This is Part 2 of 2 Parts.
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TURIN OR BUST - Part 2

The Guardian
Matthew Fort
Saturday April 17, 2004

I left Italy in July and returned in September for the final run to Turin. It was raining again as, reunited with my scooter, I set off from Ancona. It was cold, too. But my spirits lifted as I passed Pesaro, birthplace of Rossini. It wasn't simply Rossini's exuberant gift for sunny melodies or his innate laziness that appealed to me. It wasn't even his passion for higher gastronomy - he once confessed to having cried three times in his life: when his first opera was booed; when he first heard Paganini play; and when a truffled turkey fell overboard during a boat trip. No, it was his habit of wearing wigs, two of them, one on top of the other, to keep his head warm in winter.

Shortly afterwards, I crossed from the Marche into Emilia-Romagna. Doing so, I passed out of the no man's land of the nonexistent middle of Italy and into the unquestionable north, where fresh pasta took over from dry, butter ranked alongside oil, where stews were staples and where cheeses were made from cow's milk rather than sheep's milk. Emilia-Romagna is the composite region formed in 1947. The Emiliani, from the area north and west of Bologna, have the reputation of being more sophisticated than the rustic Romagnoli, but both are recognised as having a passion for food and life remarkable even by Italian standards. Perhaps as a consequence, the area has played a unique part in the political life of Italy, giving the country both Benito Mussolini and Italy's longest-serving, and most successful, communist town council in Bologna - aka La Grassa, the Fat One, in 1945 the only city to free itself from Nazi occupation without help from the Allied forces.

The sun began to take hold as I hit the beginning of the vast plain of La Pianura Padana - the Po valley - north of Rimini, the birthplace of Federico Fellini. Smallholdings began to find spaces between the factories, lighting shops and car dealerships, and I noticed that the zucchini, tomatoes, carrots and pale green lettuces of summer had given way to lines of cabbages, fennel, chicory and grumello, a hardy winter lettuce. There were fields, too, of cannellini beans, in their red-striped pods, looking mud-spattered and bedraggled.

I took the road to Quartesana, and wound my way to the fruit farm of Sergio Natali. The family had recently begun making salama da sugo, or salamina - the names seemed to be interchangeable. Sergio had been persuaded to do so by his wife a couple of years ago after they had visited the Salone del Gusto organised by Slow Food in Turin, an international organisation set up to protect and promote indigenous food products and cultures.

Their pigs lived a happy and carefree life for 13 or 14 months in their sty, feeding on maize, bran, barley, soya and any fruit that didn't make it to the distributors. Sergio's father looked after them. He had grown up on a mixed farm, where his parents had kept pigs, and had learned about their ways. He loved his pigs, he said. He named them, fed them, washed them, mucked out their sty and nursed them when they got sick, staying up all night with them if necessary. However, each November and December, at 14 months, that was it: off they went to the abattoir 30km away.

The carcasses were brought back to the farm, where they were butchered. The choicest cuts, such as the leg and loin, were made into salame all'aglio. The lesser but tastier cuts, such as shoulder, neck, belly and cheek, went into the salama da sugo, along with tongue, a small amount of liver and fat. The sausage mix was thoroughly soaked in a great deal of wine - "Buon vino. Sangiovese di Romagna. Some makers add rum, or nocino [nut liqueur] or cinnamon," said Sergio, "but I don't think that that's a good idea. I just want to taste the meat and the wine." Then it's all packed into la vescica, the bladder. "But it has been thoroughly cleaned," Sergio assured me, in case I found the notion of using the bladder offensive.

Once the skins of the salame all'aglio and bladders of the salama da sugo were safely packed, they were taken to the maturing room, which had been converted from another farm building next door, where they were strung up from metal rods and left to age for at least a year. There did not appear to be any form of refrigeration, other than the natural, airy cool of the room, and the only form of protection that I could make out was the floor-to-ceiling flyproof mesh. The salame looked like large, furry gourds. They were dark and slightly knobbly inside their string nets. Each had a label attached to it, with the name of the customer written on it and the date when they were made. These were bespoke sausages.

"People come along and choose their salamina, and we keep them here until they want them, at Easter or Christmas," Sergio explained. Some were two years old. "Occasionally, people forget about them or prefer the extra ageing. The older they get, the stronger and sharper the flavour," he said.

We walked across the yard to the house where his mother and father lived, and ate lunch in the kitchen. We started with another Ferrarese speciality, cappellacci, one of the apparently endless varieties of ravioli filled with pumpkin in pork sauce, the mild sweetness of the pumpkin contrasting with the potent, salty condiment. And then we came to the salama da sugo, which was served according to tradition with mashed potato, made with boiling milk, butter and grated Parmesan. I helped myself to two pieces, and some potato. When I finished these, I had a third piece, and then a fourth. The thick slices of sausage were a dark, purply brown. Their texture was compact and dense. Each exploded in my mouth with a flavour of enormous power, full with a keen, salty edge. The bland, unsalted mashed potato acted as a perfect foil, absorbing the fat, a neutral antibody to the intensity of the meat. I would have eaten the whole thing, had I been able. It was the definitive boiling sausage, intense, colossal in its depth of flavour, penetrating and pervading every corner of my mouth, spicy, rich, complex, intoxicating.

"What do you think?" asked la signora anxiously. I was stricken by the inadequacy of my Italian to express the range of my astonishment and pleasure. I considered kissing her hand, and then thought better of it. "It's very nice," I said. "Very, very, very nice."

I came to Cremona through the usual cordon insanitaire of industrial zones. I went to the hotel where I had booked a room two days before. No, said the old biddy at the reception desk, we have no booking in that name here. Are you sure, I said. I rang two days ago. Quite sure, she said. The lady in the tourist office eventually found me a room, in the most depressing hotel I had stayed in since I was a teenager. The room was below ground level, and gloomy.

I went back into the Piazza del Duomo that evening, and sauntered about in front of the wonderful façade of the Duomo, with its spectacular campanile, the highest in Italy, and treated myself to a Campari soda in one of the cafes. While sipping and pondering, I rang the highly rated restaurant La Sosta. The conversation went like this:
"Do you have a table for dinner tonight?" "Certainly. For how many?" "For one person." "For one?" "Yes." "We have no tables." "What, not -" Click.

Round the corner, in the Piazza Stradivari, I found a rally in support of a national strike called by the CGIL, the former communist trade union, just getting under way. There were red flags, stilt walkers, jugglers with flaming brands, saccharine pop music, food and whole families out for the evening, wrapped up against the chill and chattering away. It was an endearingly sociable scene, more family picnic than mass protest. For a few euros I got a plate of salumi (salami, coppa and prosciutto cotto), a fat slice of frittata with zucchini and onions on it, a slice of apple tart, all of good quality, a lot of bread and a glass of wine, and waited while the comrades gathered. I wondered what a similar gathering in Britain would come up with by way of food.

According to the timetable of the festa, the main speaker was billed at 9pm. At 9.15, there was still no sign of him. There was no sign of anybody. The secretary of the local CGIL eventually turned up at 9.20. He wasn't quite Demosthenes. He wasn't even forceful enough to silence the lively chatter of the crowd of party faithful that was going on around me, fuelled by two hours of gentle drinking and comradeship. However, when he finished there was prolonged and stormy applause, as they used to say in Pravda, and I went back to my dreary hotel much restored.

I was heading for Turin, on the very last stage of my journey. The road, by way of Carmagnola, was flat once again. All I had to do was survive a few more kilometres, and that would be it. I rode at a steady 60km an hour, past browny-grey thickets of desiccated maize; past stalls piled high with glossy red and yellow peperoni quadrati (sweet peppers), the speciality of the area and the season, and the polytunnels in which they grew.

The next day in Turin, I turned my scooter over to its rightful owners. It was a brisk, unsentimental parting. I walked off up the road, with a slight sense of relief that I did not have to worry about theft, punctures, mechanical failure or personal absurdity any more. It was right that I ended here in Turin. This was, in reality, where the process of unifying Italy had begun and ended, manipulated in an extraordinary fashion by Count Camillo di Cavour, prime minister to the kingdom of Savoy and then of Italy.

So was Italy unified in any meaningful sense of the word? There were still deep divisions, between north and south, between region and region, between state and people. They couldn't even agree on matters such as the correct saucing of cappellaci, for heaven's sake. But Italy, it seemed to me, is indeed united, perhaps more than it recognises. It is united not by notional politics or culture or language, or even by prosciutto, pizza or pasta. It's the passion to grow things to eat, and the casual, commonplace, everyday passion displayed in cooking and eating them, that forms the true, common currency that fuses the country together.

More than that, food is both the key to understanding Italian life, and a metaphor for Italian politics. Just as it is impossible to get agreement on what should go into salame di fegato in Sulmona or pasta e fagioli in Naples, so it is impossible to get to the bottom of the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano or who planted the bomb that killed 16 people in the Banco dell' Agricoltura in Milan in 1969.

I kept being told that things were changing, that you couldn't find this sausage or that bread any longer, that agriculture was becoming increasingly industrialised, that more women were working, that fewer people had the time for the rituals of shopping locally and cooking the time-consuming dishes of their region, that the younger generation did not have the same respect for their native food culture that the speaker had. Yet, in many cases, the speaker was no older than those whose lack of knowledge they were lamenting, and the gloomy assessment was offered in the course of a meal that celebrated the very values they claimed were being lost. ·

This is an edited extract from Eating Up Italy, by Matthew Fort, published on May 4 by Fourth Estate at £16.99. To order a copy for £14.99 (plus UK p&p), call 0870 066 7979.

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