Time to clean the system

If I learned one thing in Vienna, it was this: Piano does not qualify as cardio. At least, not if you're barely competent. Similarly, if you didn't know how to ride a bike, then going for a bike ride wouldn't be very good exercise at all. Add to that my daily habit of demolishing the complementary sweets tray at the Hotel Sacher, and a dietary regimen that included sausages, Wiener Schnitzel, and boiled beef (don't knock it till you try it), and it doesn't take a genius to see that my heart could use a bit of a break. Especially when you consider that my next stop is Florence.

With that in mind, I decided to pay a visit to an old friend. I met Tilde Vecchio last year as I made my way around the world. I spent two days at her Agriturismo about an hour and a half south of Naples, where I learned to make pasta. You could call it a life-changing visit. I haven't had store-bought pasta once in the year since. My wife complains every time I haul out my Imperia pasta-rolling machine, but then, an hour or so later, she inserts a forkful of pasta in her mouth and proclaims, "I take it back. It's worth it. It's totally worth it."  My wife doesn't know how good she has it. Or if she does, she's not letting on.

Tilde lives in Cilento, a green, hilly and sparsely populated patch of Italy that is known for two things. 1. It is beautiful. 2. The people here live a long time. The Cilentese, as they're known, live longer than anyone else on the planet, excluding a population of Japanese fishermen that last to similarly ripe old ages.

Mark Schatzker / Condé Nast Traveler Tilde pours olive oil over some marinated anchovies.

The secret, it would seem, is lots of olive oil, fresh fish and vegetables, an alimentary course of attack that cleanses the arteries. The secret, it would seem, is constant, non-stop cleansing because since arriving my mouth has been full more often than it has been empty. The theme of today was anchovies. Tilde bought a whole whack of them from a local fisherman. We ripped the heads off, pulled the guts  out, then tore out their spines. Some were marinated raw an served with grilled zucchini and egg plant. Others were baked in a dish with zucchini, potatoes and wild fennel sprouts.It seems to be working. My omega 3 levels are spiking, and good cholesterol is slowly winning the eternal battle against bad cholesterol. When I arrived, my heart was the size of a medicine ball — a half-deflated, lard-filled medicine ball. Now it's the size of a basketball. Before bed, I plan on shotgunning a pint of olive oil — Tilde has an olive grove out front, so there's plenty to go around. By tomorrow, I ought to be good as new.Name that tune
Regarding my piano lessons, it seems I suffered from a wee bit of overambition. My first thought was to learn Schubert's "Sonata in B-flat major", Schubert being my favorite composer, and his Sonata in B-flat major being my favorite composition. Albert Frantz talked me down off that ledge, bless him. But he couldn't talk me down off the Schubert ledge. So we settled on the third of his Moments Musicaux. A musical moment, I thought, ought to be something I can handle.

Mark Schatzker / Condé Nast Traveler

Well, I couldn't. It didn't take long for me to realize that a moment can seem like an eternity if you haven't played piano in ten years. I telescoped my ambition accordingly, then telescoped it two more times. Finally, in a piece that is ten lines long, I attempted to master one and half such lines. But even that proved too tall an order.

The thing is, I wanted to record something. So I'm pleased to report that technology has sort of made that possible. Here's what happened. In the Bosendorfer Studio, I positioned my Olympus LS-10 digital recorder — the best recording device I have ever used in my life — right in the mouth of a $290,000 concert grand. Albert Frantz played the entire piece. He played it cold, with hardly anything in the way of practice, and it sounded lovely. Next, I played my one-and-a-half-line moment-within-a-moment. Or, more precisely, I hacked my way through one or two bars at a time.

Albert took the sound files home and endured a marathon session of clipping and pasting and smoothing and altering and re-altering of tempi. In the end, he was able to insert my moment into the larger moment. And it doesn't sound nearly as bad as I would have imagined.

The question is, can you figure out which part is me and which part is Albert? To enter, just submit your answer via the Post a Comment link below. The first five individuals to come up with the right answer (in seconds) win.

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