Matt Goulding and Nathan Thornburgh

An 18-year-old girl poses for her diciottenne pictures in Catania’s Cathedral Square at night

La Passeggiata

It might as well be the afternoon of November 4th, 1928, the last time Mount Etna dug her molten claws into this town. At 4 pm in Catania, nothing moves. Not the shop owners, who drop the metal curtains and wander home to their wives. Not the granita kid, who no longer has any customers to buy his icy cups of pistachio and lemon; his tiny cart in Piazza Stesicoro must feel like a death foretold. Not the polizia, who have taken a break from smoking cigarettes and smirking on the sidewalk to retreat inside the station, where a radio and a fan awaits them. Somewhere on the sands of the city, pinched between the train tracks and the Ionian Sea, Italians from the mainland move once every half hour, to turn over.

By 7 pm, the heat has broken. A continuous mass of pedestrians shut down the streets snaking out from Piazza del Duomo. Couples hold hands and shake off their siestas; kids kick soccer balls around the slow march of their grandparents.

By 8 pm, the weddings are letting out. Newlyweds fight for photo opportunities in front of Catania’s regal duomo. A girl with a dozen roses and a sparkly crown stretches out across the steps at the base of the elephant statute, the ruffles of her blue dress filling out three flights of stairs, as two photographers try to capture this, her 18th birthday, for the ages.

By 9 pm, everyone has nibbled on something. Aperitivo hour may have started in the north, but it’s no less important down her on the island, especially after the afternoon exile of a Sicilian summer. A beer or a spritz will get you a round of stuzzichini, salty bar snacks to ward off the hunger—and perhaps encourage a second round. But no one orders a second round. Reservations must be honored or friends are waiting or Mom left the pasta sauce simmering on the stovetop. But by the time 10 pm strikes, it is clear that while the people of Catania may have ceded the day, they have taken back the night.

Selling a swordfish on the Piazza Carlo Alberto in Catania

Fishmonger Bazaar

The noise begins on the edge of the market: deep belly grunts and curses few but a handful of people on this planet can understand. The men are carrying five giant buckets of fish on top of a wooden pallet, and soon the entire market knows it. As they make their way through the snaking stalls, past the mountains of mussels and hills of purple urchins, through the hall of swordfish where 80-kilo carcasses are hacked into steaks with giant cleavers, past the boy with clams the size of thumbnails and the old man with live sea snails and bundles of dried oregano; as they make their way grunting and cursing through the market they slowly begin picking off customers from the other vendors, so that when they arrive at their final destination, a wet corner at the base of the stairs leading up to the duomo, 20 men are waiting for their catch. Sicilian marketing.

Despite the grunting and cursing and wild gesticulating, there appears to be some sort of order, as one by one, old men walk away with plastic bags filled with sardines. (You won’t find women in Catania’s central fish market, not selling and not even buying; like futbol and cat-calling, the buying and selling of fish is a men’s sport here.) A team of two go about “cleaning” the tiny fish, which in this case means snapping off their heads and yanking out their spines in a single motion. They do this, of course, with cigarettes dangling from their lips, because the market’s only rule is that all fishmongers must smoke as they handle their catch. By the time they finish off the first few kilos, their hands are stained a dozen shades of red. The smell of fish oil will never leave them.

The Napolitana, left making her case

The Concert

The Napolitana is arguing passionately about whether Napolitanos or Sicilians are the most passionate people in all of Italy. It’s a fact-free argument, so it is hard to pick a winner. But it does become clear, after the squall of gesturing that Italians are known for has blown over, that the Napolitana is definitely the more passionate about the topic of being passionate, so you suppose that counts as winning.

But even looking for a winner is an impossibly American way of envisioning what is happening at our table at an outdoor restaurant in Catania old town. Because this argument, like the thousands of other heated exchanges that fill the bars and bistros of this town, is not about any result in particular. It is about the pure elan of opinion.

You try to spark some sort of similar argument—Sabrina says she won’t eat the tomatoes without oil, so you try to argue back that only a crazy person, or someone from Asti like her, would think of such a thing: drowning a perfect, innocent red tomato in oil. But your argument lacks flair, conviction, volume, pacing: everything that makes an Italian discussion late into the night a concert as much as a disagreement.

You accept this, happy to be defeated, pour a bit of oil on your tomatoes, and resume watching the show.

A grill filled with horse burgers, colt steaks and skewered horse rolls

The Culture

His name is not remembered here—was it Pietro?—but he is thought of fondly. Because a waiter like that, who not only serves, but defends, is rare indeed.

The long, scythe-shaped road called Via del Plebiscito leads up the hill from the church of the Cappuchini and, there, on a curve in its middle, is a two-block open-air street food market that at one in the morning on a Saturday night is full of people who have been drinking all night, including a few who drive by slowly singing out of the windows of Fiats or those who come to eat loudly, with the urgency of drunks.

But those are not the people you need to worry about. Instead, you should be concerned that table of older men, staring dourly at the carnival, receiving the occasional visitor and drinking only espresso. That’s because, when you arrived with a camera and two foreigners and one Sicilian, someone came hustling out from the kitchen of this place and said, there are people here who don’t want their picture taken. A good deal of negotiating took place, which left your one Sicilian a little flustered—“this is what I don’t like about Sicily. I won’t say the word, but you know what I’m talking about. There is no law here, no law.”

The word, of course, is mafia, still only spoken when one can’t be overheard here.

Why negotiate to stay at a street stand with plastic chairs and plastic tablecloth and sit next to glum Mafiosi who do not want you there? Because the stand is packed, the grill is firing, and the meat is ready. You are going to eat the one thing that Via del Plebiscito is famous for: horse meat.

But first, the waiter comes and winks at you conspiratorially. They are all crazy, the wink says, I am happy to have you here.

Before long, all ominous thoughts pass as he brings plate after plate from the grill: long spring onions wrapped in pancetta, something that rather crudely would be called horse burger, and the best of the lot, colt steak, tender and marinated like strip steak.

Italians eat more horse—a kilo a year per person—than anyone in Europe, anyone outside of the horse tribes of the Steppe. Around 213,000 horses are killed for meat, with many more brought in from Eastern Europe. Depending on where you live, the meat is made into pastissada stew, or bresaola or just grilled late at night in Catania.

There have been movements, including as recent as two years ago, to outlaw the sale of horse meat in Italy, but the bill died in parliament. Italians would not have stood for it.

We can’t pretend to know the ethics of all this: is a cow not as deserving of love and compassion as a horse? But the culture is the culture, and the food was good, and the night passed uneventfully, the old men still as statues, and Pietro, or Gianni, or whatever the waiter’s name was, wishing you a good night as you head back down the hill.

Day One: Beach resort Cefalú

Day Two: the Aeolian Island of Filicudi

Day Three: Zucco Grande, emigre ghost town

Day Four: Catania, east coast city

The view from an abandoned building in Zucco Grande, with Salina Island in the distance

Zucco Grande

The trail, by its nature, promises what lies at the end: abandonment. It is a desolate thing that winds halfway down the high hill past cacti, a small vineyard wilting in the sun, and a stone barn where strings of garlic and onion hang to dry. And then it cuts diagonal around the hillside where there is nothing anymore, just fat lizards and loose rock a few hundred meters above the sea below.

Then, another turn, and on a far slope is the crumbled village of Zucco Grande, a place left empty by the waves of emigration from this island that started more than a hundred years ago. Now it is empty and ruined, with just a self-appointed caretaker-of-the-path who lives there, and maybe a Swiss hermit who is rumored to be living in cave on the hillside above.

Zucco Grande must have never been an easy place to live. It sits above a deep ravine on the north side on the island, approachable only by foot or donkey. But it was full a little more than a hundred years ago. The islanders tell differing numbers for the population for the entire island of Filicudi: at its height, before the crises of the late 19th century and before the wars, Filicudi is said to have been home to three thousand people. Now, the number is closer to 300, and many of those are newcomers.

Filicudari, in the old days, was home to fine stonemasons, a result of an exquisitely steep mountain-island that needed stone paths and stone-lined terraces so that the islanders could grow their grapes and capers and cucumbers to the very peak. But Zucco Grande is a place of ruin for masons, where the strong stone houses they built a hundred years ago now sit crumbled on top of each other.

Standing on a rusted balcony, or looking at the footprint of what used to be a wine cellar, it is hard not to feel, in a spiritual way, the isolation of this place. This is the home of the term, after all: the Italian word for island is isola.

But even on an isola, there is a boat that comes. It’s not like the old steamer that would have taken the people of Zucco Grande away from here forever. It’s a muscular ferryboat with the Siremar line, and it is leaving in an two hours, so there’s nothing left to do but have one more look around and then head back up the half-abandoned trail.

“Assassino”, at left, with the days swordfish catch on board the Orchidea

Swordfish Assassin

It’s known on the island simply as “Sword”, because to qualify it as a fish is to waste breath and to diminish the martial power of this creature, a fighting beast made of pure muscle with almost full dominion over the sea.

The boy does not look a match for the Sword. He is bony-chested with just a wisp of beard. He smokes cigarettes because the fat-bellied warriors who also man the Orchidea—his father’s boat—are smokers. But smoking does not make him a man, just a boy with a cough.

Yet this sparrow of a fisherman is opening the cold storage locker on the boat and smiling at the massive head inside, severed just below the gills, sword spiking nearly to the roof of the locker. It’s as thick around as a motorcycle wheel. The caudal fin—the crescent-shaped tail as big as a scythe—has also been cut off and is lying on the deck behind the fish scale. The Orchidea brought this fish to heel, maybe fifty kilos of animal in all, and they slaughtered him for sale that day.

In the back of the boat, a shirtless man with stubble and wan smile is cutting steaks off this swordfish with a knife the size of a machete, weighing the meat for the handful of customers who line up. Twenty-five euros a kilo. Not cheap this beast.

This was not a successful day at sea—often the Orchidea will bring in two, three, even four swords this size. But the mood at the dock is good. They have come just after noon, and they will stay on the boat, talking, gutting, cleaning, smoking until the sun has dipped under the island’s big mountain.

The boy would like copies of these pictures taken of him on the Orchidea. Perhaps he could get them by email? The men, one washing the deck, the other sitting in a chair by the gunwale, laugh and wave a hand. “Email, ha,” they say, as if the boy had suggested painting his toenails. But the boy goes back to the pilothouse for a pen and returns with a torn sheet of paper and his email address written on it. The fattest of the fishermen reads it as the boy passes by: the email handle he has chosen with an Italian ISP is assassinblack.

“Assassino!” the cry goes out. “Assassino!” All the men are laughing now. One claps him on the shoulder, and the boy smiles, looks downs and puts another cigarette to his lips.

He does not seem very bothered by this. Maybe he knows what the others do not, that they are all assassins. They are all killers of swords, even the boy.

Stefano Zagami fled the starving island of Filicudi for Sydney at the age of 24. He returned 40 years later

The Aussie-Filicudians

Stefano Zagami is 88, but looks like he might have another 50 years in him. He makes his own wine, eats 10 cucumbers a day and keeps three freezers stocked with all varieties of island flora and fauna: prickly pear (one of the few gifts Spanish invaders left in their wake), runner beans, and animals that try to eat his prickly pears and runner beans. One of the freezers contains a stack of ten rabbits and a whole fish frozen into a swooping C, like the most unforgiving case of rigor mortis imaginable.

Stefano’s freezer fixation, especially on an island capable of producing heart-breaking fruits and vegetables throughout the winter months, is a holdover from harder times. Filicudi was a leftist island during World War II, which apparently evoked the ire of Mussolini’s thugs, who would raid the houses of Filicudari. “Every piece of food was taken by the carabinieri,” Stefano says. “We had to hide the little food we could hold on to.”

Hunger eventually forced most residents off the island, much as it did across Sicily. “After the war, everyone went all around the world. A thousand people lived her before the wars. After, there were only 24.”

Whereas most Sicilians ended up in America, the Filicudari moved en masse to Australia. In Sydney, Stefano found a world far removed from the terraces of capers and grapes he used to tend back home. “It’s not what job I worked, it’s what job didn’t I work. I was a candy man, a cook, everything.”

When he returned in 1992, he came back to the house he had abandoned 42 years earlier, perched high above the Mediterranean in Valdichiesa, 100 meters from one of Filicudi’s two mountaintop churches. The house was in disrepair, so Stefano went to work restoring it to its former glory and beyond. Today, its white plaster frame and sweeping views of the sea recall the dramatic residences of Santorini.

His son, Deodato, still lives in Sydney, with his Ecuadorian wife Maria. His daughter Dina ended up in Argentina, where she makes traditional Filucudari fare to remind her family of where they come from; on Sunday’s, her kitchen is filled with the smells of slow-cooked pig’s foot.

Every July, Deodato and Dina meet in Rome, where they make the long trip down to the island to be with their father. They spend most of that month on the patio, under the snaking grape wines that protect the property from the brutal Sicilian sun. There they will all sit until late in the evening, eating Stefano’s pears, drinking Stefano’s wine, and imagining what it would have been like to have never left Filicudi.

After the second shift at La Sirena restaurant, Filicudi

Superfriends

There are eight of them: They come from Palermo and Rome and as far off as Portugal to spend their summer on an island with just 300 inhabitants. They live in a town with just one bar, largely cut off from the rest of the world. They drink together, eat together, sleep together. Their charge for the four months of the Filicudi tourism season: Run every aspect of La Sirena, the best of the island’s three restaurants.

La Sirena wears a red Michelin sticker on its kitchen door, making it one of the most remote outposts to receive recognition from the prickly team of French inspectors. The dining room has no walls or windows, just a salty Mediterranean breeze and views of the horizon. The menu is a simple but powerful display of the bounty of the Sicilian waters: plates of crudi, raw fish served with just olive oil and salt; spectacularly chewy spaghetti slicked with peppery oil and generous amounts of shaved bottarga, the salty, earthy crystals of dried roe; thick steaks of tuna wrapped in slices of cured pork fat that forms a crunchy skin around the fish as it cooks on the grill. And the service? Let’s just say that the group of eight form a team that would challenge the staunchest stereotypes about the indifference of Italian service.

But it’s not just a nighttime fine-dining destination. During the day, the group of friends stay busy steaming milk for cappuccinos and turning Campari and prosecco into afternoon apperitivos. Wild packs of shirtless children with crops of blonde hair play games between the legs of the tables. At one of those tables, an older Italian man, sunglassed and shirtless, holds a business meeting. At another, a group of English plot their return to La Sirena: “Either we come for two weeks with nothing but bathing suits, or we come for a month and bring our computers.” That might not get them far, though, since the island doesn’t appear to have Internet.

And always there are the superfriends. They open the restaurant shortly after sunrise and close it well after midnight. They buy boat tickets for guests and tell tales of the island’s most enigmatic characters: “He is a hermit who knows everything about Filicudi, but he won’t talk to you because he is actually a bit crazy.”

The owner is back in Tuscany somewhere, tending to his olive orchards; he can sleep well at night know La Sirena is in good hands. For some of them, it’s the greatest job on earth—summer camp with a salary and a view of the sea. Others sound a more cautious note. “Right now it’s amazing. We’ll see if we’re still talking at the end of the summer.”

Beachgoers throng Cefalú. Soon they will demand pizza

Scene 1: Beach Buffet

It bodes well for your grumbling stomach: a pizzeria with a shady terrace, a sprawling antipasti bar, a generous view of the bustling beach scene below.

But as you work your way down the coast, inspecting the other options—you know, because it’s nice to have options when you’re this hungry—the same scene unfolds from one restaurant to the next: pizzeria, antipasti bar, dishes in six languages, as if local restaurateurs got a wholesale break on German menus and checkered tablecloths.

You look closer, try to get a sense of what’s coming out of the kitchen. These are not the wood-perfumed, pockmarked pies of your Italian fantasies; the crust is flabby, the cheese more yellow than white, the tomatoes have nothing to do with the brilliant red ones grown just minutes inland. The sea of flesh below is more thoroughly baked than what is coming out of these ovens, but still, your hunger rages on.

You want cooks cooking what they want to eat, not what they think you want to eat. But in towns like Cefalú, where people have traveled long distances to turn their skin all shades of pink and orange and mahogany, you’ll have to move well beyond the Mediterranean to find real food. And that’s not easy with that blue-green water beckoning.

Down the street someone is selling melons the size of basketballs; they smell like orchids. Next door you find a store selling hard Sicilian cheeses and cold bottles of wine. Buy it all, plus a few of those Baci, too, and take it down to the beach to bathe in the madness of an Italian summer. It’s the best table in town.

Tourists on the Via Veterani

Scene 2: The German Connection

You might have heard a little something about a north-south divide in Europe. Like many family spats, it’s about money. The southerners, of which the Sicilians are the most southerly, tend to see the Germans in particular as some sort of dread mix of Visigoth and banker, looking to take over Italy once again, this time with austerity measures and central bank stress tests. The northerners, on the other hand, see the southerners, not without reason, as being wasteful borrowers who seem to lack the slightest idea of where money comes from and how it should be spent.

All the more impressive, then, to see the relatively harmonious coluxuriation of north and south on the beaches of Cefalú. You see them strolling the same streets at night, same ice cream in hand, part of the same clusterfuggio di turisti. Sure, one’s a little more sun-burnt, one’s a little less. But they are all vacationers, men united by a single mission to wear the smallest possible speedo for the longest possible time on the beach.

And yet, you sense something a little unfair about this dynamic. You know that the Germans still hold the cards. They have the exports, they have the money, and they have the deep-seated belief that it’s not just what the southerners do, but it’s who they are, that is killing the European Union. So why, then, are the Germans (and the Dutch and the Swiss, all in large quantity) even here in Sicily? If they come and enjoy the slowness of the town and the air here, use Sicily as a therapy session for all their northern anxieties, do they then go back home and return to mocking the south and its poor work ethic? You hope, as you watch these groups mill about in the cathedral square, that along with their sunburns, the Germans will bring a little perspective back to Berlin with them.

Son and mother, doing the impossible in the kitchen of La Brace

Scene 3: The Mother-Son Shootout

“Tavola nove!” The call comes out from the kitchen. An older woman, maybe 65, is by herself back there and a round of pasta is ready. In Italy, pasta waits for no one.

“Tavola nove!” The second time it rises up from her gut—more of a warning than announcement.

Finally, she puts down her knife and grabs the plates of tagliatelle with porcini and the spaghetti with gorgonzola and walks them out to table nine herself.

On the way back to the kitchen of this restaurant, La Brace in the old town of Cefalú, she hisses at the only waiter, who also happens to be her son. He bites back and she flips him the back of her hand as she gets back to chopping zucchini.

You start to do the math. Twenty-seven diners, three plates a piece, one cook, one server: we’re fucked. It’s almost 11pm, the restaurant should have been empty, you think, but this is southern Italy and people have been on the beach until the Mediterranean swallowed the sun, so when you walk in, you see a room full of bronzed faces with wild looks in their eyes.

You sense the impending doom, as if the bile exchanged between mother and son will seep into the food and the wine and leave you with a viscous hangover. You think about slipping out undetected, but just then the son comes and you rattle of an order.

You pour yourself some wine—about a euro a glass, here in one of Sicily’s most expensive towns—and by the time the food starts to arrive 30 minutes later, you’ve remembered exactly where you are and it all starts to make sense. The pasta tastes as it does only in this country, with the sauce clinging so tight to the rigatoni that it looks like it was painted on the noodle. Rabbit slides off the bone and into a puddle or balsamic vinegar and chestnuts.

When you finally get the bill, well past midnight, after an espresso, a tiramisu and a cigarette, the son looks like he survived a fierce summer storm.

“When we work here, we’re not mother and son,” he says. But why not hire someone else to help out? “We prefer it this way.”

A wedding on the jetty

Scene 4: The Jetty Wedding

The jetty reaches out like a stone claw into the Mediterranean. You see the stone and respect it immediately: it’s part rampart, which is fitting for a town whose centerpiece cathedral is built with heavy turrets connected by covered walkways so that archers, not priests, can move safely between the two.

The water, however, you fall in love with up close. Peer over the jetty, and three feet below you is twenty more feet of water that is now impossibly blue and clear to the bottom. The kids and adults of the town have been flinging themselves off this jetty from sunup to sundown, disappearing under the water with a blue-white splash, and you want to join.

So you take off your shirt, place your sandals to the side, and jump. The first impressions upon contact: salt and cool. You are used to swimming in oceans, not a sea like the Mediterranean, and it’s shocking how salty the waters are. After that first jump, your sinuses start to clear: the Mediterranean is a giant neti pot. But then the cool hits you, and it is more than welcome, because you have been baking like baccalao in the Cefalú sun. The best part is how the water on the surface is a bit cooler than the water below, so each armstroke as you swim back to the pier is a new kind of refreshing. Between the salt that buoys your body and the coolness that pushes you forward, it’s the easiest twenty meter swim you’ve ever had.

Towel off a bit and then you notice a wedding couple that had been taking pictures on the rampart has descended to the jetty. They are a striking couple, not just young and beautiful—though they are that—but also serious. Trailed by two photographers and a videographer, they walk stone-faced toward a waiting boat. You will, because you have only ever known Sicily from the movies, be instantly reminded of Simonetta Stefanelli, who played the stoic bride Apollonia, unsmiling as she married Michael Corleone.

They descend into the boat. The groom begins talking urgently into a cell phone. They both look anxious, but that is also part of being young, and of getting married. But you don’t have time to think about this too much: with their boat now out of the way, you measure the jetty, get a running start, and fling yourself over once again.

Check out more of Roads and Kingdoms’ Postcards from Sicily:

Swordfish, sunsets and an abandoned village on the Aeolian Islands

Grilled horse and the passeggiata in Catania

Cliff diving and agriturismo in Siracusa

Pasta le sarde and an al fresco feast in Ribera

1. Denmark is expensive. Japan expensive. Here’s what $5 will buy you: a cup of coffee, a soft drink at a restaurant, a single metro ride, a postcard, half of an open-faced sandwich, two beers at a 7-11, a few minutes on a public phone. Just thought we’d let you know that up front to save you the sticker shock we felt nearly everywhere we went.

2. AirBnB is your best friend in Copenhagen. Spartan hotel rooms come with Manhattan price tags and preciously little personality. Using the online private booking system, we scored our first place, a small apartment near Christiania, for $120 a night. Our second place was a boat on the canals of Christianshavn. Spending the late evenings on the back of the boat drinking beers and watching the sun turn the water a thousand shades of orange was one of the great pleasures of our week in the Kingdom of Denmark. It cost us $65 a night—the price of a cheap bottle of wine in a restaurant. The cash we saved on hotel rooms paid for the boozy 26-course, four-hour Noma feast.

3. Everybody takes plastic, but nobody takes credit cards. If your card doesn’t have a pin, it won’t swipe in most Denmark establishments. Pack your debit card or keep your wallet thick with kroner.

4. You won’t get into Noma. Statistically speaking, your chances of getting into “the world’s best restaurant” are about 1 in 200. Not lottery long shot, but pretty damn close. Don’t fret. The explosion of top-tier Nordic restaurants in the wake of Noma’s ascendance means that there are at least a dozen exceptional places in Copenhagen alone that will give you some insight into why this city has suddenly become the world’s hottest dining destination. The popular bets are Radio and Relae, both run by heavyweights from the Noma system, both offering vegetable-heavy menus deeply dedicated to seasonality for about a quarter of the price of admission at Noma. For our kroner, though, AOC is one of the most exciting restaurants in the country. Chef Ronny Emborg, an alum of Iberian titans elBulli and Mugaritz, is mixing Nordic ingredients with Spanish avant-garde technique to create dishes like frozen halibut curls with lump roe, egg cream and fresh horseradish. It’s the kind of dish that makes you forget about all other restaurants (even Noma)—at least for a little while.

5. Hot dogs are king. Seriously, in Danish they’re called sausage wagons, which was reason enough to make encased meat the first meal we ate after landing in Denmark. But if you need more motivation, how about this: The quality of the meat is exceptional, the snap of the griddled dog is almost audible as you bite down, and the condiments—crispy fried onions, bracing slices of pickle, creamy remoulade—put New York street vendors to shame. Our overarching road food philosophy can best be summed up as follows: eat high and low. Tasting menus and street dogs.

6. Nope, weed isn’t actually legal in Christiania. The post-hippie enclave in central Copenhagen seems to exist outside of Danish law, but it doesn’t—not on paper anyhow. “I think the general idea is that it’s legal inside Christiania,” says one resident. “It’s not. It’s just that police don’t come that often here.” The police, by the way, don’t come in because the biker gangs who control drugs in Christiania tend to put up a big fight, as do the independent-minded, rock-wielding residents. All of which is to say, enjoy yourself in Christiania proper, but don’t be a dumbass and take the joint outside the gates.

7. No pictures on Pusher Street. Market-photography is a time-honored genre among travelers: just search Flickr for la Boqueria, Pike Place, or Spice Market Istanbul for a quick overdose on market photography. Nathan is no less a sucker for the form, having succumbed to the temptation of massive beef hearts on hooks and the general slaughter of Sukhumi’s main market. But on Pusher Street, the open-market weed-and-hash bazaar in Christiania, even he kept his camera holstered. That’s because of the huge signs everywhere saying No Photography and the legions of lanky, dodgy runners and thuggish bodyguards to help enforce the rule. The great irony, of course, is that Danish police are surveilling the hell out of Pusher Street with all the tools available to the modern panopticon state. Good luck getting the police to stop taking market pictures, gents.

8. Get out of Copenhagen. Damn fine city, but much of the real Denmark lies just on the other side of the island of Fyn. Go to Jutland, particularly the western stretch that locals call the Rotten Banana (self-deprecation is a refined art in Denmark). Nothing rotten about it: just a captivating landscape of heaths, fjords and peat bogs. Better yet, bring bicycles and ride the rolling hills. And the end of your trek, take the ferry from Ebeltoft back east, not just because it’s a very fast boat, but because Ebeltoft is also home to what we believe might be the world’s only hot dog stand that doubles as a Thai massage parlor.

9. Bring your battleaxe. Live Action Role Playing (LARPing) is serious stuff across the Kingdom. Think of a Star Trek convention crossed with the Battle of Helm’s Deep and you can begin to imagine the insanity of LARPing. Come weekend, Danes take to countryside in full costume to play out incredibly complex scenarios ranging from multi-layered World War II reenactments to prisoner-guard phantasmagoria that are more psychological experiment than lighthearted pastime. We got in on the action one morning with a few hundred Danish school children, Nathan as an evil solider destined for death and Matt as a forest-dwelling monster with a 12-foot battle axe and a tear-inducing belly growl. Check in with the Rollespils Fabrikken to see if any LARPing is going down during your time in Denmark.

10. The Danes consume more pork than anyone in the world. The average citizen packs away 142 pounds of pig a year, outpacing freakish porcine addicts like the Spaniards by a full 20 pounds. (They also drink more than Americans and live longer, too. Why aren’t you there right now?!?!) While there are many delicious ways to get a pork fix in this country (roast pork with cracklings being perhaps the greatest), we suggest you pay special attention to the many delicious things Danes don’t eat, namely the world-class oysters, razor clams and blue mussels from the Limfjord in the north. That’s right, in a country surrounded by water the greatest treasures of the sea are largely ignored in favor of pork. But places like Fiskebaren in Copenhagen are doing their best to change that, offering the best of the aquatic bounty with light touches (lumpfish roe with smoked cheese, mussels steamed in apple cider)—a strong reminder that there is life beyond bacon.

11. Drink good beer. Carlsberg is the Danish powerhouse, but it’s only a small step above Budweiser on the suds scale. On the flip side, tiny Mikkeller is one of the world’s most innovative breweries, known for putting out the kinds of potions beergeeks take to forums to discuss ad nauseam. Stop by their bar in central Copenhagen and taste what happens when someone (in this case, former physics teacher Mikkel Borg Bjergsø) brings the imagination of a modernist chef and the precision of a scientist to the brewing process. Their bottle list is 10 pages long and includes $700 bottle of Mikkeller 2007 Barrell Aged Imperial Stout, but we were happy enough with $5 12-ounce pours of Super Galena, a bright single hop with a crisp, bitter bite, or Texas Ranger, a dark, brooding chili porter that scratches lightly at your throat on the way down. (While you’re there, be sure to order a pint of Cantillon Kriek if they have it on tap. One of the finest achievements of Old World brewing, a bottle of this at a bar in the States and most parts of Europe will set you back $25. At $5 a pour, it represents one of the few genuine bargains in the entire country.)

12. When you’re not eating street dogs, Michelin-starred feasts, raw oysters, and Danish home cooking, be sure to squeeze in some smørrebrød. The national sandwich of choice is built on a single slice of dark buttered rye, a dense and satisfying launch pad for tiers of elaborate toppings: beef tartare, cut with red onions and capers, crowned with a raw egg yolk; thick slabs of pate covered with sautéed mushrooms, smoky bacon and a wobbly rectangle of jellified gravy; or, the granddaddy of them all, the stjerneskud, the “shooting star” of the smørrebrød discipline that pairs half of the ocean’s creatures—crispy fried white fish, ruby curls of smoked salmon, sweet baby shrimp, salty orbs of caviar—with cucumber and dill and wedges of hard-boiled egg. It’s a death-star shot at hunger and the most potent example of the smørrebrøod ad campaign slogan we created on the road: half the bread, twice the sandwich.

13. Akvavit, Denmark’s national spirit, may be falling out of favor with young Danes, who’d rather pound Red Bull vodkas than drink the stuff their parents keep in the liquor cabinet, but that just means there’s more for you. Traditionally it’s sipped during lunch, paired like wine with a variety of dishes heavy on salt and brine and spice which the akvavit—heavily charged with caraway and dill—plays off perfectly. Best to try it in Aalborg, where Danish akvavit was born. At Restaurant Elbjørn, a converted steamboat floating not more than a few hundred meters from the Aalborg Akvavit factory, you can taste nearly a dozen types as you work your way through lunch. A pickled herring smørrebrød and a few ounces of Danish firewater around noon will set you free.

14. Take to two wheels. Estimates have it that one third of Copenhagen commutes on bike, and if you’re out on the street at 8am, dodging thick packs of pedals and spokes, it’s easy to believe. Join the urban fray and explore the capital on wheels, or better yet, grab a bike and get out of town. Denmark is one of the world’s flattest countries and everywhere you turn will remind you of the Shire. Try the Lammefjord area just north of Copenhagen, where the roads are gentle and meandering, the fields are painted yellow with rapeseed flowers, and the towns are studded with country cooking taverns perfect for fueling the adventure. If you ate and drank as much as we did, you’re going to need the exercise.

15. Get invited to dinner. It’s a smart strategy no matter where you find yourself in the world, but it’s particularly genius in Denmark, where many of the deeply satisfying comfort dishes of the country are found exclusively on the family dining room table. We learned this lesson the best possible way, from Solveig Brask Christensen, mother to Kristian (aka the Ambassador of Pleasure), a guy whose generosity and passion for Denmark showed us more about that country than we could have ever discovered on our own. Chief among those discoveries was his mom’s exceptional cooking: a simple salad of sweet shrimp, mayonnaise and lemon, creamy boiled potatoes, and, glory of all glories, a perfectly roasted brisket, rosy red, skirted with fat, and redolent of garlic and a mother’s love. Heavy on wine and long with lovely conversation, it was one of the best and most meaningful meals in a week of magical eating.

16. Danes speak English better than you do. Okay, not all of them, but the countrywide mastery of the language is pretty startling, even if you’ve spent time in northern Europe before. We meet oyster fishermen and rural farmers and drug dealers who all spoke it with ease. When Danes drop words like “incendiary” and “lament” casually into a conversation, you know these dudes have grown beyond the “English-from-the-movies” fluency level found in most countries around the world. So go ahead, learn those five words and use them as often as possible (we’ll help you get started: hello = “hej”); just don’t be surprised when supremely polished English is volleyed back at you.

A U.N. report released last month named Denmark the world’s happiest country. R&K hit the streets to find out what happiness means to the Danes.

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Here’s the scene: You’re a 9-year-old boy. You’ve recently died of a tragic illness and have passed on to the next world, where the forces of evil are stirring. While a witch lord plots to enslave the world’s population, your bravery is put to the test. You come to a forest where you meet a soldier. There is a foul creature afoot, he tells you, but he has not the heart to pass through the trees. Will you be brave enough? You step softly through the fallen leaves, your heart pounding, your hands trembling, overwhelmed with the knowledge that something wild is hunting you…

The Danes take their play seriously. So seriously that a full two percent of the population partake in Live Action Role Playing (LARP)—like Dungeons and Dragons brought to life, complete with costumes, nuanced back stories, and an armory of foam and replica weapons for settling scores. It’s not unheard to find a few thousand grown men and women dressed up like orcs and elves, playing out a Tolkien-inspired fantasy among the rolling hills of the Danish countryside.

On our third day in Denmark we were invited by Claus Raasted, the country’s leading LARPer, to take part in the grand spectacle. The scenario du jour was based on The Brothers Lionheart, a tale of good and evil that serves as a literary right of passage for Scandinavian school children. It wouldn’t be enough to just watch 200 Danish kids chase each other around with swords and shields. When we heard that a battle would be taking place in the forest just outside of Copenhagen, we wanted in.

And so it was that Matt was cast as the monster in the forest, a vicious creature with a dagger in his back, a 12-foot axe in his hand, and a growl in his belly so fierce that it brought the elementary school soldiers to the brink of tears. The full-length feature film, documenting every last blow of the ensuing battle, will be out soon, but in the meantime, a few glimpses of our LARP initiation.

We like our travel with a healthy serving of grit. Our first trip took us to Burma, where, against a sweltering backdrop of civil war and sticky curries, we explored an oppressed country on the cusp of radical political change. In Peru, we traveled to the Andes to eat oven-roasted guinea pigs and to the Amazon to consume mind-bending jungle hallucinogens. But today, Roads and Kingdoms makes its first official foray into the developed world, touching down in the most First World of all countries: the Kingdom of Denmark. It’s a land of plenty, and yet so many things seem in just the right proportions. The Danish bullet points read like a social scientist’s wet dream. Here are just a few of the feats of modern civilization Denmark can claim:

—The world’s most even distribution of wealth
—The country with the lowest level of corruption
—The first country to implement environmental laws
—The third highest employment rate

No, we’re not in Rangoon anymore. This is the home of Hamlet, birthplace of Legos, and according to a recent study commissioned by the United Nations, the Happiest Place on Earth (though just wait until Disney’s legal team hears about that copyright infringement). For the next week, we’ll be on the march in the world’s oldest monarchy. Here’s a glimpse at what’s in store for Roads and Kingdoms in the days ahead:

New Nordic Cuisine is the global food press’ latest object of obsession. So serious are the Danes about this movement that they have carved out their own manifesto, a 10-point blueprint for turning the bounty of Scandinavia into a cohesive culinary vision, fusing the latest in technical mastery (spheres! liquid nitrogen!) with hyper-locavorism to create a cuisine that is equal parts sensual and intellectual. At the heart of it all is Noma, currently heralded as the best restaurant in the world, and as such, a magnet for moneyed tourists and young chefs with Michelin stars in their eyes. We’ve broken our backs to lock down a reservation, so we’ll have 20 courses to contemplate whether the reality on the plate lives up to the dizzying global reputation.

But we’ll also be taking an in-depth look at the Noma Economy springing up in Copenhagen and across Denmark. A new wave of young cooks, farmers, and brew masters, recognizing that Noma’s success can mean opportunities up and down the food chain, are taking advantage of the global focus to reimagine the way this country eats and drinks. Is this just Denmark’s moment in the sun, or is the country on the brink of a lasting revolution? We’ll do our best to get to the bottom of it.

Something about Denmark—the endless windswept plain? the feeling of being on the very northern fringe of continental Europe? the history of all those ragged conquerors crossing the northern seas in open-hulled boats?—that makes one think about freedom. We’ll be looking at two very different forms of freedom and self-expression that seem to be, in their passion at least, uniquely Danish.

First up is Freetown Christiania, the sprawling autonomous zone that has been setting its own rules in the shadow of Copenhagen’s Town Hall for over forty years. We aren’t the first to tell the story of this rangy combination of a hippie commune and Mad-Max-Bartertown. But now, right now, is a pivotal moment in Christiania’s history: a landmark agreement with a wary Danish government has given the community the chance to actually buy much of the land it sits on, instead of just squatting on it. But with the chance to stabilize its status comes intrusions of all kinds—land surveyors, government case files, dueling lawyers—that are anathema to the whole idea of Freetown. Our guide to Christiania: Tanja Fox, a lifelong resident of Christiania whose father was an American adventurer and dropout from Canoga Park, Calif. Tanja’s Danish mother brought her to Christiania when she was just four years old; in turn she raised her own children there. Tanja is now in charge of the Christiania People’s Stock, an initiative to raise the money needed to buy their town back from the government by selling shares in the community. Nobody knows Christiania, where it’s been and where it is going, better than her.

But freedom, in Denmark, can also be a weekend thing. That’s the moral of LARPing—Live Action Role Playing—which until recently was Denmark’s second most popular sport, if you can call it that. It’s something like a combination of video games and acting and rural flashmobbing. The American analogues would be RenFaires or war reenacters—also people who don costumes on the weekend—but that doesn’t quite do Danish LARPing justice. What the LARPers create, on a weekly basis all throughout the kingdom, are incredibly complex scenarios that have refined game structures and, of course, elaborate costumes. Some of the events are like D&D or LoR come alive, while others deal with modern, or even post-apocalyptic scenarios. So exactly what is driving its popularity? Escapism? The chance to break out of your weekly routine to be someone completely different? It’s a different animal than Christiania, perhaps, but it seems to have the same engine: a Danish desire to break free, whether for a weekend or a lifetime.