It encompasses Antonioni’s modernity trilogy (including the movie where my profile pic comes from!!) and some world-premiere restorations. If you've never seen any of these, I recommend starting with La Notte, which has Jeanne Moreau, too.

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𝐉𝐎𝐔𝐑𝐍𝐄𝐘 𝐓𝐎 𝐈𝐓𝐀𝐋𝐘

cramming

thank you Derek

My literary Italian has remained firmly at elementary school standard despite years of study from sixth grade through college. (If anyone wants to practice conversationally let me know.) I discovered this while patiently and cheerfully reading through Roald Dahl’s The Witches. Too bad knowing all the words for the ways in which una strega can dispatch unsuspecting innocents does little for someone on vacation.

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fritti misti

Nope.

A litany of fried foods staring down the port. Spleen and ricotta sandwiches throughout the week. I missed a run in with

GUTS MAGAZINE

by a day. Oblong croquettes filled with potatoes or even just milk. Every arancine, even the ones that likely came frozen still surpass any made by hand from the pizzerias here. Season the rice for crissakes. Fried sardines out of a cone? Zach and I both came to the same conclusion: our ideal movie snack.

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boob pastries

One of Palermo’s well-known bakeries is hidden inside a convent. The Europeans all formed a neat but unnecessary line. We were handed deli counter tickets to order, and behind the glass partitions the sisters (maybe?) filled cannoli with swift, practiced hands.