Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (56 page)

In northern Italy
latterie
, or dairy shops, abound. At one time, every block had its own dairy shop, where besides selling milk they served meat, fish, and vegetables. They are wonderful places—at least the few that have survived to present day.

The existence of
fiaschetterie
, or wineshops (not to be confused with the Roman
fraschetterie
, wine bars), comes from the region of Chianti and has gradually spread throughout Italy. The Chianti bottle is called a
fiasca
(flask), and a
fiaschetteria
is a place where there are many flasks. Giannino in Milan (in the Vittoria area), known since 1899 and now a deluxe restaurant, started out as a
fiaschetteria
. Giannino's cuisine is Tuscan.

Taverns date back to ancient Rome and Greece.

Places that serve tea, in the absence of an Italian term, are pretentiously referred to by the English term “tearoom.” The tea ritual is so rare, so aristocratic, that even Italian high society does not always have enough
bon ton
to indulge in it. But if they do, it is at five o'clock in the afternoon. The tea is brewed strong, as the English prepare it. The most affected ladies schedule appointments in a tearoom for five o'clock. A trace of lemon in the tea is a symbol of high aristocracy, recalling the counts and countesses in a song by Giorgio Gaber and Enzo Jannacci: “A slice of lemon in the tea . . .” Asking for tea at the end of lunch or dinner in an ordinary restaurant, as Russian tourists often do, is wasted effort: you get a teapot of boiling water and a sorry teabag.

Cantine
, or wine bars, are places where you can drink wine and have some bread and cheese. Like most other places, some wine bars have kept to their mission, while others have been transformed into restaurants, at times quite lavish. There are wine bars that have existed for several centuries, such as the Ca' de be' (the place to drink) in Bertinoro, Romagna, not far from Predappio, a powerfully alluring destination for the history buff: Mussolini is buried not far from there.

Enoteche
(wineshops) can be unforgettable, such as the Enoteca Pubblica della
Liguria e della Lunigiana, in the high-vaulted basements of the seventeenth-century Palazzo del Comune in Castelnuovo Magra, where art exhibitions are held. Or the illustrious Enoteca Pinchiorri in Florence's historic center, which is recognized as the best in Italy by the most rigid gastronomic experts.

In the center of Tuscan cities there are shops,
mescite
, also called
vinaini
, where unbottled wine is sold from the barrel. In many cities in Liguria, Campania, and Sicily people love the
friggitorie
, where fried foods are sold to take home or eat along the street. There you can get something savory or something sweet. The
rosticcerie
(rotisseries or delicatessens) have a similar function.

In thousands of villages, in hundreds of thousands of places, you can enjoy wonderful food directly from the producer. You can also go directly to the farms for that purpose.

In stalls in the historic center of big cities, at the market, or in small villages, you can buy every kind of street food: chestnut cake, roast chestnuts, roast corn on the cob, watermelons, and so on, and it is these stands that give the city such a warm, human, unique feeling: the watermelon vendors, the lupine vendors, the cooked-pear vendors. These are the few individuals who remain constant in a landscape of rapidly changing features, as we all become acquainted with the third millennium, now no longer the stuff of science fiction.

Or we can plunge into the mountains and hills of Piedmont, in the Langhe, and clamber up the hills, looking for a particular farm in order to have lunch or dinner and at the same time support the rural economy by participating in the program Turismo del Vino e Dei Sapori (Tourism of Wine and Tastes). It is an essential effort for the salvation of those farms, which would otherwise be forced to close. Besides being of clear benefit to farmers, this type of tourism secures great satisfaction to all participants (see “
Slow Food
”).

But the best thing someone who wants to eat outside the home in Italy can do is travel 240 kilometers away from one's home city, follow a winding road along a lake, climb up 1,500 meters along a snaking, unpaved track in the Ossolan Alps, and end up right at the hut of a herdsman who keeps a hundred cows and produces a hundred Toma cheeses per year. There they will serve you potato gnocchi and
neccio
(a local focaccia) with butter, sage, and cheese or with grated smoked ricotta. They will prepare a dish called
cuchela
: red potatoes cooked with pork ribs or slices of pancetta. They will offer you the local cheeses. No need to think twice: go and eat at a place like this.

Calabria, which lies between the Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas, has always held great strategic importance because of its position and has always been the target of foreign conquerors. Its land has frequently been the scene of battles between various conquering peoples. And the Calabrians, without much resistance, assimilated the language and customs of their invaders, and appropriated their culinary cultures, with all their oddities and superstitions. In some areas of Calabria, farmers still read omens from a pig's entrails when it is taken to slaughter, as the Etruscan haruspices did. And like the ancients, they believe that it is possible to guess whether a boy or a girl will be born by interrogating the stars. Even today, they see to it that the formal Christmas and Epiphany dinner consists of exactly thirteen courses, not one more, not one less. For St. Rocco's Day, you can bake bread dough in the image of any ailing body part, and it will heal without any medical intervention. While kneading the leavened dough, women were expected at one time to dance and shout incantations to drive away the evil spirits. The bakers who were kneading the bread could not be approached without having first requested permission from St. Martin. In Calabria there are still some who trace a magic sign of protection on the loaf before it enters the oven: a triple cross.

The ethnographer gathering all this material must suddenly stop in bewilderment.
For Calabria hosts a phenomenon even more arresting than these rituals: a mirage, right before his very eyes. It is called the Fata Morgana effect, referring to the magical fairy Morgan le Fay. From the port of Reggio Calabria, on very hot days, an entire city with houses and palm trees can suddenly be seen clearly, rising above the sea. According to scientific explanation, they are the buildings of the city of Messina that “fly” across the strait as a result of water vapor and fluctuating warm air, saturated with moisture.

Some Calabrian customs deviate quite a bit from widespread Italian ritual. Throughout Italy breakfast usually boils down to a sip of coffee, or something extremely light. In Calabria, on the other hand, it is a very substantial meal. Unique in all of Italy, Calabrians consume a real English-style cooked breakfast. In the morning they may eat a specific meat pie, the
murseddu
(from the Spanish
almuerzo
, breakfast), a shell of leavened dough with entrails, liver, pancetta, salt pork, and salami with hot red pepper. Often such an abundant breakfast is consumed in the company of friends and relatives, in a trattoria. Others eat a brioche filled with ice cream (a rather exotic variant) instead, in the course of their morning travels. It is definitely part of the southern tradition to eat while walking in the street: in the early morning, in the piazzas and narrow streets of Calabrian towns are stands where you can buy
arancini
(rice balls),
panzerotti
(folded, fried pizza), fritters, pizza, and stuffed focaccias.

From the eighth century
B.C.
until the third century
B.C.
, Calabria, like Puglia and Sicily, was part of Magna Graecia. It was the Greeks who founded Reggio Calabria, Sybaris (populated by dissolute Sybarites), Crotone, and Locri. Five hundred years after the Greeks, the Romans arrived in Calabria and had high regard for the local wines. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Calabria was ruled in turn by the Germans, the Goths, the Lombards, the Byzantines, the Normans, the Franks, the Swabians, the Saracens, the Spanish, and the French, until the power of the terrible Calabrian mafia, the
'ndrangheta
, began to assert itself, succeeding the numerous foreign rulers in the second half of the nineteenth century. The sparse, scattered population maintained political neutrality, developed few relationships, and led a silent, dismal life in houses similar to hermitages.

Indeed, this region is ideal for anchorites. In the area of Sybaris, at a vast distance from northern monasticism, Cistercian monasteries began to be established in the eleventh century. The Cistercians, at the time, had broken away from the Benedictine order to observe asceticism more strictly and follow the austere rule of St. Bernard. Calabria was so poor that asceticism was part of everyday life there. The cenobitic life
of the Sybaritic monks certainly did not evoke the extravagance of the ancient Sybarites. Working very hard, unsparingly, the Cistercians introduced many agricultural innovations into local life and developed a regular dairy farming industry in Calabria.

Nevertheless, despite this contribution of Nordic know-how, Calabrian life on the whole remained immune to external influences. The Calabrian population's custom of isolating itself on mountaintops—eating the fruits of the land and breeding with little diversity—was too ingrained. The main vegetables grown in Calabria are eggplants and peppers, while in the orchards citrus fruits predominate, especially oranges. These oranges were introduced in Calabria, as in Sicily, by the Arabs, who brought them from India and China.

Eggplants also came from the Arabs. In northern Italy they are not generally grown, because it is too cool and the eggplants grown there have no flavor. By contrast, under the burning Calabrian sun they develop fragrant juices. There is a great wealth of variety in the Calabrian eggplant domain: Asmara, Nubia, Larga Morada, Slim Jim, Black Beauty, the so-called Violets (
Violette
), and the enormous variety called “Mostruosa di New York.”