Eating, Eating and more Eating

I have never ate so much in my entire life than I just did a couple hours ago. I signed up for a cooking class and today was my first day. I am OBSESSED with Italian cooking. The woman that cooked for us is amazing. She was telling us about her family and how she hosts dinners at her house for 5 people or more every night! And Italian dinners are not just your main course and then you leave. It is usually a 4-5 course meal, with dessert and coffee at the end. She cooked the food and we took down notes as to how everything was prepared. She never used any measurements, ever. A pinch to her was a handful. A tablespoon to her was an entire ladle. But all the food was phenomenal. Here'e what we ate. I was considering writing out the recipe but I don't want any of you making it before me, ok here we go:

First:
We started out with some amazing wine calledValplicella which I guess is a wine that is specific to Verona. It was so delicious. I can officially call myself a wine drinker. We also had some cheese and bread.

Then:
We started to make the pizza dough completely from scratch. It was so cool to see how they actually make the dough. We also made the pasta sauce for our spaghetti and the sweet and sour dish called Agro Dolci which is peppers mixed with olive oil, onions, sunflower seeds, and raisins. It's known as a sweet & salty dish. I thought the ingredients were a little odd but it tasted GREAT. I'm about to burst...right now.

Still Going:
We made frittata which has eggs, onions, parsley, tomatoes, bread crumbs and cheese. It is basically an omelette but no omelette

Finally:
More wine, dessert, and oranges. I AM GOING TO BURST

Pizza, pasta, fritatta, peppers, dessert, wine. great night and great food. I'm moving here.

The past two days we went on day trips to Bolzano and Rovereto on Saturday and then Mantua on Sunday. Both places were beautiful cities. Bolzano was very close to the borders of Austria and Germany so both German and Italian were spoken. In Rovereto we toured a wine castle and got to purchase bottles of wine from the vineyard. One of the bottles of wine was 18 euro per bottle and it costs close to $200 in the US! I'm so bummed I didn't buy that one, but I did get one that you can only find in Rovereto, so I was happy.

Rovereto consisted of a lot of castles with AMAZING art work inside. We had a great tour guide who knew everything about both castles that we went to. There was a lot of Greek mythology in the different rooms we saw which I really enjoyed. One of the castles we went to had 500 different rooms! But we only saw about 20 of them. I was happy to leave tho because the castles had NO HEATING WHAT SO EVER so i was a popsicle.

Sunday night we got to go to this outlet mall because Saldi is going on all over Italy right now. It's this huge sale for the month of January and everything is 20% off and upwards. Really great deals, so I was so excited to go to this mall. We drive around in an obnoxiously large tour bus that we all call the space ship. It barely makes turns and I'm pretty sure our bus driver is insane and very horn happy. But the outlet mall was a complete bust and I didn't buy a thing! So pissed off, I need to find a good pair of boots and I won't stop until I find them.