Buongiorno from northern Italy. George Clooney owns a villa not far from here. However, I'm not visiting George Clooney.  I am in the nearby and equally beautiful Lake Garda and late last night, I found myself eating pasta with a man who was not my husband.

...

The stars were shining.  I had been out all day.  We had been eating, and drinking wine, for what seemed like hours.  Then the man turned to me and asked if I would like something special.  If you know me at all you know that I always want something special.  Although it was a kitchen that served dozens of diners each night, it was not very big.  The quarters were cramped.  The room was as hot as the chile peppers he sprinkled into hot oil.  There was another pot of salted water on the burner, boiling.  The man took two whole garlic cloves and threw them into the hot oil.

He took two white ceramic plates out and adorned each with a single leaf of basil and one half of a cherry tomato.  He put spaghetti into the pot, measuring each serving by what fit between his thumb and his index finger.  "Eight minutes," he told me.  I'm a patient woman, I told him. I can wait.

He chopped fresh parsley. Then after removing the garlic from the pot with a slotted spoon, he moved the hot oil to a medium heat burner and allowed the parsley to sizzle.  He strained the spaghetti and poured extra virgin olive oil straight on it.  Then he tossed the spaghetti into the hot oil with chile peppers and parsley. The parsley covered the spaghetti like bright green specks of jade.  He did not add salt or pepper.  He swirled the spaghetti onto the plate and it looked like an ice-cream cone turned upside down.  It was a small serving, a single scoop. Which is how I imagine chic Italian women can eat so much pasta and still fit into their Versace dresses.

The dish was scrumptious.  It was just spaghetti, but it was so much more.  The man, Chef Vito, looked pleased as I struggled to take polite bites, to catch the dripping olive oil that spilled from my fork on my napkin, before the oil could stain my dress. 

"It's called La Spaghettata," another man told me.  He was handsome and had been the object of much adoration from the women at our giant table. 

Handsome told me, "La Spaghettata is what you eat when you've been out all dancing out all night and you come home with your friends and its three a.m. and you're ravenous."

As I ate, I thought, La Spaghettata is what you eat when you've been in bed all day with a lover and you get out of bed, with the goal of eating just enough so that you can get right back into bed again.

"Is your pulse racing?" Handsome asked and I had to admit it was. "It's the chili and the garlic," another woman piped in. But I thought perhaps my heart was racing for another reason altogether.

All of a sudden, I was homesick.  I wanted to be back in my own kitchen, making this late night feast for the man I love.

You can make la spaghettata at home, but if you are in northern Italy and are longing for the real thing, you can find it -- and Chef Vito -- at Spia D'Italia.  At Spia D'Italia, they make their own wines, they have their own restaurant and in a few short months, they'll also have agriturismo -- rooms you can rent while enjoying the wine tastings and cooking demonstrations in the restaurant below.

Buon apetito!