Founder of Delicious Italy Magazine, Philip Curnow

Is a desire to travel inherited?

Articolo di Philip Curnow Fotografia: www.deliciousItaly.com

If so, then mine might just have been passed down by my great-grandparents who left the tin mines of Cornwall to dig ironstone in Cleveland and North Yorkshire. Or was it my grandfather who escaped a life digging ironstone in Cleveland and North Yorkshire by dedicating himself to football and earning a professional contract with Wolverhampton Wanderers? Or perhaps from my father who left for sea with the merchant navy at the age of 16 to circumnavigate the world several times before settling down on Merseyside? Or maybe from my mother who flew with TWA out of Kansas City while she waited for my father to circumnavigate the world several times before settling down on Merseyside? Or even her father, who sailed from Liverpool to the Barents Sea during WW2 as a ship's purser, also seeing action off the north African coast? Let's just say my own first venture abroad, if you can exclude Wales and many blissful summer days spent along the coast from Anglesey to Pembrokeshire, was not Spain, France, or even Portugal, but the Arabian Gulf at the age of 9. A friend of my father from those merchant navy days was piloting now tankers into various ports of the region and suggested we take a month out for a visit. The trip was deemed to be of unique educational value by the Wirral school authorities and they let us go. It was October 1976. The only way to get there was a dusk flight from a deserted Heathrow in a British Airways VC-10. The aircraft didn't have the range to do the trip non-stop, so we sleepily disembarked in the early hours at Damascus airport. It felt like we'd arrived at the other side of the world. It was perhaps even then I understood the difference between travel and adventure, or even exploration. It was to be a full cultural immersion which I also documented in a small notebook. I still have it.

Language and Arabic

The call to prayer was one of the first entries in my journal. It was wondrous sound which pierced the quiet of the time, five times a day according to my reckoning. I spent hours trying to transcribe in phonetics what was being said. But it didn't really matter. It was the possibility of people communicating with each other in a completely incomprehensible language which really fascinated me, first sparked by a visit to the Welsh village of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. Back in school, a weekly French language lesson had been added to the curriculum following a national referendum confirming the UK's participation in the Common Market. The country had decided (the Shetland Islands and the Outer Hebrides excepted) that the future was Europe and a new generation had to speak languages. I loved it, ditched the sciences at 13 and took up German and Latin at A-Level, with economics thrown in to round things up. So what did I decide to study at University? Modern Literary Arabic of course. A joint honours degree which included Management Studies at Leeds, West Yorkshire.

Cairo

The outstanding element of this particular degree course was the obligatory study abroad year in our Year 2 and not the usual year 3 typical of more traditional language degrees. Why? We didn't really know, but what a year it was once 10 or so of us pitched up in Heliopolis in Cairo in the Autumn of 1986. The first thing which became apparent was that Egyptians don't speak Modern Literary Arabic, at least to friends and family. That was the Arabic of newspapers and pan-Arab broadcasting. Spoken Arabic of course is a series of dialects and to this day, although I can read and write Modern Literary Arabic (Al-Fusha), my spoken Arabic is pure Cairo. I quickly made the decision to drop out of the formal lessons at Ain Shams University and blagged a part-time job teaching English. This meant a bit more cash in hand and a chance to travel to every corner of the country at least once. This included an untouched Sharm al Sheikh, marvelous Abu Simbel and the oases of the Western desert. One adventure did take me and a fellow student out of Egypt. For a month in fact, and a 5000 km land and sea trip all the way to Khartoum and back. We departed from Suez and, via a detour to Jeddah, we knew everything would be fine as soon as we

arrived at Customs in Port Sudan. Seeking a permit to travel inland we introduced ourslves and explained the motive of our trip. The official immediately beamed a broad grin and exclaimed "Leeds University! I was a student at the Engineering Faculty in Leeds. Wonderful memories!" We were on our way. An adventure of a totally different sort was courtesy of the BBC. Street posters in English had been popping up in and around Tahrir Square with the intriguing call to action: 'Wanted, European or European looking People for upcoming Filming'. The Egyptian production team were a bit cagey at first with the details, but asked us if we didn't mind getting 1940's military haircuts. A couple of people dropped out while the rest of us soon found ourselves on set in the desert behind Giza playing at desert rats for a couple of weeks. And I was the sapper! The British half of the crew were not convinced by the production and considered the narrative and direction slow and ponderous (despite our best efforts). But the eventual Fortunes of War starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson was widely acclaimed.

London

Many language graduates follow the call of teaching English as a second language after graduation. What a waste. I was off to London. I didn't expect the streets to be paved with gold but it had to be done. Luckily, I walked into the right temping agency on the Monday and by the Friday had a day's work emptying a storeroom ... at the breakfast television studios of TVam in Camden. The job lasted 2 years. Television is a very fluid profession and is supported by an active grapevine of new opportunities, freelancing etc. So there was something inevitable about a conversation with Jane, a fellow Merseysider at TVam. She said she was about to join a new satellite television channel based in Parson's Green. It was called MBC, the Middle East Broadcasting Centre, and they were seeking production assistants with Arabic skills and knowledge of the region. We made a weekly 30 minute fashion programme with Egyptian presenters Mona and Shafky. As well as London and occasionally elsewhere in the UK, we also filmed in Cairo. Among the many wonderful guests, Jimmy Choo and legendary belly dancer and actress Fifi Abdou stand out (and I mean 'legendary' Fifi Abdou).

Fotografia: www.deliciousItaly.com

Dubai

Is it only travellers who get itchy feet? Maybe, but after four years in London I wanted to put myself to the test again. One half of my university degree was not being used. I also had an unfulfilled ambition to work for the local company of my youth, Unilever. Market research was a module I especially enjoyed at University, not least the qualitative element when applied to advertising and branding. Only one company seemed appropriate to approach, the Dubai based MERAC and affiliated to MBL in London. After an interview over a bottle of white wine with the big boss, John Goodyear, I was on the plane back to the Gulf. The work was particularly demanding both physically and mentally, but one which took me to a Dubai which would be unrecognizable today. It was the early 1990s and I think the tallest building in the city at the time was the Etisalat Tower overlooking the Creek. The job involved a number of trips to Saudi Arabia as well as Oman, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait. Abu Dhabi and the remaining Emirates remained places to visit and relax in during the weekends, particularly the very serene Ras al Khaima.

I worked on a number of FMCG brands for Unilever, but the most interesting of all was a cultural lifestyle study for them based on the research of Geert Hofstede. It was a project designed to better understand Gulf Arab consumers and how their lifstyle and attitudes might be changing. But the most intriguing job of all took me to Beirut, alone. It was just after the end of the civil war and MERAC had been requested by RJ Reynolds to research lifestyle attitudes amongst smokers in the city. It was part of a wider Middle East survey using collage techniques. This was just a couple of years after hostage Terry Waite had been released after 5 years in captivity. Nothing to worry about of course but, ironically, I had become friendly with his brother David who pitched up regularly at TVam during the period. My hotel seemed to be on the border between east and west Beirut. A Syrian anti-aircraft gun emplacement filled what would have been the front garden. At least cold beer was readily available unlike in Dubai. It is difficult to gauge the destruction war leaves from a television screen, yet those pulverized streets offe

red a demonstration of the human spirit I have never forgotten. Walking through the most devastated worst

parts of West Beirut a trail of kids kept asking me for for money, food, anything really. I remembered I had a small toy bear in my backpack which

had come as part of a Kodak promotion at Dubai airport. I gave the youngest kid the bear and he ran off with the others happily enough. But a couple of minutes later he was back again. I said that's all I had, but he stretched out a tiny hand which was blue with squashed berries and small fruits. I took them and he ran off even more excitedly than before to tell his family what he'd done.

Rome

A lot packed into those 2 years, but time for another move. Many of my old colleagues at MBC were now working in Rome for a new satellite television start up. It was called Orbit Communications and was the world's first digital satellite television station owned by the then richest man in the world, Prince Al-Waleed or Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud to give him his full name. I met him once in Rome. Orbit was very corporate, too corporate for individual initiative and genuine creativity. It was television by numbers. But seeing how and where Pay TV and nascent digital media would be heading was very informative. Saying that, amidst the routine, I somehow ended up accompanying a producer to Dubai to report on that year's Miss World promotional event and interviewing Julia Morely, Chair and CEO of the Miss World Organization. It also offered the chance to meet up with Jane again who was there with MBC. Not long after word amongst the staff at Orbit was that the station was moving to Bahrain and merging with Showtime Arabia. It eventually did and is now called OSN (Orbit Showtime Network) and boasts 154 television channels and 53 high-definition channels. I had no intention of following for a very good reason. I met my wife Giuseppina and we had already started freelancing for Europe Online, another digital start up this time out of Luxembourg. It was the World Wide Web via satellite. Ridiculously fast web delivery in 1995, but still a 56k dial up to send the server your request. It never caught on.

Delicious Italy

Delicious Italy was born out for the work we had done for Europe Online. We curated the Italy section of their portal and were amazed how many people wrote to us for first-hand advice and tips about travelling to Italy and Italian food. We settled on the name fairly quickly and created a first website by hand in html

following a template we drew with coloured pends. We still have it. Eventually the images and code were refined by a professional graphic artist. Then we started to seriously travel the length and breadth of Italy. It was 2000. We felt like pioneers. In fact, we were pioneers and collected hundreds of brochures and information from local tourism boards, trade fairs and the annual BIT or course. Over time our services developed from selling simple advertorial pages in our portal to a full range of media marketing and press services. For those, take a look at our dedicated company website www.deliciousitaly.it But at the core of work is still a personal journey through the Italian regions through its people, gastronomy, history and territory. So after 20 years of Delicious Italy what have been the highlights? Certainly organizing location filming for Heston Blumenthal in Le Marche for the Trojan Hog episode of his 'Feast with Heston Blumenthal'. But also becoming media partner for the first four years of Taste of Roma which allowed us to interview some of the city's top chefs. And not forgetting a commission by the now defunct AA Publishing to write a new guide to Venice entitled History Mystery Walks. As for other memorable trips within Italy, then the 10-day 'South Italy Coast to Coast' was an educational tour for journalists organized by the Chambers of Commerce of Foggia, Crotone, Cosenza, Reggio Calabria and Matera. However, my favourite invite of all was from Turismo Torino and a full immersion behind the scenes of the splendid Carnival of Ivrea. As for the immediate future we are now setting up interviews for the second series of our Delicious Italy Podcasts, one on one interviews with people active in incoming tourism or gastronomic sector in Italy. And we are finishing a follow up to our self-published '92 Everyday Delicious Abruzzo Recipes'. The Grand Tour continues