This is Part 1 of 2 Parts.
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TURIN OR BUST

Matthew Fort has had a passion for Italy since he was a boy, matched by his love of food. So he formed the plan to travel the length of the country - by Vespa, naturally - relish the diverse cuisine along the way and, maybe, discover some of the secrets of the Italian soul, too.

The Guardian
Matthew Fort
Saturday April 17, 2004
 

I have been in love with Italy for most of my life. It's an affair that began in 1958, when I was 11, and we took a family holiday at Cervia on the Adriatic coast. I remember little of the cultural side of things - the endless churches and monasteries around which we were dragged, or the celebrated mosaics and frescos that seemed to clutter up every available surface. On the other hand, I can still taste the ice creams with which we were bribed every step of the way, and visualise the vast cold buffets, complete with swans sculpted from ice, that appeared in the dining room of the Hotel Mare e Pineta at lunchtime each Thursday, and the grapes, slices of melon and segments of orange coated in light caramel that we bought from a vendor on the beach.

I returned as often as I could, but a question always lingered in my mind as to whether what I felt was true love, or merely another Englishman's infatuation with sunlight, landscape, food and wine. So this journey, from the very southernmost tip of the country to Turin, eating as I went, was to be an attempt to sort through the waffle of interior monologue. Food, in all its forms, was the medium through which I would try to understand this beautiful and baffling country. I had considered walking,
or doing the trip on a bicycle, but dis-missed them as being impractical. A car? Too boring, too conventional, too . . . middle-aged. No, a scooter, a classic Vespa, design icon, landmark of Italian culture, sound, sensible and slowish - that was the thing. I arranged to do the journey in three sections, allotting one month to each. The first would take me from the tip of Calabria to Naples; the second from Naples to Ancona; and the third from Ancona to Turin. Well, the theoretical justification was that this route, from south to north, described the course of the unification of Italy.

That was why I had come to Melito di Porto Salvo. It was here that Giuseppe Garibaldi landed in 1860 with 10,000 men after his conquest of Sicily. He progressed northwards, routing the forces of the reactionary Bourbons as he went. In fact, I had taken lunch in the dining room of the Casina dei Mille, that had served as Garibaldi's headquarters.

I wondered how far Italy was really unified in any social or political sense. Perhaps food might be a more accurate gauge of Italy's unity. Pasta, prosciutto, pecorino (the ubiquitous sheep's cheese) - those, surely, were universally recognised from Melito to Milan. Well, I would find out. I headed back up the coast to Reggio di Calabria beneath lowering skies.

"This swordfish," Silvia Cappello addressed the proprietor of Baylik, one of Reggio's suaver restaurants, through a cloud of cigarette smoke. "Is it Italian or Greek?"

"Italian," he replied firmly. "Are you sure?" Her voice rang with disbelief. "It's very early for swordfish here. I think it must be Greek." "Absolutely not," he countered. "They are just beginning to catch them in the Straits of Messina." "Hrrummph," said Silvia. "I'll have the sea bass."

I had met Silvia at the Italian Institute in London, where she taught Italian to people like me. She was Calabrian born and bred, and had offered to initiate me in the mysteries of her native cooking. She was in Reggio, visiting her mother.

"What was all that about?" I asked, when the battered man had beaten his retreat with our order. Silvia explained that the swordfish made their way up the Calabrian coast through the Straits of Messina to spawn. Usually, they arrived only at the end of April or the beginning of May. That's why she was suspicious about the provenance of the swordfish. It was too early for the true Italian catch. "So? What's the difference between a Greek swordfish and an Italian one?"

"As they come up through the Straits, they are getting amorosi, ready to spawn. It makes their flesh più dolce, più delicato, più morbido - sweeter, more delicate, softer, better in every way."

"Can you really tell?" She looked scandalised. "Of course." Taking pity on my solitary state, Silvia invited me to lunch on Easter Sunday at home with her mother and her aunt. Signora Cappello was a handsome woman of decisive mien, and her sister, a civil servant, had a dark languor and sharp intelligence. I had always thought that my own family's tribal feasts were pretty substantial, but nothing prepared me for the majestic sequence of dishes of a traditional Calabrese Easter feast. This one started with rigatoni al forno, the kind of dish that anchors you to the table. It consisted of ridged tubular pasta with meatballs, mozzarella, provola, cooked ham, Parmesan, melanzane, hard-boiled eggs and sugo - tomato sauce - and it had been baked in the oven.

The difference between sugo and ragù had been something of a mystery to me, but Signora Cappello briskly cleared this up for me. "Normally, sugo is simply tomato sauce, and ragù is a sauce with meat in it, like a ragù bolognese, but down here ragù is a bit different. First, I make a soffritto [the great Mediterranean base flavour of onions, or onions and garlic, stewed in olive oil]. Then I put a piece of beef and a piece of pork on top, then add the tomatoes. Now I let it bubble quietly for four hours or more. The meat is kept nice and moist, but also it gives up some of its flavour to the sauce. So you can eat your pasta with the sugo, and then eat the meat as the secondo piatto. It is a very practical way to cook, no?" Braised lamb with potatoes came next. "It must be pecora - ewe," said Signora Cappello with certainty. "It is more tender and tastier than agnello - ram." For a moment, I wondered if, like swordfish, it was più amorosa as well. Then there was a salad of Romaine lettuce and fennel; involtini di vitello, thin slices of veal stuffed with breadcrumbs, parsley, garlic, Parmesan and then grilled; fried artichoke, which had been sliced, dipped in egg and breadcrumbs, and fried; and a classically unctuous melanzane alla Parmigiana - "The melanzane [aubergine] must be female," said Signora Cappello, which prompted a long discussion about how you can tell whether or not a melanzana is female.

Even the Calabresi don't eat on this scale very often, but in the light of this trial by calorie it struck me that northern Europeans have a rather distorted view of what we loosely call Mediterranean cooking. We have been led to believe that the Mediterranean diet is light and healthy, made up mostly of vegetables, pulses and olive oil, with a few grilled dainties by way of protein. Actually, with its roots in a recent peasant culture, it is hearty, hefty, filling and loaded with carbohydrates. If you have spent the day in the fields under the broiling sun, the last thing you want is a plate of tomato and mozzarella followed by a grilled sardine and salad.

That night, I lay on the bed in my hotel, marvelling at the size of my stomach and the gastronomic riches I had already uncovered, and contemplating what lay before me. I began to feel decidedly queasy. Now I saw all too clearly that my breezy insouciance had been chronically misplaced. Faced with the reality of diversity of the country, the inadequacy of my personal resources - not very good Italian, scooter terror and cursory research - I found the reality of my undertaking, frankly, terrifying.

And it was raining. It had rained since I had arrived. It looked as if it would rain for ever.

The next day, 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. The sea twinkled below. I sped round the odd pothole. I didn't feel frightened, I didn't feel that I couldn't cope. The scooter made a noise like a demented gnat. 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 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. 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 ."

After a while, 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. 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 farther south, more classical than pagan, more wooded than forested, more Lake District than Highlands. I surged on towards Castrovillari, up through the Albanian part of Calabria. Albanians had been in these rolling hills since they fled Turkish persecution in the 15th century. In spite of five centuries of acclimatisation, they have kept their own customs, language and cooking.

According to the maître d', the carne 'ncatarata in salsa di miele e peperoncino, an idiosyncratic combination of honey and chilli with pork which I had at La Locanda de Alia in Castrovillari, was Albanian in origin. Hmm. I wasn't convinced that chilli figured prominently in Albanian cooking, so perhaps this was a Balkan dish with an Italian accent. Heat and sweetness make for ruminative eating, but I decided that it was really rather wonderful, not least because the pork was so tender that I could have sliced it up with a sheet of paper.

I followed that with the ficchi secchi con salsa di cioccolato bianco - dried figs with white chocolate sauce. It was difficult to know what to conclude from this weird confection. Decorated with a liberal dose of hundreds and thousands like tiny beads, it was as vulgar as some of the more lachrymose baroque Madonnas in roadside niches. Of course, Britain can legitimately claim to be the world leader in puddings. No other country can match the wealth and variety of our pudding tradition, from fools to roly-polies, tarts to trifles, syllabubs to creams and custards. By comparison, the Italians are limited. True, zabaglione, the velvety combination of beaten eggs, sugar and Marsala, is a great pudding; panna cotta, happily adopted by contemporary British restaurants, passes muster in its finest form; and ice creams reach a degree of perfection in Italy that we can only dream of. But for the rest? That ludicrous confection tiramisu? The trifle of an impoverished imagination. Crostate? Tarts as heavy as manhole covers. Panettone? Better turned into bread-and-butter pudding.

It was time to hit the road again. I knew it was time because it had just started to rain. I wove my way out of Calabria and into Basilicata. At Marina di Maratea, I passed a scruffy side road with a battered handwritten sign that read "Al Mare". Why not, I thought. It was a day to be beside the seaside. I turned off, bounced down the track, passed a trattoria, and went over the coastal railway line to a small headland covered in umbrella pines and that characteristic Mediterranean green-grey scrub of broom, juniper and laurel. On either side of the headland were two small, pebble-beached coves, apparently deserted. Parking in the shade, I scrambled down to the farther of the two coves. The harsh, ammoniac smell of rotting seaweed mixed with the fragrance of thyme growing around the walls of the cove. The seabed wobbled and rippled through the blue water. It seemed silly not to have a little paddle. I took off my boots and socks and rolled up my trousers. The winking light off the sea was mesmerising. Well, why not have a swim? I stripped to my underpants and slipped into the water. It was gently refreshing, and the sun was warm on my head. I paddled round and then eased myself out on to a rock and lay like a white seal in the sun. And then the pagan spirit of the place took hold and I shed the last vestiges of civilisation and swam naked. This is it, I thought. This is how I had imagined it would be.

When others drawl on about wrestling with crocodiles, killing wild boar with their bare hands and bungee-jumping from the top of the Niagara Falls, the man who has ridden a scooter in Naples has only to say, in a quiet voice, "I have ridden a scooter in Naples", and, if they have any sense, those other thrill-seekers will fall silent and simply look at him with awe. There was something of the chariot race in Ben Hur about it, and something of the intergalactic battles in Star Wars, speeded up tenfold. Traffic roared, leaped, hooted, tooted, peeled away, converged, moved in all directions at once with a terrible intensity. And through all this mechanised chaos wove scooters, on this side of the road or that, stopping, starting, scooting off again, from nought to 60 in three metres.

Which way? This street or that? Decisions needed to be made in an instant. Of course, it would have helped to have known where I was going. In these instants - seconds, minutes, hours - I lived several lifetimes. People were kindly. They didn't swear or rage. They didn't confront or abuse. No one was stationary long enough. When at last I reached a hotel that would give me a bed, I lay down on it fully clothed and passed out.

I had returned to Naples to start the second leg of my odyssey. It was mid-June, and the weather alternated between balmy sunshine and sudden frenzied downpours.

The Tripperia Fiorenzano was utterly, distinctively Neapolitan. I was drawn in by a display cabinet fronting the street, decorously hung with blanched tripe, cows' feet, pigs' trotters and a bit of calf's head, all dripping with the water that continuously sprayed over them. Beyond the cabinet was a tiny and immaculate dining room with five tables, each covered with a blue-check oilcloth, with a small kitchen down one side. Antonio Moglie was a third-generation trippaio and ran the place with his son.

There was a steady trickle of customers, mostly women, buying to take home, as he cooked a dish for me. It was just oil, tomatoes, chilli, salt and lots of pepper. That's the distinguishing spice in Neapolitan cookery, he told me, pepper. He wasn't sure why.

It was something of a mystery. The Romans had been inordinately fond of pepper, as they were of most spices. But it could hardly be a remnant of imperial Rome. It could be that pepper was another culinary debt Naples owed to French former rulers. The French were keen on the spice before they were hoofed out of India after the battle of Plassey in 1756, but even this French connection is a bit too flimsy to justify more than a tentative theory. All the more puzzling was the Neapolitan predilection for white pepper, although I read somewhere that the reasons for this were purely aesthetic: Neapolitan cooks did not like the specks of black pepper showing up in a dish.

The ascendancy of the tomato was easier to assess. Tomatoes arrived in Europe from the Americas a little after chillis. The first reference to them appears to have been in the 1520s. The southern Italians quickly took to the pomodoro, or golden apple, and it migrated northwards, cropping up in the herbals of Rembert Dodoens (1544) and Basilius Besler (1613), and reaching Britain some time in the 16th century. Along the way, the tomato became a staple of the still life of such artists as Murillo, a process that reached its logical conclusion when it was immortalised in a can of soup by Andy Warhol.

Signor Moglie was not really interested in this speculation. His concerns were purely culinary. "Up north, they add carrots, celery, onion. This is not good - troppi sapori, too many flavours." The Neapolitan version, he said, was simpler, the flavours purer. He was dismissive of all cooking north of the Abruzzo in general. When the tomato sauce had reduced to the required intensity, he sliced up some tripe and added it to the sugo, along with some chopped calf's head - " per una consistenza differente, e ricchezza " - and stewed everything for about 20 minutes.

As I ate it, with some springy bread with a thick, blackened crust from a shop round the corner and a plastic cup of chilled red wine, Antonio treated me to a Neapolitan worldview of tripe cooking and a missionary's sermon on the health-giving qualities of offal. Of course, he was right on both counts, but the sad thing is that nothing will bring people back to eating tripe again. He was a priest of a dying religion.

Agostino was, I suppose, what would once have been called a higgler in rural England of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, acting as a kind of commercial go-between linking remote farms and the nearest markets, bartering farm produce for essentials. Agostino had the complexion of someone who lived outdoors most of the time, ruddy and a bit lined. He told me the way of life in the Monti del Matese seemed hardly to have been touched by the 19th or even the 18th centuries, let alone the 20th.

The shepherds, he said, lived much as they had always done, driving their flocks from grazing to grazing throughout the spring and summer. There were about 200,000 sheep on the Matese, Spagnola and Bergamasca, and 100,000 Podolica cows. Agostino collected cheeses from the farms, where they were made by hand with unpasteurised milk by the farmers' wives. In exchange, he brought them what they needed - flour, salt, pepper, washing powder or any other of the necessities of life.

The cheeses were stored out the back in a large, cool room. They were neatly laid out on tables, arranged according to age, chunky and round, ranging in colour from the pale straw-yellow of the most recent arrivals, a few weeks old, to grey, mould-encrusted cheeses like stones. We sipped a lethal dose of walnut liqueur as we tasted some old and pungent pecorino, like essence of cheese, all crumbly and smelly, usually used just for grating, and a mild, fresh caciocavallo with a slight, sour, lactic tang; and we chatted about cheese, fishing and football - football most of all.

Between dismissive comments about the form of the current Italian football team, Agostino seemed quite buoyant about the state of cheese producers in the area. "There are about 50 or so that I know about. True, that's fewer than a few years back. There used to be 100 or so in the Matese. But still a good many survive. They make cheeses as they always have, to bring a bit of spending money." "So what would happen if they had to stick to EU or Italian hygiene regulations?" I wondered. "They'd stop making cheese," said Agostino. "It wouldn't be worth their while.

Continued in Part 2....

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