Pasticceria Scarpato - Nice cakes, shame about the website
I won’t say how I found out about the site of Italian biscuit and cake maker, Scarpato, but I decided to check it out. Well, I do like Italian food and one of the aims of this blog is to do a little promotion of all things Italian.
So, off I went to have a mosey around.
What I found was a very interesting selection of Italian cakes and pastries, plus a few other goodies, as you can see in this .pdf version of their 2007 Christmas catalogue. Check out the fun turkey and piggy cakes on pages 16 and 18. Very original. However, although these temptations may well tempt you, there is nowhere on Scarpato’s clean looking site that I could find that actually tells you where you can lay your hands on these scrummy looking delights. Neither within Italy or any other countries.
Not knowing where you can find these things is one thing which lets Scarpato’s otherwise nice little site down, the other thing is that the site is only half in English, and even though you may click on the little US/UK flag, this does not guarantee that everything you will see is in English. Maybe I could rustle up a little translation work from them!
What a great shame - lots of tempting treats all locked behind a virtual window. Another wee problem is that many of the cakes are shown on the main site in their decorative wrappings, but you cannot see what the actual cake looks like.
Yes, I know you could try to contact this company via email or phone, but it would save their and yours if they invested a little more effort in their website. I hope they do.
I might ring the Verona based Scarpato up and gently bend their ears over these little oversights.
PS Please let me know if you have heard of this company. I think I have seen their stuff on sale in the shops here, but I don’t think the Scarpato brand has been etched into my brain in the same way as Barilla, for example.
Walter Veltroni - again.
Rob, over at his interesting bi-lingual blog, Wind Rose Hotel, has written a couple of posts on Veltroni, in Italian.
In the first of his posts back in June last year, Rob observed that although Veltroni is no great orator, he does appear to be an effective communicator, and is possibly good enough to counter the effects of Italy’s arch-communicator and Veltroni’s main opponent, Mr Berlusconi. And, I think what impressed Rob most with regard to what Veltroni has been saying were the vestiges of genuine sincerity which the man managed to convey.
Rob’s second post is even more optimistic, and it is my impression that Rob believes that there may be a little more to Veltroni than meets the eye. Rob’s bases his opinion on an interview Veltroni gave to the Italian newspaper il Foglio. And I have to agree that what Veltroni said does appear to be rather open and insightful for an Italian politician, old guard or not.
I really do hope that Rob’s impressions are correct, and that Veltroni has not simply been demonstrating the capacity, which all the best politicians possess, to blind the populace with carefully crafted rhetoric. Such rhetoric often turns out to be rather hollow, as after the speaker has managed to worm him or herself into power, all the magnificent promises made and ideals espoused are quietly forgotten.
Still, hope springs eternal, and hope is one of the things that propels this blogger forward in life.
I’m starting to think that giving Veltroni a chance may not be such a bad thing after all. The only alternative is Mr B, and, let’s face it, he had his chance, but did not do much with it.
Out with the old and in with the new (ish).
(Yes, I’ve had a change of heart - and maybe, just maybe, regurgitating Veltroni may not turn out to be so bad after all. Heck, I hope so, for the sake of all the great Italians I know.)
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