Eating Up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa

2 TABLESPOONS ORANGE FLOWER WATER

2 TABLESPOONS MANDARINO LIQUEUR

2

KING PIG

REGGIO DI CALABRIA – VIBO VALENTIA – PIZZO – PIANAPOLI

Soppressata

The soppressata was fine grained and the colour of roses and spicy and sweet, with aniseed coiling through it.

2

KING PIG

REGGIO DI CALABRIA – VIBO VALENTIA – PIZZO – PIANAPOLI

I thanked the Lord that, by the time I finally opened up the throttle on 50cc of raging power on my Vespa and wobbled off through the heart of Reggio with a combination of blind bravado, blind terror and blind relief, it was 1.30 p.m., and the roads were almost clear. The Calabresi maintained the extremely civilised habit of lunching properly every day. From about noon to 1 p.m. the roads were filled with traffic, and everything closed down as people headed for home or a restaurant for lunch.

Your average Italian Vespa rip would have been kitted out in trainers, jeans, shirt and maybe, just, a helmet. Wearing a helmet had recently become compulsory, but it was treated more as a fashion accessory than cranium protection. But as far as I was concerned, comfort came before cutting a dash. I was dressed in heavy-duty brown shoes, heavy-duty green cords, T-shirt, shirt, a rather macho lightweight charcoal motorcycle jacket with pockets in all sorts of unlikely places, black leather gloves and a white helmet like the basinet of a knight of the Middle Ages. There was no way that anyone was going to identify me as an Italian. This was unlikely anyway, as I had no intention of travelling faster than fifty kilometres per hour, a preposterously stately pace by Italian standards.

I envied the Calabresi their complete mastery of their machines. They seemed to have no fear of hurtling down roads at speeds which I thought suicidal, or zooming up them while carrying on an animated conversation with their pillion passenger over their shoulder. They could hover like hawks, absolutely stationary, without putting their feet on the ground, just revving their engines to maintain their stability while they nattered away to one another for a minute or two before swooping away into a gap in the traffic or flow of pedestrians. Man, or woman, and machine were fused into a single unit, apparently with a shared nervous system. Perhaps they were simply born with an instinctive ability. I was not.

With a tentative skitter and then a wild leap like an agitated kangaroo, it was up, up and away, finally, at last, at very long last. The open road lay before me, new horizons rushed to meet me, a sense of adventure embraced me. It was ‘the blithesome step forward … out of the old life into the new’, as the Wayfaring Rat put it in The Wind in the Willows.

The sun shone for the first time. The road ran along the edge of the coast. To my right the land rose steeply to the thickly wooded slopes of the Aspromonte. To my left the sea twinkled below. I saw a traditional swordfishing boat, with its disproportionately high mast at least twenty metres tall with a crow’s nest at the top, from which to spy out for fish, and its long, needle prow, thirty metres at least, from which to harpoon them. It was a detail from another age.

I roared up hill and drifted down dale. I sped round the odd pothole. I didn’t feel frightened. I didn’t panic. I didn’t feel out of control. I didn’t feel that I couldn’t cope. The scooter made a noise like a demented gnat, particularly going uphill. So long as the demented gnat sound didn’t drive me bonkers, and the machine could take the strain, everything would be fine.

Just beyond Nicotera, I sat in an olive grove and lunched on bread, salami, tomatoes and pecorino. The grove was full of borage, butterflies and light. The air was warm and fragrant. This was all right, I thought, liberty, lunch and loafing.

I looked out over the town back towards the Golfo di Gioia beyond. From up here the coastline was still seductively beautiful and romantic, in spite of haphazard development and container ports. Tankers, container ships and tramp steamers lay anchored in the bay of Gioia Tauro, larger versions of the Phoenician and Roman galleys, and the later Venetian and Genoese merchant ships that had once anchored there. The movement of boats is dictated by history. Present trade follows the pattern of past trade. Ships sail to and from the same safe havens, and follow the same invisible paths, century by century.

The occasional car ground past on the road. My scooter was still, its demented gnat noise stopped for a while. Its continuous state of high-pitched excitement, particularly going uphill, put me in mind of a then well-known DJ and media personality known as Ginger, and so Ginger it became. I grew dozy and stretched out on the ground.

Presently I was accosted by a toothless gnome in a peaked cap. He was the brother of the owner of the olive grove, he said, and just wanted to check that there wasn’t a dead body on family property, as if dead bodies were quite a regular occurrence.

I explained that I was having a picnic.

‘Ai, mangia,’ he said in a singing tone, giving a little chopping movement with his hand against his tummy. ‘Va bene. Buon appetito.’

Presently I roused myself from my reveries, and took myself across the hilly neck of the Capo Vaticano, past olive and citrus groves and herds of sheep minded by shepherds with dogs the size of wolves, towards Vibo Valentia and Pizzo.

While Calabria is rich enough in history, much of it soaked in blood, it seemed to be short on cultural artefacts and remains. War and earthquakes had destroyed most of them. However, Vibo Valentia – Hipponium to the Greeks, an ‘illustre et nobile municipium’, according to Cicero – had, it seemed, been spared the general wastage and was packed with churches and pictures of note.

There was, said the guides, the church of San Leoluca with ‘extremely fine stucco work’, ‘a superb marble group of the Madonna between St John the Evangelist and the Magdalene (notice the bas-reliefs around the bases)’ and a Madonna and Child attributed to Girolamo Santacroce. There was the thirteenth-century church of Rosario with a ‘strange baroque pulpit’, and the church of San Michele, ‘an exquisite little Renaissance church … with a fine but somewhat overshadowing campanile of 1671’.

I can testify to the quality of the campanile, and, indeed, to the classical elegance and beauty of the outside of San Michele, but of the rest – nothing. Every church I passed that wasn’t being done up with EC grants was shut. I banged on doors. I pushed. I prayed. No good. So, no strange baroque pulpit, no Madonna and Child attributed to Girolamo Santacroce, no stucco work, no bas-reliefs. So much for higher culture.

But who needs higher culture when agriculture is to hand? Quite by accident, I came across an unheralded market of dazzling variety. Here were broad beans, ready podded, like tiny green opals; fat, busty fennels; early season artichokes piled in spiky ziggurats; boxes of mixed cicorie selvatiche, bitter wild salad leaves; a great log of tuna, its flesh purple/carmine; and tiny red rock mullet, neatly laid out like a pattern in a kaleidoscope.

The two cheery brothers with blood-stained hands who ran the Macelleria del Mercato treated me to ’nduja vibonese, a local variant on one of the classic pig products of Calabria: a creamy, fiery sausage of pork and peperoncino or chilli, in this case liberally laced with fennel seed. It was eaten, they said, with raw broad beans, bread and wine. One of the brothers then carved me a long, thin slice of zingirole, the brawn of Vibo, from a large bowl, the inside of which was mottled with a blue, green and cream swirled glaze, like sunlight shining through sea water in a rock pool. Curls and whorls of ears, snout and other odds and ends were set in a pale amber jelly. The zingirole had a dainty, delicate flavour and a gently chewy character. They made zingirole only in winter, he explained, when the pigs were in the right condition. It wasn’t suitable for hot weather. This was the last of the season.

The pig has an almost sacred place in the food chain in southern Italy. Pig-loving traditions of Italy go back to the earliest times. The Romans, Martial and Cicero, recorded their partiality for pork products, especially those of Lucania, the modern Basilicata, a little to the north of Vibo; the omnipresent luganica is a descendant of that sausage. Both Norman Douglas in Old Calabria and Carlo Levi in Christ Stopped at Eboli write of the reverence with which pigs were treated, observing how they had the run of villages, and, in many cases, houses as well, until the day of retribution, of course. It was still true in Calabria that pigs enjoyed wide appreciation, even if they didn’t have the freedom of the houses and village streets in the way that they used to.

In common with most of Italy, Calabria is home to a bewildering diversity of salumi, cured pork products – capocollo, soppressata, ’nduja, ’nnuglia, frittuli, salato, scarafogli and spianata calabrese, to name but a few. These, in turn, generate their own multifarious families through geographical associations. So Spilinga and Poro are famous for their ’nduja, Cosenza for its frittuli, Acri for its salsiccia. Each is made with very express cuts of meat and with very precise techniques, but varies according to local custom in the use of spices, herbs and wine. Invariably, however, all contain chilli in varying quantities.

The most famous of Calabria’s salumi are capocollo, soppressata and ’nduja. Capocollo is the neck and shoulder of pork, boned out, packed into a pig’s bladder, cured, lightly smoked and then aged for at least one hundred days. It is eaten only as an antipasto, sliced thinly like salami. ’Nduja (apparently ’nudja is the Italianisation of the French andouillette – a reminder that southern Italy was regularly part of greater France) is a paste of pork fat and pork meat infused with sweet and fiery chilli, and other flavourings depending on where it is made. It can be spread on bread or heated up to make a sauce for pasta, typically maccheroni. Soppressata is an altogether more sophisticated number, and I had hopes of meeting up with a maker further north.

I said goodbye to the cheery butcher brothers. They wished me well and joy with the ’nduja that they had given me to complement the zingirole. A skinned calf's head peered at me mournfully from behind them.

Beyond Vibo Valentia, astride the coast road, was Pizzo. Scrambling up and down the precipitous side of a hill that eventually dropped vertically into the sea, Pizzo might have been designed by Piranesi and M. C. Escher. The streets and alleys above its piazza formed a maze of vertical disorder. The Vico Minotauro turned off the Via Minotauro; and the Vicolo Minotauro, scarcely wide enough to allow a plump English sightseer to pass with ease, turned off the Vico Minotauro. Stairs and steps and passageways fell up or down, round each corner, opening up a series of microvistas, truncated by the corner of a house, the basement or roof. There were no cars or scooters here. Feet were the only form of transport; and, as I explored, I eavesdropped on the patchwork harmony and disharmony of domestic life, and caught its accompanying smells.

By any qualitative criteria, Italy is the world centre for ice cream, and Pizzo is its self-declared capital. The rest of the country would certainly dispute this claim, but at Pizzo there was certainly a lot of ice cream packed into a small area. I counted nine bars around the Piazza della Repubblica alone, each of which made its own ranges of ices.

The history of ice cream, in which we must include granitas and sherbets or sorbets, the Moors’ gift to summer refreshment, is also a long and complicated one, going back to the sixteenth century, and, to be frank, only really of interest to the food historian. The point is that the ice creams in Italy have an intensity and freshness that are foreign to British and American ices, where flavour is sacrificed to sugar, cream and air.

Angelo Belvedere was something of an ambassador for the ice creams of Pizzo. He gave off an aura not of romance or woolly artisanality but rather of canny commercial nous. He wore a Pepsi baseball cap and a many-pocketed waistcoat. Metal-rimmed spectacles framed shrewd eyes, and he seemed no stranger to the interview – ‘I am the grandson of the founder of the Gelateria Belvedere, which was established in 1901. My grandfather was un gentiluomo molto elegante – an elegant gentleman.’ Grandfather Belvedere had a sharp nose for business opportunities as well.

‘My grandmother started making the ice creams for family weddings, birthdays and christenings. She used snow packed into blocks to freeze the ice creams. It was very hard work.’ Then came technology, with freezing salt and a hand-cranked freezer. Her husband noticed that locals gathered in the Piazza della Repubblica on high days and holidays to listen to a brass band, sweltering in their respectable suits in the sun. ‘So he set up a kiosk on the corner of the piazza, and my grandmother, she made more ice creams and they became famous. I followed them and now my sons work the kiosk and the café.’

The latest generation of the Belvedere family used modern technology as astutely as their ancestors. The ice creams were made in small batches of a few litres at a time, and contained only fresh fruit and high-quality flavourings. I rolled my tongue up and over a hummock of jade-green pistachio and glossy, dark mahogany chocolate held in a cone. The texture was smooth and lusciously creamy, the pistachio more intense and perfumed than any nut, the chocolate powerful, with a clean, penetrating bite.

‘Every producer has his own particular way of doing things,’ said Angelo, ‘but most of them use an industrial ice cream base as a stabilising agent, and add eggs and milk to that.’ He was vague about exact proportions. ‘They vary according to which ice cream you want to make. I am not going to tell you exactly what we do. There are too many sharks out there,’ and his eyes glittered.

One of Angelo Belvedere’s sons was manning the kiosk. He told me that the reason the gelaterias were so consistently good here was that they were family businesses. In Palermo or Reggio, he said, gelaterias change hands every ten years or so and traditional recipes are lost in the process.

‘My family is an example of continuity,’ he went on. ‘I studied law in Messina, but in the end I came back to work here. I could never have been a lawyer. I’m an ice-cream man.’ He peered down at the ice creams lined up, brilliant and glistening, in their metal trays in the freezer display – cioccolato, nocciola, croccantino, stracciatella, zuppa inglese, cioccoriso, caffè, nutella, dolcelatte, fiordilatte, pistacchio, spagnola, melone, cassata, frutti di bosco, fragola, banana, limone, ananas, latte di mandorla. He could have been talking a load of baloney, of course, but it made a fine tale.

After Pizzo, I turned inland, vaguely following the erratic course of Garibaldi’s progress northwards through the foothills of the Sila, the next range north of the Aspromonte. The landscape became less dramatic and savage than that further south, more classical than pagan, more wooded than forested, more Lake District than Highlands. Rock roses, yellow brimstone butterflies, irises, ox-eye daisies, vetch, broom, borage and knapweed thickly populated the verges.

Not far from Pianapoli, well off the beaten track and some way down an unbeaten one, I found La Carolee. The house stood on the edge of a sharp escarpment, looking out over voluptuous, tree-covered hills. Pinky terracotta new paint notwithstanding, it was formidable, square, with a round tower at one corner and a courtyard at its centre. It had a squat, purposeful presence. It also had a squat, purposeful past, having been built as a kind of fortified manor house, to be defended against the bandits who roamed the countryside in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Carolee was a local dialect name for a variety of olive that grew in profusion in these hills, and the house had been named after it. A few years ago, Armando Gaetano had bought the estate from the Catholic Church, restored it, and turned it over to organic production to provide olives for the family frantoio – oil mill – not far away. The nominal owner might have been Armando, but responsibility was shared by the whole family, with his son, Federico, running the estate, and his wife, Maria, a small, elegant, birdlike woman, and Federico’s handsome wife, also Maria, sharing cooking duties and other jobs.

Federico Gaetano was a stocky young man, with soft brown eyes and thinning hair, the curve of his cheeks carrying the blue-black bloom of perpetual stubble. He led me away among the trees, wading knee-deep through lupins and beans mixed with ox-eye daisies, buttercups and clovers, all in full flower beneath the trees, a thick shag-pile of vegetation enamelled with colours. These would be ploughed back into the earth in the fullness of time, he explained, to fix nitrogen in the soil and so provide natural fertiliser.

To anyone used to the chemical blitzkrieg methods of modern farming, the constraints of organic production seemed to require a disproportionate amount of trouble and ingenuity, but that was the way, said Federico, ‘to respect the integrity of the soil and the integrity of nature’. It was difficult to know whether this was simply an article of marketing faith or a declaration of a more profound conversion to the organic way. Either way, organic methods at La Carolee produced superb olive oil, rich, spicy, deep, dandelion-gold, which they could sell at a premium. High-mindedness had a sharp commercial edge.

There are various grades of olive oil: extra vergine, the first oil from the press, which, according to Italian regulations, has to have a level of oleic acid of less than 1.2 per cent; the less fine vergine, which is made from olives that have been simply pressed, but which may have a slightly higher level of acidity – 2 per cent; straight olio d’uliva, a blend made by heating pressed olives, which helps extraction but affects the chemical balance in the oil, pressing them again and chemically treating the oil to lower the acidity; and finally a whole range of lesser grades of olive oil mixed with vegetable oils.

The winter of 1985 was the worst in living memory for olive producers. Of twenty-two million olive trees, seventeen million froze where they grew. Many died (although olive trees have almost miraculous powers of regeneration). Oil production dropped by 40 per cent. However, the Italians are the most pragmatic of people. Faced with a shortfall in production, they set about reducing the damage in terms of income.

To the hierarchy of oleic purity, the Italians, led by the thrifty Tuscans, began adding refinements. First came the single-estate oils in fancy bottles. Then came single-estate, single olive varietal oils. Then came, well, the whole panoply of food snobbery and marketing legerdemain. Since then, of course, olive oil has become one of the commonplaces of modern life. It is a culinary essential and fashion accessory. The bottle in the bourgeois kitchen is as socially defining as Nike, Nokia, Prada and Porsche. The distillation of Mediterranean sunshine and culture, olive oil occupies a central place in cultural iconography far removed from its peasant origins.

Yet, by an ironic quirk of nature, it is made in the depths of winter, between the end of October and the beginning of March. In May there wasn’t much for me to look at, except for the high drama of the olive blossom slowly turning into olives.