A few of those foods had been placed in front of us on the counter, and their presence was both tempting and reassuring: a tennis-ball-size globe of fresh mozzarella, dressed in olive oil and sea salt and crimson sun-dried tomatoes, and four fat-stitched sashes of prosciutto.
"I closed my eyes," he wrote, "and the sun burned crimson through the lids.
The sky was crimson, as if the sun had been knifed and was bleeding out along the horizon.
As the sun sets crimson, Bottura talks gently about the Po and its people and how they have fished eels here for 500 years.
"The long hills slavered like Chinese dragons, crimson in the setting sun," he intoned, summoning all the passion of someone reciting the court circular rather than the climax to Cider with Rosie.
As she talked she stared in absent-minded fascination at the way the dying sun shone crimson through her husband's earlobe and made his dandruff into flakes of fire, but her thoughts were hurrying ahead to the evening".
His first major poetry collection, Where the Sidewalk Ends (1974), featured the popular title verse: There is a place where the sidewalk ends And before the street begins, And there the grass grows soft and white, And there the sun burns crimson bright, And there the moon-bird rests from his flight To cool in the peppermint wind.
"When the Indians came up here and saw the rocks and the faces in them, they thought this was the center of the world," said Mr. Birrittella one recent afternoon as the setting sun lent a crimson glare to the buttes framed in the meditation room's enormous windows.
Then, as the afternoon sun blazes, a crimson curtain gets jerked aside to reveal a plaque, and the country's first gender-inclusive public toilet is officially opened.
