Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (47 page)

During the D'Alema government, chicory played a leading role at the high-level presidential table. A chicory pie with sea urchins, made by the illustrious personal chef Gianfranco Vissani, was served to Gerhard Schröder on May 17, 1999, on the occasion of the Italo-German summit in Bari. More recently, this plant of the Asteraceae family leaped back into the headlines of all the Italian newspapers when, after the capture of the dangerous fugitive and mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano in Sicily on April 10, 2006, a saucepan with the remains of boiled chicory was found on the small cooking stove in his rundown farmhouse.

 

It sends us back to an archaic food world, governed by simple gestures and honest flavors . . . things available to cows and people who have nothing—all they have to do is search through the weeds as millions of Italians did during World War II. The search for wild chicory holds up against affluence, the third millennium, emigration.

 

Thus
The New York Times
, in a front-page story, described the strange habits of Italian-Americans of New Jersey and New York: surrounded by trailer trucks and speeding cars streaking past one another, they park in highway turnouts and pick supplies of chicory plants. The health authorities' appeals—“Plants saturated by pollution”—fall on deaf ears. There's nothing to be done. The Italian-Americans have been looking for chicory
da sempre
—since time immemorial, as the Romans say, and they will continue to do it.
⁸

The active use of the culinary code in election campaigns was exalted at one time by the shipowner Achille Lauro, a political Monarchist, nicknamed “Commander,” who became mayor of Naples by buying votes in exchange for pasta. It was said bitterly and sarcastically in the city that during the course of the elections of 1953 “the grain mills worked harder than the printing offices.”
⁹

“The Vacca family, hired by mayoral candidate Achille Lauro, distributed pasta during the electoral campaign. The family next door, after receiving it and eating it for lunch, left the house to conduct propaganda for the PCI [Partito Comunista Italiano, the Italian Communist Party]. The Vacca family became aware of it. An altercation arose, which then continued dramatically with razor slashing. Four people . . . were seriously injured,” the newspaper
La Stampa
reported on June 5, 1953. Also published in
La Stampa
during the
months of Lauro's electoral campaign were the articles “Pastasciutta calda con contorno nuova arma ‘segreta' di Lauro” (Hot pasta with a side of Lauro's new “secret” weapon)
¹⁰
and, aptly, “Nuovi incidenti a Napoli per le violenze dei monarchici” (New incidents in Naples as a result of Monarchist violence).
¹¹
The article “Ricompaiono pasta e olio nella campagna elettorale Dc” (Pasta and oil reemerge in the DC electoral campaign) appeared in
L'Unità
, The Italian left-wing newspaper, on April 30 of that same year.

Thanks to pasta, olive oil, and tomatoes, the Neapolitan populace proclaimed the Monarchist Achille Lauro its first citizen. In the three months prior to the elections, the Christian Democrats, his adversaries, having learned of his citywide food distribution, had sent fourteen thousand gift packets to the city through Leopoldo Rubinacci, the minister of labor. But Lauro, responding to the distribution of dry rations by his competitors, decided to take a revolutionary step: he began distributing hot pasta dishes in Monarchist centers in Naples. Beginning April 8, 1953, a free mess hall began operating in the city at the Flower Market, serving a thousand meals per hour. A plate of pasta was distributed to anyone who showed a Monarchist Party card or had a special voucher, distributed by the Monarchists' electoral committee.

Snickering, people began calling Achille Lauro's Popular Monarchist Party (PMP) the “Pasta Macaroni Pomodoro” party. But this taunting was not enough to decrease his number of votes—on the contrary.

In other regions of Italy, especially in red Emilia Romagna, free pasta was unsuccessful. Achille Lauro tried to hold a rally in Piazza Maggiore in Bologna, but leaflets were distributed among the crowd: “Here in Emilia Neapolitan pasta doesn't catch on: we prefer our homemade tagliatelle.” In Italy, tagliatelle, like the embattled tortellini of Emilia attacked by the Roman D'Alema (see “
The
Sagra
”), were and still remain a symbol of Communist camp kitchens. It was the Communism that Mussolini termed “Socialism of the tagliatelle,” in reference to the rallies held by revolutionaries who “furled up the red flags as soon as they saw a white tablecloth.”

But that's how Communist propaganda work was done immediately after the war, in July 1948. To wish Palmiro Togliatti a quick recovery after the dangerous attempt on his life, a huge party was held in Rome at the Foro Italico stadium, which appeared to have lost its institutional solemnity for the occasion:

 

The lawns and marble
piazzali
were teeming, their green and white expanses covered by a shrieking crowd that only the vendors of fritters, soft drinks, balloons, and propaganda leaflets were able to make their way through . . . Seamen from the Lido, on a cart representing
a fishing trawler, were cooking fish stew and eating it, alternating the lyrics of “Bandiera rossa” with loud shouts of hurrah. Meanwhile the guests arrived, trooping through stands selling grapes and melons, orange drinks, ice creams, and sweet buns (
maritozzi
); sweaty and boisterous, they crowded on the steps of the stadium.
¹²

 

Today, the culinary code is still part of the political experts' arsenal and is used widely in electoral campaigns, especially by the coalition of the Left.
¹³

Following the fall of ancient Rome, Naples was dominated by the Normans, the Swabians, the Aragon dynasty, the Angevin dynasty, the Bourbon dynasty, and the Savoy dynasty, but these foreign rulers did not leave many recipes in Neapolitan tradition and cookbooks (with the exception of
sartù
and baba).

For a long time, the world considered the cuisine of Naples and Campania the maximum, absolute expression of the Italian character (
italianità
). And indeed, it was in Naples that macaroni with tomato sauce, spaghetti with clams, and pizza were invented. Since the days of ancient Rome, the term
cene capuane
(Capuan dinners) has been synonymous with “extravagant banquets.” On May 29, 1787, Goethe wrote of Naples:

 

There is no season when one is not surrounded on all sides by victuals. The Neapolitan not only enjoys his food, but insists that it be attractively displayed for sale. In Santa Lucia the fish are placed on a layer of green leaves, and each category—rock lobsters, oysters, clams and small mussels—has a clean, pretty basket to itself. But nothing is more carefully planned than the display of meat, which, since their appetite is stimulated by the periodic fast day, is particularly coveted by the common people.

In the butchers' stalls, quarters of beef, veal or mutton are never hung up without having the unfatty parts of the flanks and legs heavily gilded.

Several days in the year and especially the Christmas holidays are famous for their orgies of gluttony. At such times a general cocagna [
cuccagna
, feast] is celebrated, in which five hundred thousand people vow to outdo each other. The Toledo and other streets and squares are decorated most appetizingly; vegetables, raisins, melons and figs are piled high in their stalls; huge paternosters of gilded sausages, tied with red ribbons, and capons with little red flags stuck in their rumps are suspended in festoons across the streets overhead. I was assured that, not counting those which people had fattened in their own homes, thirty thousand of them had been sold. Crowds of donkeys laden with vegetables, capons and young lambs are driven to market, and never in my life have I seen so many eggs in one pile as I have seen here in several places.

Not only is all this eaten, but every year a policeman, accompanied by a trumpeter, rides through the city and announces in every square and at every crossroad how many thousand oxen, calves, lambs, pigs, etc., the Neapolitans have consumed.
¹

 

By Andrei Bourtsev

This region is fortunate for the fertility of the terrain, for its prominence, and for its climate. Here, outdoor life, no matter what the weather, affords a genuine physical pleasure. The climate is simply ideal, mild in winter and not too hot in summer, with a steady, pleasant breeze. The natural landscapes are remarkable and the day passes in contemplation: this is a paradise for tourists, with one of the most beautiful coastlines of Italy, the Amalfi Coast. Hippolyte Taine, who didn't like anything, found Campania extraordinarily pleasing. On March 6, 1864, after leaving Naples, he wrote:

 

As far as Capua the country is a garden. Green crops as fresh as in May cover the plain. Every fifteen feet a branchless elm sustains a tortuous vine, the lateral shoots of which extend to another trunk, and convert the field into one vast arbour. Above this brown trellis of vines and the whitened branches of the elms rise Italian pines with their dark spreading cupolas, as if of a foreign and superior race . . . But how luxuriant the country around! Vegetation rises to a man's height, and the atmosphere is so mild that we can leave the windows of the carriage continually open.
²

 

Here the harvest is so abundant that it plentifully supplies not one but two metropolises (Rome and Naples), located in the same agricultural region. Unlike Rome (a papal city, and a tourist city, where the clergy rules), Naples was a true capital of a kingdom. Stendhal wrote on December 6, 1816: “The Kingdom of Naples is confined to this one city, which alone among all towns of Italy has the tone and the bustle of a true capital . . . Naples, like Paris, is a great capital city; this, perhaps, is the reason why I find so little to record . . . Naples, alone among Italian cities, has the true makings of a capital; the rest are nothing but glorified provincial towns, like Lyon.”
³