Toscanelli

The first cigars I ever tried were the long, thin ones that Dr. M________ brought back to Wimbledon from his ’89 Xmas trip home to Milan, along with a bottle of grappa. I wasn’t thrilled, at first, with the smoking experience, but alternating puffs with sips of the liquor made either one seem that little bit less unpleasant. It wasn’t until seven years later that I tried a cigar again, during my second visit to Paris, in the midst of a cold snap that had frozen the city almost solid. I was visiting Dr. M_____ (a different Dr., I should point out, his name spelled with five underscores rather than eight). Dr M_____ had accompanied me as I’d purchased Tour d’Eiffel keychains & snowglobes, when it struck us that we should buy a postcard for our absent, mutual friend, Mr. R_________. I think we eventually settled for one with a picture of a naked lady on it. We needed a stamp, and so headed for the nearest Tabac. Both Dr. M_____ and I had quit smoking cigarettes a short time before, and, once inside the exceptionally well-stocked tobacconist’s, were both dumbstruck with overwhelmingly intense nicotine nostalgia. We both really wanted a smoke, and I would have bought a pack had not Dr. M_____ suggested we try some cigarillos instead. I tried a puff, and, this time, I found it to my liking. I found that, moreover, they blunted my appetite for cigarettes.

Back in Rome a few days later I’d smoked the last of what I'd bought in Paris, and was in need of more. On my way to work I stopped in at the usual Tabacchi, where the grumpy man was used to handing me my Camel Filters. He automatically reached for them that morning too… No, grazie. I said, Volevo dei… sigari. The tobacconist gestured morosely at his selection, at which I ummed momentarily until a fellow-customer to my right suggested: Toscanelli? Si, I ventured, Toscanelli! The grumpy man looked doubtful, and warned me that they were rather strong, but I paid my 4500 lire & walked away with my first red-&-white pack of Italian cigars.

The cigars themselves resembled small bits of twig, and took an age to catch alight. They were indeed rather strong, overwhelmingly so if one made the mistake, as I did on several occasions, of inhaling… They were so strong, in fact, that they would make me hiccup, but nevertheless I developed a perverse liking for them. They’re the cigars that Clint Eastwood was always chewing on in those old westerns. A website devoted to the subject lists Giacomo Puccini, Arturo Toscanini, Giuseppe Garibaldi, George Sand, Gabriele d’Annunzio, and Eugenio Montale amongst other famous Toscanelli or Toscani smokers. A Toscano by the way, is a double-length Toscanello, or else a Toscanello is more-or-less half a Toscano. I find nothing accompanies a bitter shot of espresso better than a few puffs on a Toscanello: most anything less intense, even an undiluted shot of scotch, say, tends to be drowned out by the robustness of the cigar’s flavour.

In later years I found an independent, specialist tobacconist’s shop in Cardiff that stocked Toscani and Toscanelli, albeit at twice the price one pays in Italy. It’s an establishment which seems an isolated survival from those yellow-stained years past when tobacco was king. I dropped by there on Saturday, and bought myself a few packs.

The images above were lifted from the sigarotoscano site.