Our friends Owen and Brigitte were visiting from Germany. They'd been intrigued by my adventures in Moroccan cooking, and I had just added to my gear an authentic Moroccan terra cotta tagine schlepped all the way from Morocco by the mother of my friend Youssef! So that became the cornerstone of the dinner, but we wanted Brigitte to try some authentic New England treats as well, so we came up with this screwy menu:

• We opened with a Shlada 'arobiya - a traditional Moroccan salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, and fresh mint
• The main course was a Mqualli, an elaborate fish tagine made with halibut, vegetables, and preserved lemon. I added some clams just because.
• For an extra vegetable, I steamed up some fresh Fiddleheads because Brigitte had never tried them.
• Dessert was a Maple Cream Pie and espresso.

The Moroccan recipes came from the collection of excellent Moroccan recipes by Christine Benlafquih at The Spruce Eats. The links above go to the recipes as I prepared them for this dinner. 

I've been a member of the Old Colony Club of Plymouth for a long time. We have great formal parties there, but none as grand as the one that we put on for the 250th anniversary of the club's founding on 13 January 1769.

The gala is modeled on a seven-course formal dinner that  might have been served in 1919, but it's all served cocktail-party style, with no need for knives and big plates and tables. That's important because we had about 100 attendees! 

Before people arrived, we had set out:

• A magnificent cheese board in the Presidents Room. We had about two dozen excellent cheeses (over $500 worth!), mostly from The Cheese Shop in Concord, MA.
• A beautiful array of crudites and steamed vegetables with Le Grand Aioli and other dips that covered an 8-foot banquet table in the Red Room. 
• An embarrassingly opulent charcuterie display in the Snug, representing Italy, France, Poland, Russia, Spain, and the USA, among others.

This enabled early arrivals to explore and graze until the formal courses came up from the kitchen.

Here's what we had:

On this, the last full day of an ambitious, exhausting and exhilarating vacation, the carefully-wrought plan finally started to come undone. I'm happy that it held together as long as it had, but with less than 36 hours to go, there was unfinished business to attend to.

We all wanted to see St Peter's Basilica, I for my third time, Lorna for her second, and Melissa for her first. IMO it is simply the single most beautiful public work of many human hands in the world. 

Melissa also wanted to see the Sistine Chapel, and so Lorna wanted to see it again, with her. I had no trouble resisting that interminable shuffle and buffeting by pushy tour groups with experienced and ruthless leaders.   

We got a late start, so the intended early arrival at the Vatican was lost, and there's no point arriving in the thick of the morning tour-bus crowd, so we headed north instead, to catch the afternoon's planned sites and any other targets of opportunity that might present themselves, including a Guess store where one of them had her eye on something that I don't recall.

We started the day late, Thursday having been a long exhausting day after an unrestful night on the Palermo-Naples ferry. As we got all our cylinders firing, I sorted through my accumulated books and other souvenirs and despaired of carrying them home, so I boxed up a lot of things I no longer needed (including laundry!) to ship home.

By the time we got started, it was late morning and we all needed to shop for some mundane essentials and ship that box before turning our attention to explorations. Those chores done, we force-marched to the Jewish ghetto neighborhood to start the day's peregrinations in the Eternal City.

We had lunch at Piperno, a celebrated Jewish-Italian restaurant. Jewish-Italian food has developed for thousands of years, and Jewish food in Rome is nothing like Jewish food in New York City!

This was a busy day!

The overnight ferry from Palermo to Naples arrived on time, but it took so long to get off the boat (we had to wait for the cars to get off first) that we missed our scheduled, ticketed train. On a tip from a fellow traveller, I went to the Trenitalia ticket desk. The woman there explained that they have an agreement with GNV Ferries and she honored our tickets for a later train at no charge!

We took another sexy Frecciarossa (red arrow) high-speed train. What would have been a two-and-a-half hour drive from one city center to another and through the unpretty urban sprawl of both became a comfortable 70-minute ride, with a snack. In 2015 we had taken high-speed trains in Italy, Switzerland, and France, and the Italian train through the Alps from Milan to Zurich was the best of the three. And the Roma Termini train station is just a few blocks from our hotel! 

The very early morning ferry brought us back to Pozzallo at 08:15 so we had an early start for a busy day.

Much of southern Sicily has glorious oleander growing along the roadsides, and wild cactus. There are extensive groves of olive, pistachio, almond, and citrus trees, and of course the vineyards. This is also the home of Magna Graeca, as the later Romans referred to the "greater Greece" of antiquity, and its concentration of ancient Greek settlements and ruins.

There's also a lot of weedy overgrowth and occasional debris. At one point we passed a dead dog on the side of the road; southern Sicily is simply not as tourist-visited and thus not as nicely maintained as the rest of Italy that we had seen.

Except for the magnificent temples at Agrigento, today was really about getting from Malta to Naples. We had no foodie goodness and much of the scenery was like driving through eastern Colorado or New Mexico. If we had another day we'd have explored Marsala and the western point of Sicily, but we had consciously traded that for the quick and exciting side-trip to Malta.

The ferry brought us to Valletta Harbour at about 11:00pm. After disembarking, finding the car from the hotel, and experiencing the pastoral serenity (sarcasm) of driving in urban Malta, we arrived at the Grand Hotel Excelsior in Floriana around midnight. Nevertheless we woke up bright and early to tour Malta with Amy Pace, our hired guide for the day, starting on time at 08:30 AM. 

Over the winter, I had worked with Amy to set up an ambitious itinerary of Maltese sites: the Hypogeum (a neolithic necropolis)  and the neolithic temple at Haggar Qim, Lunch at La Reggia in the picturesque Marsaxlokk fishing village (pictured above), then the mostly intact medieval town of Mdina, and back to Valletta for the magnificent Co-Cathedral of St John and the National Archaeology Museum. Amy's services made our day the great success that it was and I recommend her highly to anyone planning a trip to Malta.

We started the day with a visit to the spectacular Mercato Ortygia, the large local farmers' and fishermans' market just a few blocks from where we stayed.

What an experience! We saw such fish! Here's a swordfish seller's counter. He'd cut the fish here, either to order or to restock the ice-covered counter in the front of the stall.

There were also two kinds of shrimp, several varieties of clams, octopus and squid, and many fin-fish including a very long silvery monster called a spatula. 

There were flies, of course, but the fish was clearly fresh and well-kept. There's plenty of competition at the market.  

And the produce was beautiful, with figs as big as my fist. Here is a basket of bright yellow-orange zucchini blossoms. We saw zucchini blossoms on many menus, sometimes stuffed and usually deep-fried as large fritters.

Considering how many zucchini we see in New England in the late summertime, I'm surprised that we so seldom see the blossoms.