Eating Up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa

It was instructive to contrast the vision of Old Calabria with that of another classic record of life in southern Italy, Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi. Although Levi’s record, based on his experiences as a political exile to two remote Calabrian villages between 1939 and 1942, post-dates Douglas’s by twenty or so years, and the part of southern Italy about which he wrote was a little to the north of that which Douglas explored, the life they both describe cannot have differed very much in essence. Levi saw it as a northern Italian intellectual, a humanist and a doctor. For him, the closeness to nature was little different from that of beasts, and his doctor’s training led him to record the physical and social effects of repression, exploitation and poverty with rather less gloss than Douglas, essentially a classicist, was wont to do. It seems probable that the reality lay closer to Levi’s grim record than to Douglas’s cheery travelogue.

The fact is that the life of the southern peasantry has always been viciously hard. Aside from social neglect, political corruption, the tradition of latifundia and criminal exploitation, much of the landscape is still guaranteed to immure those who live there in peasant poverty. There are only small areas of cultivatable land, and which are not productive on any scale that is meaningful in modern agroindustry. It was not until the agrarian reforms of the 1960s that many agricultural labourers had any rights at all, let alone the right to own land. And even then the land that became available was, on the whole, so poor as to be unable to support anything other than the basic family unit, and then only with incredible labour. It is small wonder that there was a massive migration from the south. Between 1946 and 1957, more than two million people emigrated to the Americas and northern Europe, and between 1951 and 1971 a further nine million were involved in inter-regional migration, taking with them the foods of their own localities.

While some aspects of rural life have changed since the 1960s, social and cultural attitudes have remained generally conservative. That conservatism, however, has been instrumental in producing food of unmatched flavour and quality. It is one of the abiding ironies of southern Italy that the beauty of the materials, the artisanal ricottas and pecorinos, soppressate, extra-virgin olive oils, particular wheats, wild salads, mountain lamb and goat, so appreciated by visitors passing though, so sought after by buyers for the chrome and plate-glass food emporia in London, New York and Tokyo, are sustained by a resolutely peasant underclass.

On the one hand, a vocal, gastronomically enfranchised élite decry the globalisation and homogenisation of food cultures. On the other, they – and we – fail to recognise the true cost of keeping traditional, indigenous cultures alive to the people who carry the burden of maintaining them. We endorse labour and indignity that we would not tolerate in our own lives. As a tourist, it is easy to escape from such things. It is in the nature of tourism to seek pleasure, not truth; to look for beauty, not mundanity.

I took to Sapri after the faux rusticity of Maratea. It was another coastal town, just over the border in Campania, on the Golfo di Policastro. It was a workaday kind of place, without pretension but with a proper human scale, agreeable, getting on with the business of life, with a small port, a decent market and at least one very good restaurant.

It seemed to be the rule in southern Italy that the showier the restaurant, the worse the food; the better the shop, or, by and large, the trattoria and even ristorante, the less the exterior display. Southern Italians seemed to reserve display for personal glory in the form of clothes or cars, but when it came to architecture, public design, shop fronts, advertising, window dressing – well, forget it. But walk past an unremarkable doorway, peer into the shaded interior beyond, and suddenly there was a huge space hanging with salamis, or a long, immaculately clean, neatly laid-out butcher’s display, or boxes of fruit and vegetables stacked up, propped to present their wares to passing trade.

The Cantina Mustozza was one of these modest establishments. It had a slightly worn, warm, purposeful air. I knew that I was there to eat.

The restaurant was manned by an immensely conversational young man, and by his mother, who, after surveying the tables filling up, headed for the kitchen. When it came to my turn to order there was no menu and precious little choice.

‘Antipastipastacarneopesce?’ said the young man briskly.

‘Eh?’ I said.

‘Antipastopastacarneopesce?’ he repeated.

‘Oh, sì,’ I said.

‘Carne o pesce?’ he said with a touch of asperity.

‘Oh, carne. Definitely carne,’ I said.

‘Vino?’

‘Sì, sì.’

He whisked away.

Hardly had I had time to blink when plonk came the wine, plonk came the bread, plonk came the antipasti. Hey ho, I thought, and tucked in with a will: a couple of slices of mozzarella squeaking between the teeth; a thimble of ricotta like a breath of fresh herbs; a slice of cured ham, cut thick and tasty and sweet and salty; a coil or two of oily grilled peppers; a battered zucchini flower, fried and served cold and, to be honest, not terribly nice. And a substantial quantity of rough-hewn bread, all washed away with no-name, no-pack-drill wine.

The plate of ex-antipasti disappeared. Plonk, down came a plate of pasta. ‘Er, what are these?’

‘Cavatelli.’

‘Oh, thanks.’ They were short, fat cylinders, like gnocchi. I knew that, in theory, cavatelli was native to this corner of the Basilicata/Campania border. The trouble was, being something of an expert by now, I could have sworn they were cecatelli. The naming of dishes was becoming something of a problem. Just as I thought that I had got one safely identified, authenticated and located in one area, something remarkably like it to the untutored eye turned up somewhere else under a quite different name. For instance, Enzo Monaco had referred to a condiment of neonati, tiny fish pickled in chilli and herbs, as rosamarino, when I knew it as mustica or sardella. There appeared to be as many authentic recipes in Campania as there were cooks and eaters, and whoever I spoke to on the subject would swear that this dish had nothing to do with the other dish at all, and they would name some ingredient or stage in the cooking process which made it altogether different, and markedly inferior, naturally.

Never mind, there and then, it was cavatelli with a heavy-duty tomato sauce made smoky with provola affumicata (a smoked cow’s cheese) and with that ubiquitous condiment, of olive oil, garlic and chilli served on the side.

‘Thank you very much.’

Plonk. A second pasta dish arrived, a single raviolo, fat as a down pillow, stuffed with ricotta, lolling in a bright, fresh tomato sauce, brightened still further with clumps of fresh basil. Very nice it was, too.

There is a pleasure to eating on your own, allowing the wine to gently neutralise any natural inhibitions about watching your fellow diners too obviously, and so covertly observe dramas and relationships unfolding at other tables. There was a father entertaining a rather fussy grown-up daughter; a table of five men who looked like business colleagues; a brace of couples feeding and laughing. Everyone was eating with the minimum of fuss, without unnecessary reference or deference. Food was conveyed to the mouth with elegant economy, tasted, assessed, commented on. Eating, talking, socialising formed a single, seamless and indivisible continuum.

Plonk!

‘What’s this?’

‘Orecchiette con broccoli.’

‘Another pasta?’

‘Sì, signore.’

I was beginning to sweat slightly. I wished that I hadn’t gone at the bread with such vigour. Still, it was yet another potent dish. Orechiette are supposed to be the classic pasta of Puglia, next door to Basilicata, but what the hell. I had to take things as they came, and they seemed to be coming fast and hard just at that moment.

I was feeling rather smug about having managed that third pasta course when a fourth arrived, tagliatelle con gamberi – tagliatelle in a sauce of prawn stock and tomato. Even by the normal generous Italian standards, this was stretching things a bit. Although I was beginning to wonder if the walls of my stomach would stretch enough to accommodate it, my fellow lunchers didn’t seem to notice anything unusual going on, and were motoring smoothly through the same dish.

I wondered where the standard four-course structure – antipasto/primo piatto/secondo piatto/formaggio–frutta–dolce – had come from. Extensive research had turned up no clue. However, no one seemed to treat this model as inviolable. A meal was bent to the needs, mood or pleasure of the eater. A chap at another table had a bowl of soup followed by a salad followed by fried fish, while his daughter had the antipasto followed by grilled prawns. Not for them the pasta marathon.

Mum popped out of her kitchen to see how I was getting on. I goggled at her, and remembered the meat still to come.

And meat it was, just meat; no sauce, no veg, no sprig of chervil, no dab of this or blob of that, simply a piece of chicken, a chunk of pork, a slab of veal, all grey and inert, and just about as unappetising as it is possible for meat to look. Ah, but to taste, that was another matter. The chicken was redolent of the farmyard, the lamb robust with free ranging and the pork subtle and unctuous as an undertaker. It was like being taken back to childhood and the novelty of flavours experienced then. No matter that getting each morsel down inside me was like stuffing the last presents into an over-filled Christmas stocking.

It was food that had its roots in the rural working class, not the educated middle class, as is the case with many dishes in France or Britain. In Italy there had once been a tradition of fancy cooking for the aristocratic houses – there is a memorable description of a dinner of immense elaboration and elaborate immensity in The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa – but that has largely disappeared. By some mysterious, radical process, the cooking of the contadini invaded the kitchens of their social superiors, perhaps riding on the coat tails of the ubiquitous peperoncini.

The final dish of early strawberries was unusually refreshing. They had been macerated in lemon juice and sugar for a few hours before serving. It caused the fruits to sweat a little of their juices, and sharpened the flavours.

I didn’t exactly leap into the saddle after that. I took the first small back road that I could find, stopped and was asleep on the verge in an instant.

I turned away from the sea and hit the hill roads again, heading up through the Vallo di Diano, which, while it lacked the obvious drama of the Aspromonte or the Sila, had the charm of intimate grandeur – rushing streams, a lot of oak and chestnut, as well as pine, ilex and laurel, although, oddly, very few olive trees. There was the occasional open bit of country given over to mixed cultivation and extraordinary small fields of wheat. What were they for? They couldn’t be economic or produce that much flour. And how were they harvested? Everything gave a little charge to the solitary brain, shut away inside the helmet.

I stopped to chat with a grizzled, recumbent shepherd – very Norman Douglas – dozing away the afternoon on the verge while his goats shredded the greenery on the other side of the road; and for a second time to interrogate a lady picking cicorie selvatiche (wild salad leaves), dente di leone (dandelion), portulaca (purslane), and valerianella (valerian). The Italian taste for these pungent weeds with their varying degrees of bitterness is alien to sweeter-toothed northern Europeans.

The hills calmed down to a substantial, fertile, flat plain around the rather grubby small town of Sala Consilina. According to the guides, the Hotel La Pergola seemed to be the only reasonable hotel in the area, and, true, it was clean and perfectly respectable. But, gloomy, echoing and kitted out in cheap marble, it reminded me of the most melancholy kind of overnight stop for commercial travellers. It was run by a husband-and-wife team, and a skeleton crew of helpers, masterminded by the wife in a voice pitched permanently on penetrating. The husband seemed to be something of a dreamer, providing the waiting services at dinner in a crumpled white waiter’s jacket with the top two buttons undone, forgetful of the bread, the water, the salad.

The dining room never had more than a sprinkling of other people. The giant television permanently on in the corner made thought, let alone speech, an impossibility. One dinner was accompanied by a programme about intimate aspects of women’s bodies; another by one of the endless and mindless semi-quiz games that Italian television specialises in churning out. None of my fellow guests seemed much in the mood for merry banter.

The food was curious at best – a memorably vile pasta dish swimming in water with a revolting low-rent Bolognese sauce followed by a cheese dish of cold mozzarella and melted caciocavallo cheeses, pizza casereccia, bits of pizza base unadorned by anything, and salad, all at the same time, followed by a wretched fruit salad. Another night’s feast was equally bizarre: orecchiette with a good tomato sauce pepped up with chilli; a huge round of something unidentifiable, which reminded me of the watery, claggy scrambled egg we had had at school; bits of roast chicken; and then a plate of burnt peppers swimming for their lives in oil.

It was all the more memorable for being a rare experience. It was almost reassuring to discover that even Italians produce food quite as disgusting as anything in Britain. The difference was, of course, that in Britain such experiences are still the rule. So far in Italy they were the exception.

I left La Pergola with few misgivings, and crossed the floor of the valley, climbing the steep road to the pretty hill town of Teggiano in warm sunshine. I stripped down to my T-shirt and looked rather Marlon Brandoish, I thought. Well, perhaps later Brando in terms of girth, but certainly early Brando in terms of dash.

The road ran from Teggiano to Sacco and Piaggino, climbing between two ramparts of grey rock, surrounded by buttercups and daisies, orchids, carpets of wild thyme, and a host of other brilliantly coloured flowers whose names I didn’t know. I stopped for a while. The only sounds were those of birds, including a most persistent cuckoo, bees and the clonking of cow bells from a small herd grazing serenely just below the bare rock line on the far side of the pass. I could not help thinking that those people who only experience the Italian coast, or the artlessly domesticated countryside of Tuscany and Umbria, have little idea of the astounding beauty of the hill and mountain areas which make up most of the south. With a sigh, I headed for Paestum, and Naples beyond.

Crossing the fertile, intensively cultivated flat plain between Paestum and Salerno was not too much of a challenge. Things got a bit tricky going into Salerno, and decidedly trickier getting out of it. All the obvious roads turned into autostradas on which scooters of Ginger’s humble power were not allowed. More by luck than good judgement, I finally found myself on the road to Naples.