TOiLING IN THE VINEYARDS

Yesterday was incredibly hard work and we were so exhausted when we returned we cooked a simple store-bought pasta and fell into bed. But before you expend much sympathy on us, it was also incredibly fun. We were toiling in the vineyards of archaeology.

Yesterday morning about 8:30 Fernando showed up and we rounded up Fabio, who loaded us into Rolando’s Jeep, a Russian-made Lada Niva 4 X 4, and we headed out to the Bay of Trentova, down the coast from Agropoli. We left the coast road after several miles and it immediately became clear why we needed the Lada; this was a road in only the most generic sense of the word. Thankfully it has been dry here for at least two weeks (the proverbial Mediterranean climate), so there was no serious danger of being stuck, just of bouncing off the ceiling. But then, suddenly, there we were on a beautiful little Roman road, pavers perfectly fitted, well-wrought curbstones, the camber in the middle to shed water just like I tell my students, and straight as an arrow. Most impressive of all, it was in near perfect condition after some 2,000 years. And we in America are lucky to get 40 out of ours.

The Roman road quickly disappeared and we endured more carnival ride, but soon enough arrived at the site of a Roman villa maritima, one of those luxury villas the Romans built all up and down the southern Italian coast to get away from the stress of life in the big city, to enjoy the pleasant year-round weather, and to luxuriate in the spectacular views for which this area is so rightly famous.

Unfortunately, the Roman villa was superseded by a Medieval villa which still stands, though in a state of perilous ruin and now used as a cow barn. The Roman villa is some 4 meters down, and only a small test dig has been conducted, four meters square, to establish the existence of the villa. What remains visible is still impressive. The villa was surrounded by a huge stone wall, apparently some 16’ tall and several meters wide. This site is thought to go back several centuries BCE, and the assumption is that the wall was built during the Punic Wars when the fearsome Carthaginian fleet caused such fear along these coasts.

Elsewhere Fernando showed me a huge stone into which had been cut two parallel cavities, about 2’ wide and 5’ long, which the original discoverer had suggested were tombs. Not very likely; no other such tombs exist and cuttings on one end seem to be for the wooden stanchions to support a superstructure, and another scholar has suggested a press bed for olive oil instead. Then we saw a spring which issued from the hillside behind the villa, for which the Romans had wrought a well crafted reservoir complete with a painted wall in front; the Romans adored the aqua minerale of this region as much as their descendants now do. We followed the continuation of the Roman road as it made its way down to a small bay, a port for the facility, and Fernando pointed out places on the hillside where the local stone had been quarried to be shipped from this harbor.

Unquestionably the most impressive thing about the site was the sheer volume of items, Roman as well as Greek, which were clearly visible on the ground. It’s what the archaeologists call surface scatter. Fabio has an incredibly sharp eye for such things and he pointed out fragments of Greek drinking cups, of Roman plates and bowls, of marble fragments beautifully cut to create an intarsio floor, probably for part of the bath complex that Romans included in their villas, of fragments of Roman glass, clear and of the brilliant cobalt that the Romans first made famous. All this in an area the size of our house lot back home. This is an extremely rich site, just screaming to be excavated. So why not? Lack of funds, of course. There are just so many sites in Italy and so little money to support such research. But Fabio and Fernando call this “another Paestum, just waiting to be discovered.”

After a brief excursion to the top of the hill for a panoramic view of the area and of Paestan Plain, we headed home for some lunch and a brief riposo. Then we were off to chase more archaeology. Fabio had to work, but we were joined by Sandy’s new best friend, Katuscia. We love being with this young woman. She is beautiful, bright, funny and warmhearted. And she seems to be quite smitten with Fabio. The problem is that Fabio has a mistress, one he has adored, according to Uncle Luigi, at least since he was eight. Her name is Archeologia, and she is stiff competition indeed.

We were headed for the mountain town of Perdifumo, but we stopped in Vatolla along the way to see another cantina, this one in the basement of a medieval palazzo that belonged to the Spanish family of Vargas. Fernando had made arrangements to meet the custodian of the palace—it has become an inside joke with us that Italian cultural attractions are siempre aperto...ma non oggi!, ‘always open...just not today’!—but in the event he was nowhere to be found. Two hours later Fernando was able to track him down (he’s a volunteer for the Italian Red Cross as well) and we made a brief tour of the carefully refurbished palazzo, which is now a center to commemorate a local boy who made good, the famous philosopher and educational reformer Giambattista Vico. But no cantina, the very thing we came to see! It seems a different custodian had the key to the cantina, and he, too, was nowhere to be found. Oy!

So down the road we went to Perdifumo, where we parked the car and strolled through the little town, asking periodically where was the famous palmento. It’s one of those ironies of Italy that in the midst of such cultural wealth very few people really know or care what they are living amidst. Finally some gentlemen playing penuchle in the piazza who sent us off to the suburbs, followed by more confusion and several more puzzled locals, before a little nono came walking down the road and pointed to an olive orchard right beside us... and there was the palmento, largely obscured by olive nets and vine stakes, not 50 meters away. Without his help we would never have found it. The owner of the orchard kindly offered permission to explore, and we finally bagged the big one.

At least big to a couple of classical geeks. Palmenti are large treading vats cut into native stone, with one, two, sometimes three separate but connected vats. This was a single vat, but the more typical form has two, an upper and a lower one, connected by a small hole in the adjoining wall. The best guess is that grape clusters were harvested and dumped into the upper vat where they were trodden by naked feet, still the absolute best method for gently extracting grape juice, called must, without extracting too much tannin from the skins and seeds. The grape solids would settle to the bottom of the upper tank and when the tank was full the aperture between the vats, probably plugged with wet clay, would be opened and the pure must allowed to drain into the lower vat, to be racked into fermentation vessels. Remaining juice might be left on the marc, the solid parts of the clusters, to obtain color, flavor and a bit of tannin, all of which derive almost exclusively from the skins of the grapes. After perhaps 24 to 48 hours the juice would be racked off the marc and the marc put under a press of some sort to extract more of the precious liquid.

So what’s the big deal? It has to do with the history of wine. There is a debate in scholarly circles as to when exactly wine was first systematically produced in the Old World. To explain, wine is a food product that will essentially make itself, since colonies of yeasts are lurking on the grape skins just waiting for that barrier to be broken so they can have a regular sugar-eating orgy, in the process of which they will fart out CO2 and pee out ethyl alcohol. You’ve all seen those little colonies—they appear as grayish coloration on dark grapes—and perhaps didn’t even know what you were looking at. The point is that making wine, at least bad wine, is a fairly simple technology. The problem is that wine very quickly and inevitably turns to vinegar unless oxygen is excluded from the product. So the development of pottery in the late Neolithic was a very big deal.

But what about Middle Neolithic or even Paleolithic? We simply don’t know, but it’s fun to speculate. Are the palmenti that cluster along the Apennine regions of Italy, from Aemilia-Romagna all the way down to Calabria, neolithic vats? Probably not, although it is difficult to say. How do you date a native stone? The most knowledgeable scholar in this area, the Frenchman, Jean-Pierre Brun, thinks they go no further back than the Roman period. The point is that theoretically they could have provided winemaking in the Neolithic, at least in the so-called ceramic period after there were jugs to store the wine in. And we are in the process of developing the analytical tools such as chromatography and mass spectrometry to determine many things about such vessels, so someday we may have a more definitive answer to the question. In the meantime Dave just had to hop in this palmento and do a bit of imaginary grape treading. Katuscia was a good sport and helped me out. And later that night at home I raised a toast to our ancestors, whoever they were, who developed the wonderful technology of wine. And half the night I dreamed, not of sexy Italian girls, but of sexy Italian palmenti!

STORIED WATERS

I mentioned earlier how immediate the distant past is for Catholics in this country because of the many elements of paleo-Christianity that are immediately at hand. But the same is perhaps truer for a classicist; the classical world is everywhere in southern Italy, not to speak of the pre-classical, neolithic and even paleolithic world. Sandy and I have been hop scotching along the coasts for several days, and we’ve been bumping into a whole lot of history.

Last week, for example, we accompanied Fernando to one of the many conferences he participates in, this one to help launch the new book he and his friend and distant cousin Amadeo La Greca have published on Licosa and Ogliastro, two seaside towns along the Cilentane coast. Fernando's talk was accompanied by slides, and we were able to follow most of it. The Punta di Licosa is one of those points along the Tyrrhenian coastline that mark another bay, which spell a measure of safety for a hard-driven sailor. But of course to reach that safety you have to pass by the points, the most dangerous, shoaly places along the coast. It’s one of those ironies that the danger is what creates the safety. I suppose there’s a life lesson there, though I’m not sure what it is.

In any case, this point is associated in myth and history with two goddesses, Leukosia, one of the fabled Sirens who lure sailors to destruction, and Leukothea, a sea goddess. Imagined either in wholly anthropomorphic form or as harpies, that is, creatures with the upper bodies of women but the lower bodies of birds of prey, the Sirens brought ruin either by singing so sweetly that sailors became enraptured, forgot about business, and crashed on the rocks and died. Alternately, they shrieked so loudly that sailors became distracted in their terror...and crashed on the rocks and died. Choose your poison. By far the most famous hero to encounter these gals was Odysseus, the great hero of the Trojan epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Odysseus has been warned in advance and so he has his crew plug their ears with beeswax so they can’t hear and has himself tied to the mast so that he can hear the fatal songs. Odysseus has a real problem with self-control, but at least he’s beginning to learn after a mere 18 years.

Alternately, the point is associated with the goddess Leukothea, “The White Goddess”, savior of sailors (and ultimately of our guy Odysseus). Two letters difference, nemesis or savior. But which one? There’s a solid tradition in the ancient sources for both. Nobody ever accused the Greeks of being unsophisticated in their thinking, so I’m going with both. Hey, it’s a gorgeous little harbor, as Sandy’s pictures will attest. But when I look at that point, especially on Fernando’s aerial view that shows the shoals and reefs, even I as a jackleg sailor get the fantods. And when you consider that ancient sailors habitually coasted, that is, ran along the coasts instead of in deep water, it’s easy to see how some poor fellow desperate for refuge in a storm might discover his plight too late.

Two days later we headed for two other fabled towns, Policastro Bussentino and Palinuro, further down the coast.

Policastro was the site of an important Roman town but is more interesting to me because a famous Roman wine was produced there. To reach the town we headed away from the coast and through the heart of the Cilentane mountains along the superstrada that follows the old Roman Via Annia. We passed near to Monte Bulgheria, whose dramatic profile had us believing it was eight or nine thousand feet tall, although it is in fact less than four. I suppose it’s because the road at that point is close to sea level and the mountain just erupts out of the valley and shoots straight up above dizzying precipices. In any case, I’ve never seen anything else so much like those peaks in Yosemite.

The mountain derives its name from Bulgarian colonists who settled there in the 500s CE, and there’s a little town, Celle di Bulgheria, that commemorates the event. The locals think the mountain looks like a recumbent lion, something like a sphinx, with it’s haunches to the west and head to the east, and that this leone like any good sphinx guards the valley and protects them from harm.

The little town of Policastro itself is underwhelming. There’s a beautiful beach with lots of little lidos, the businesses along Italian coasts that have showers and rent cabanas and/or umbrellas and beach chairs, as well as offering snacks and sandwiches. The Greek town was Pyxintos or some such, but after the Punic Wars it was refounded as a Roman colony and renamed Buxentum, and became an important seaport. Unfortunately, that made it vulnerable to the constant depredations of invaders and pirates during the next 1300 years. Again and again the little town would be sacked and destroyed by Byzantines, Saracens, Aragonese, Bourbons, Turks...you name it. Again and again the conquerors would recognize the strategic advantage of the town and rebuild and refortify it, only to be supplanted by the next group of thugs. Eventually most of the population wised up and moved up on the mountain to a new town, Santa Marina, more easily defended and less malarial.

And yet, there is a large and beautiful church in the old town, built over the site of the old Roman forum and probably right over the Temple of the Capitoline Triad (early Christians were not too subtle in their religious symbolism) and incorporating Roman architectural features such as columns. Down the center aisle of the nave are buried no fewer than three bishops, the ceiling is gorgeously ‘frescoed’ on wood panels, there are impressive paintings along both side aisles...the whole thing is most impressive, way too impressive for such a tiny village. Sic transit gloria mundi indeed. Most shocking of all to me is the fact that wine is no longer a big deal here. There’s no local DOC (the Italian version of a designation of origin) and as I fly my Google Earth helicopter around the environs, there is just no vineyard anywhere to be found! What happened to the famous wine?

Palinuro is bigger, more touristy, but equally pretty. We hustled to the tiny Antiquarium to beat the closing time. The site has seen human occupation since the dawn of man; remains of Homo erectus have been found in a nearby grotto. Then there were the Oenotrians, the native Italic folk who evidently impressed the Greeks with their winemaking (Greek oenos = wine). So much so that a colony from Phocea, escaping from the Persians who had invaded western Turkey, Greek at the time, was established here in 540 BCE. Once again we are in the land of a siren, this one Molpe, who gave her name to a tiny village about two miles from the main area of settlement. But it was not Odysseus who suffered at the dramatic headland but Aeneas, the future founder of Rome, a Trojan prince who had escaped the destruction Odysseus and his Greeks had wrought and was told by the gods to found a new Troy in “Hesperia”, the ‘western land’.

Imagine, Aeneas has struggled from one hardship to another for almost ten years, has lost his wife and his beloved papa and is finally within reach of his new home. But the wrath of the gods is not yet sated; as Aeneas rounds the point of Palinuro and enters the bay of Licosa, he is beset by a terrible storm and loses many of his ships and men. Even his trusted helmsman Palinurus is swept overboard and drowned, a fate commemorated in the name of the Greek and later Roman town.

From the town we wound our way to the top of the headland and the faro, lighthouse, possibly built over the site of its Roman analogue. The name faro comes from the famous lighthouse built in Alexandria, Egypt which was 430 feet tall and whose beacon could be seen 36 miles out at sea. The Romans thought that was a cool idea, so, ever practical, they built phari all over the Mediterranean and even out into the Atlantic in western Spain. Today the Egyptian word is not only an Italian lighthouse, but an Italain flashlight as well. Any port in a storm, right? As we stood on a tiny rock outcrop and stared down 650 feet to a natural arch and a pleasure boat, I learned for the first time the meaning of 'dizzy heights'; I literally became dizzy and had to sit down. Nothing short of spectacular.

Sandy and I learned the hard way why our heroes preferred sea travel, with all its attendant dangers, to travel over the rugged headlands of the Cilento. Coming out of Palinuro, we had wanted to take the road southeastward to pick up the superstrada again even though we were ultimately headed north. But GPS and the Italian Siren Bad Signage conspired against us and we were directed along the coast road instead. No problem, it’ll take a bit longer, but there is another breathtaking panorama around practically every bend, since the coast road is anywhere from 200 to 400 feet above the sea...straight down. But as we came out of the picturesque little Medieval village of Pisciotta and headed toward Ascea, some 30 miles out of Palinuro, we found the road closed and barricaded. No signs anywhere along the way to indicate upcoming problems, just concrete barriers and nowhere to go but back. Back down the road we went, but cut across over a local mountain road to San Nicola and Foria to pick up the susperstrada.

Unless you’ve lived in the mountains you have no idea how serpentine a county road can be, so I won’t waste my effort. But believe me, there were many times when we made such sharp switchbacks that we were able to kiss our own fannies. Coming into a blind curve we came upon a road sign, “Frana!” Then the monologue from Sandy went something like, “Frana? What’s a fra...aaaaaaahhhhhheeeeee! Oh ^^%$^&! Oh &&^%())*&*! Oh &&^$^&!” And so on and so forth for about another mile. I won’t spoil the fun, but I will tell you that Italian frana shares the same Latin root as English fragmentary. Fortunately, our Leukosia proved to be more of a Leokothea, and we made our way without too much further incident back to the superstrada and back to our welcoming little home away from home.

TOTA ITALIA IN TRIA CURRICULA DIVISA EST

We are often delighted and a bit amused with how laid back Italians are about matters of time. People just don’t seem to be as frantic as they are in the States. Things get done in Italy, more often than not done well and with pride...but not necessarily very quickly. I wonder if that is a function, in some small measure, of their Roman heritage. The Romans, you see, did not have minutes. None. Nada. Didn’t even have a word for the concept. Our word minute comes from the Latin minutus, ‘small’, as in minute, My-NOOT. The timekeepers that Romans had were just not practical for measuring such small increments of time.

One of my mentors at Chapel Hill wrote a very thought-provoking article about “Life without Minutes”. Can you imagine NOT being late for work, or for an appointment, or to pick up the kids at practice, or any of the dozen other minute-functional episodes we Americans confront in a typical day? The smallest time increment the Romans had was the half hour, so I suppose if you showed up an hour late, old Marcus Cato might be a bit peeved, but otherwise he’d just relax, have a little vinum, maybe hobnob with his chums about that young whippersnapper Gaius Julius, and be happy to see you when you appeared. As anal as I am about punctuality, that seems like heaven to me: a system that compels you to chill out and take life a little less seriously.

But there is one area where the Italians have a serious, chronic and urgent need for speed, and that is on the roads. To an American, the typical Italian driver drives like a pipistrello out of Inferno.

Which is ironic, since it is absolutely impossible to go fast through any but the most modern of Italian towns. The speed limits in towns are a clever little joke that we all wink and chuckle at. Most towns here date from the Middle Ages or before, and streets are often one-lane at best. The first time we were here we rented a little Ford Fiesta, the smallest of Ford’s European models at the time, because it was all we could afford. That was the smartest stupid decision I’ve ever made. Time after time I blessed Katie (Amy was five and she always christened our cars) for being able to maneuver through lanes where a larger car could not.

There was one instance when we were driving through Perugia, a beautiful Etruscan/Roman hill town in Umbria, trying to find the Centro, the center of the ancient city. God bless the Romans for the city grid plan; hill towns are gorgeous, but their tortuous streets are sometimes all but impenetrable. We finally just decided to keep going up, up, up until we couldn’t go up any more, on the theory that the best defensive position for the important stuff was at the top of that hill. We drove up a one-way street, winding along as the road became narrower and narrower, until we came to a stone portal on the other side of which was a sidewalk. What to do? The street was one way, and we didn’t have room to turn around if it had not been. Finally I got out of the car and walked over to the nearest shop, a sort of open-air barber shop as I recall, and asked in my bad Italian, “Signori, dov’è l’uscita?” (Sirs, where’s the exit?). Uproarious laughter (I kept half of Italy in stitches that trip) and all four men pointed simultaneously...to the sidewalk! It wasn’t a sidewalk at all, it was a street!

Well, we inched our way through, Amy giggling the whole time as her Mom moaned and peeked from behind the hands she had clasped over her eyes. And, sure enough, out we popped onto the perimeter of the piazza. My advice to you: if you ever rent a car in Italy with the intent of actually seeing anything but the autostrada, get a little one. Yeah, yeah, I know all that lore about the big ones being safer. Forget it. It doesn’t apply when you’re trying to stuff 20 pounds of machina into the 10-pound poke which is an Italian viale. Get the small one and remember that the most dangerous car in the world is a safe SUV with a loose nut behind the steering wheel.

So this time you may be sure we rented a small car, in this case a little Daewoo hatchback whom we’ve named Bianca. And she is bravissima, negotiating streets and highways with grace if not speed. The only serious issue she has is with the air conditioning. Bianca may be of Asiatic extraction, but she is a thoroughly assimilated Italian, and every time Sandy turns on the air she literally makes a coughing sound, and does so periodically thereafter just to let you know how disgusted she is. If we are climbing a major hill or the flank of a mountain, the air simply has to go off.

One thing that helps in Italian towns, and on the highways too, for that matter, is the Italian love of tondi (roundabouts), and I have to say that they work remarkably well because everyone is so cooperative. The key to using the tondo is to be assertive but not aggressive. Everyone expects you to poke your nose into the flow of traffic, they’re even anticipating it, and as often as not they’ll resent it if you don’t, because it interrupts the flow of traffic and slows everything down. In any case, we have seen exactly one semaphore on this trip to Italy, ONE! And where was it? Why, on a main highway outside Tavernanuova, at the crossroads with what appeared to be a pig trail. Evidently just one that was slated for removal but someone hasn’t gotten around to it. Please refer to remarks on time perceptions.

Maybe it’s because they know they’re going to encounter such delays in the towns that the Italians drive like hell on the highways. The speed limits on highways are a clever little joke that we all wink and chuckle at. Think nothing of seeing a Lancia tooling down the autostrada at 100 mph. If you drive like me, they will appear as a speck in your rear view mirror and by the time your mind has registered what you’re seeing, they’ll be a speck on the forward horizon.

On the state highways there is less scope for such frivolity, but most of the new state roads are built with extra wide lanes, and it’s just expected that people will pass constantly. The white line in the middle of the road? It's to mark the imaginary passing lane that we all know is there. See that Alfa tailgating you? Don’t be alarmed or angry, he’s just preparing to pass. And everybody cooperates! Cars being passed will courteously move as far to the right as they safely can to allow the car overtaking to scoot around as quickly as possible. If there is oncoming traffic—oh, yeah, they absolutely do pass in the face of oncoming traffic—cars coming from the opposite direction will scoot over in the other direction as well. If it looks like a particularly tight squeeze, cars on both ends will often brake to provide the extra three millimeters the passer needs to squeeze in at the last possible second.

I’m telling you, guys, it’s a thing of beauty if you can control your nerves. At this point the only passing situations that completely freak me out are the ones where a car is passing a semi and there’s another semi approaching. But I’ve seen it happen a half dozen times since we’ve been here!

So Sandy and I just habitually hug the line on the right side of the road and try to enjoy the show. And on the autostrada we generally stay in the right lane and poke along. No problems, right? Well...no. Some of the most hair-raising episodes I’ve had in Italy were in the right lane on the autostrada, tooling along at a respectable 90 kpo, 60 mph, when I drove up on a little Fiat Cinquecento (refer to previous blog), with a nice little Italian nonno going 25 mph on the interstate. It’s just not something an American expects, and twice I’ve almost sent Nonno flying.

But what to do about those pesky towns if you’re seriously hooked on speed? Why, get a moto (motorcycle) instead! Then you can weave in and out of traffic with reckless abandon, causing motorists to dodge you and seriously threatening pedestrians! On the highway, you can also dodge and weave, but at 80 mph! Oh, and by the way, that helmet strapped to the seat? Remember, it's a fashion accessory.

I’ll admit it, I enjoy the escapades of Italian drivers. But are they really so acrobatic that they can get away with such frolics? In a word, no. I’ve never heard an Italian admit it, but they are paying a grim toll for their addiction to the fast lane. For several years now Italy has had the highest rate of motor vehicle deaths of any European country, and the Poles are their only serious competition. The Italians are paying in tragedy for their need for speed, and, more tragically still, a disproportionate percent of the toll is their young people. With appalling regularity, life in the fast lane for Italians is leading to death in the fast lane.

THE CINQUECENTO

I am seeing more and more of an Italian legend here, the beloved little Fiat Cinquecento, perhaps the world’s most heroic car. The Cinquecento has become an icon, and Italians are scooping up the classic models and dragging those old antiques out of the hay barn to gussie them up and give them the love and respect they so richly deserve.

The Nova Cinquecento (pronounced CHEEN kweh CHAIN toh), so-called after the size of its motor, was launched in 1957 by the Italian auto giant and continued production in some form or other until 1975. Like its German cousin, the classic VW Beetle, the 500 was designed to fill the post-war demand for a cheap, practical city car which would obtain excellent gas mileage. It was more successful than its designer, Dante Giacosa, could ever have dreamed.

The classic 500 has a 479 cc two-cylinder, air-cooled motor. That probably doesn’t mean a lot to many of you, so for comparison, my small Mazda truck has a 2,600cc motor and many SUVs have motors in the 4,000 cc range, almost ten times the size of the 500’s. But in a country starved for gasoline, the tiny size and the efficient engine of the 500 make sense. Again, for comparison, Italians today pay about the same in real dollars for gas as they did in ‘57. My last trip to the pump I paid 1.65 euros per liter. I’m too lazy to do the math, but that’s somewhere in the range of 7 US dollars per gallon. Our little Daewoo Matiz, Bianca, set us back about $50 the last time we pulled into the pump. Efficiency is a must here unless you’re just irresponsible or addicted to conspicuous consumption.

The original 500 was slightly less than 10’ long, featured ‘suicide doors’, the ones that were hinged at the back, and a canvas sun roof that folded back. It was also available as a slightly larger four-door station wagon with a correspondingly bigger motor. Through the years it went through several permutations, but the basic design and motor were never changed. In 2007, Fiat launched a new version of the beloved little car, similar to the relaunch of the Beetle, to capitalize on the growing nostalgia. Based on our highly unscientific research, they've allowed the Smart Car to steal a march on them, and it will be a long time before they catch up, if ever.

One of the most beautiful 500s I’ve seen belongs to our host, Rolando, and is parked in the carport on the far side of the house where it is protected from the weather. It is spotless, with the classic beige color that practically screams 500, but with gorgeous red interior and black retractable roof. Obviously this is the ‘bebe di Rolando’.

And why not? The 500 is as heroic as it is cute. The little car is legendary for its tenacity and spunk. In May 2007, for example, two Aussies drove their 1969 ‘Bambino’, the nickname the 500 receives in Australia, around the world, making it the smallest car ever to ‘circumnavigate’ the globe. The couple drove the Bambino from Vladivostok, Russia to Garlenda, Italy, thence to Belgium where it was shipped by cargo liner to New York City, then driven across the Unites States to Anchorage, Alaska where it received a hero’s welcome. The trip covered 32,000 kilometers (18,900 miles) in 99 days. Bambino was then shipped home where it received another hero’s welcome and a well deserved riposo.

But the most remarkable 500 feat, at least to me, happened right here in Agropoli, as reported by my font of information, Fernando. Some fifteen years ago no fewer than 12 Agropolitans managed to cram themselves into a 500 and proceeded to drive from San Marco to Agropoli, a distance of about ten miles. I am shocked but delighted to report that car, driver and passengers all survived the trip just fine.

LA FAMIGLIA

This morning the Astones were kind enough to take us to the farmhouse of some family friends to watch the process of simple farmhouse cheesemaking. But before you roll your eyes over another cheese blog, please read on; this blog is a little about making cheese and a whole lot about a wonderful Itailian family.

The farmhouse was located in the hills north of Agropoli and west of Paestum, beyond Monte Soprano. As we wound around country lanes and through two tiny hamlets we began to worry that Fabio had us lost. At last we arrived in the frazione (hamlet) of Terzerie in the commune (town) of Roccadaspide. We were warmly greeted by Rosanna, a strikingly beautiful woman with piercing eyes the color of the Grotta Azurra, and husband Umberto, a handsome gentleman who exuded good cheer, in the driveway of their beautiful home, styled as a villa, with a veranda on the upper floor which overlooks easily a hundred square miles of Paestum Plain as well as the hills farther north and east, including the aptly named town of Altavilla (lofty villa), one of those indescribable Italian hill towns.

Rosanna immediately invited us into the kitchen/dining area of the home for caffé and we sat as the elixir brewed and made introductions and allowed Filo and Rolando to catch up on news. Umberto and Rosanna have two older children, a son, 26, who works part time and goes to the university, and a daughter, 20, who is also in college. A younger bello regazzo, Vito, 10, joined us later. He looked a bit sleepy and his dad teased him a bit, so we had the feeling that kids in Italy in the summer have the same sleeping habits as their American equivalents. The family was completed by Achille or Achi, pronounced AH-kee, a cute little mutt.

After coffee Rosanna brought out a pail of beautiful rich white milk from the frigo and took us into the carport where she has an incredibly simple cheesemaking set-up. First she filtered the milk, the combined product of yesterday evening’s and this morning’s milkings, through a fine mesh filter to remove any impurities. It was then strained into a large aluminum pot which she placed on a propane burner and cranked up the heat to bring it to boiling and pasteurize it. She stirred it periodically to keep it from scorching. In a matter of seven minutes or so the milk began to boil and Rosanna removed it from the heat and placed the pot into a plastic tub of cold water to cool the milk to blood temperature.

While the milk cooled we enjoyed a tour of the farm, obviously the product of many years of hard work. There was a large garage for cars and farm equipment as well as not one but two of the beloved little Fiat "Cinquecenti" (500’s), the famous little car that you will doubtless remember from “Mr. Bean’s Vacation”. There was a separate building for general storage and farmwork. And then there were the animal stables. In the first section we met four beautiful white goat does, who nuzzled us curiosly, and the little teenaged offspring of one, held in a separate pen. These were the tradtiional Cilentane breed, which Fabio tells me come in white, red and gray. Opposite the goat stalls were hutches with about two dozen bunnies. Sandy was totally entranced by now and I had to remind her that this was a farm and the cute little bunnies were destined to adorn the dinner table soon enough. Out back of the stalls were chickens for fresh eggs, and another set of stalls contained two massive pigs which will be slaughtered come January for lovely prosciutti, pancette, and the dozen other cured and uncured porcine products that Italians love. When I was a kid, we used to say that you eat every part of the pig except the 'oink', and that’s a proverb any Italian farmer would endorse.

Outside the stall were a garden, a small field of wheat ready to harvest, and another small field of medic, the clover-like forage plant that goats love. The goats are fed a mixture of forage but are also allowed every day to roam the hills and forage at will. Goats love herbs, and this part of Italy is herb heaven; Italians swear you can taste the herbs in the cheese. Nearer to the house was another carefully tended garden with enough San Marzano tomatoes to feed half of Campania as well as lettuce, eggplant, squashes, hot peppers, grapes, basil, celery, parsley, and green beans. These two folks were obviously talented gardeners, and the house itself is surrounded by palm trees, magnolias, roses, and other ornamentals. Filo had commented when we arrived on the little potted palm trees that Rosanna had in the yard, and Rosanna explained that two adult palms, easily 25 feet tall, she had raised from scraggly little mutts with only three fronds.

Rosanna now tested the temperature of the milk with a finger and, judging it cool enough, squirted rennet into the pail from a squeeze bottle and explained that she had added a tablespoon. I guess every talented cook eventually learns how to ‘eyeball’ quantities.

While the rennet did its magic we sat in the driveway, enjoying the beautiful vista and the mountain breeze which has been so lacking in Agropoli for the last three days and just enjoyed listening to these folks catch up on the news. Some of it we even understood! Like so many Italians, Umberto has a regular day job, in this case as a prison guard, so that he has a reliable income and can keep the family farm going. Then there was talk of old times on the farm: of hardships, of joys, of threshing with the hooves of livestock and with the tribulo, just as has been done (and continues to be done in some places) in the Mediterranean for 4,000 years, of the women separating wheat from chaff by tossing the threshing product into the breeze, of lovely chestnut torte and torte do grano, a sweet cake made with boiled wheat buds, and of other traditions. Then there was talk of the shocking state of the youth and it was warmly agreed by both Italian and American parents alike that today’s kids are thoroughly spoiled and that it’s just not good for them. Filo was especially incensed by the daughter of a cousin who spent 6,000 euros on window treatments...for just the kitchen!

Rosanna checked the coagulum and found it ready and the cheesemaking began. Placing the pot of milk on a table, she took a perforated kitchen ladle and very gently began to break apart the coagulum, stirring around and back and forth, lifting coagulum from the bottom of the pail and stirring again, until she had broken it into large, glossy curds and greenish whey. She positioned the pail over a bucket and, using only the same simple little kitchen ladle, strained the whey from the curd into the pail, ever patient and gentle, even using the handle of the ladle and her fingers on it to trap errant curd. A few escaped, but this whey was destined to go to the porkers and, as we used to say down home, “It will all come back on the table.” Italians think that their cured hams have such a luscious sweet flavor because the pigs are as spoiled as the younger generation. Ragazzi, ragazze, beware! You could wind up as prosciutti!

When she had drained almost all the whey Rosanna took one of the little plastic cheese baskets I have seen so often, this one about 6” in diameter and 4” tall, and carefull ladled the curds into it, now placed in a kitchen bowl to catch every last drop of the precious, nutritious whey. Filo explained that when she was a girl folks would dip their bread in this whey and eat it thus, just like we used to dip our cornbread in buttermilk, a byproduct of butter-making. The curds filled exactly one of these little baskets, and Rosanna explained that it takes 10 liters of raw milk to make one cheese. Cheese is powerful nutrition indeed, and in a form that is more digestible than raw milk and is safe from the dreaded brucellosis and tuberculosis.

Rosanna revealed that this cheese was her gift to us, a momento of a wonderful morning. Then we moved to the kitchen for some serious business; Filo insists on nothing but the best artisinal products, so she loads up when she has the opportunity: 4 kilos of aged and shrink-wrapped stagionati for Brother Ciccio, 3 kilos for a cousin, 2 kilos plus a couple of fresh cheeses for the Astones themselves, plus three dozen fresh farm eggs. Then Rosanna began heaping on the generosity that we always associate with farm families at home: peaches, eggplants, beautiful green beans—I wondered who was going to walk home, Fabio’s Alfa Romeo was so laden.

Rosanna wanted to cook lunch for us, but Fabio had work at 2 pm and it was already eleven; no self-respecting Italian woman would offer guests a meal that didn’t involve four courses and at least three hours of work. Forgive me if I’m sentimental, but that is part of what we love so much about these people, hard-nosed practicality combined with extravagant hospitality. I dearly hope that someday I have the chance to return for that meal. As much to be around these wonderful people as their wonderful food.

THE STAFF OF LIFE

If you’re easily offended you may want to skip this one; I’m going to use the ‘p’ word. There’s just no way to understand the Mediterranean Diet without confronting the deep-seated Italian love of pane, bread.

And I shall be unapologetic about using the word; despite the relentless attempts on the part of some food Nazis to the contrary, bread is, always has been, and always will be, good food. You could make a case that man’s co-evolution with various grass seeds is the basis for all civilization. It was grass seeds that convinced paleolithic hunter gatherers to settle down and become farmers. It was grass seeds that 'domesticated' humans, that is, convinced them to give up the yurt and settle down in a proper domus (house). Think of corn, rice, quinoa, barley. But in Italy, ancient and modern, that love affair has been with members of the Triticum family, the wheats. And at least as far back as the early second century BCE that love affair has been manifested as leavened bread cooked in a wood-fired oven.

So it was that, several days ago, I made my way at midnight to the Forno Antico Biscottificio on the outskirts of Agropoli. The proprietor, Elio, had been kind enough to give the pazzo Americano access to his facility.

This was traditional baking on an industrial scale, if that makes any sense at all, for this Forno was actually four forni (ovens), three easily capable of baking 70 loaves of panoni at a time, and one monster probably twice that. Such are the financial exigencies of modern artisinal food in Italy: adapt or die. In fact, in this town of some 26,000 inhabitants, a number that grows to 40,000 on summer weekends when the beaches are packed, there is only one other paneficio in town.

Still, the basics of the procedure are there, as are the grueling work and the dedication to craft. When I arrived the forni were being fired for the night’s baking and the breads were being formed. Singh, a young man of Indian extraction, was using a blowtorch to fire up the fuel, contained in a pan at the front of a metallic arm connected to a powerful fan and auger. And the fuel was quite a surprise; the Forno uses hazelnut hulls which they buy by the truckload! While some traditionalists sneer, it makes all the sense in the world; Italy has suffered from deforestation for at least 2,000 years, so wood is an expensive fuel which is minimally renewable, and the nut hulls are otherwise a waste product. Plus, they never really touch the floor of the oven so there are no cinders and ash to remove. But Fernando tells me that some people complain when they don’t find little fragments of charcoal in the bottom crust of a bread because it means it wasn’t cooked in the traditional way. O tempora! O mores!

After the hulls were lit, Singh cranked up the fan and within ten minutes there was a blazing fire in the fire pan and the auger began slowly advancing more of the hulls as the original ones were spent. He then proceeded to repeat the process with the other two forni in this area.

Meanwhile, in the forming room, Elio and another Indian worker, Parmjit (is finding labor in the food industry as difficult in Italy as it is in America?) were forming loaves. Parmjit took small doughs and ran them through a roller machine which flattened the doughs and rolled them neatly into panini, ‘little breads’, which Elio put on a proofing tray. They also showed me panini loaves combined with cured sausage and caciocavallo, a sort of all-in-one sandwich.

Elsewhere Celestino loaded 20 kg bags of semola, hard-wheat flour, of grano integro, whole wheat flour, and so-called 00 (‘double-O’) flour, pretty close to our all-purpose flour, into two enormous mixing bowls, added water and leaven, and began the kneading process. Think of a Kitchen Master on steroids, with a dough hook two feet long and 2 inches in diameter. (Continued below)

When the dough was properly mixed and kneaded, Celestino, a talented mime who kept me in stitches much of the night, used the pneumatic hoists on the mixers to raise and tilt the dough into the forming machine. This monster simultaneously weighed, divided and spat out panoni doughs with a very satisfying “splort!” The doughs rolled down a chute and onto a forming machine which rolled them down another chute as perfectly round doughs which Celestino placed, two abreast, down the length of a proofing tray about 14” wide and 6’ long. The trays were about 4” deep and lined with lengths of cloth. The bottom one was on a tram, and as one was filled Celestino would simply stack another on top and fill it in turn and before long he had a stack of trays about five feet tall. The stack could then be moved aside and another stack formed.

By now Parmjit and Elio had finished their smaller breads, placed them on trays which they slid into a mobile cart and wrapped and covered the cart with cloths to provide a cozy proofing environment for them as well. Parmjit and Celestino then took a number of previously proofed doughs, expertly flattened then into something that looked like pizza doughs and, using a simple food can about the size of a 14 oz can of tomato sauce, created holes in the middle of each dough to create a sort of giant bagel and then placed them back in the proofing trays, Parmjit napping the cloth so that loaves could be loaded cheek-by-jowl and yet never touch. These would become ciambelle, breads about 14” in diameter and 4” high with an incredibly crunchy crust.

Meanwhile Giuseppe, undisputed capo fornaio, head oven man, called for two of the forni to be heated to 300°C (572°F) and the third to 320°C (608°F). Those babies were hot! Parmjit and Singh continued to monitor the firing process.

The real key to a forno à legna is in the brick construction. The heart of the oven is a round platform paved with huge bricks over which a dome of the same material is constructed, a so-called beehive oven. The design goes back to the ancient Romans and from them to the more ancient Greeks and perhaps from them back to the Egyptians. Easily 3,000 years old and still effective. That’s because terra cotta is capable of retaining heat for a very long time.

When the ovens reached the required temperature, the firing trays were simply retracted from the back doors of the ovens and the doors shut and sealed. If the fornaio needs to shed a bit of heat, by the front door of the oven is a small metallic box attached to a chute which can be removed partially or totally to allow some of the heat to disperse.

The bakers had already been working with incredible efficiency, but now the process became extremely intense. It was a thing of beauty. Singh had scoured the oven with a long-handled brush dipped in water to created the steam that gives good ‘oven-spring’ and gelatinizes the crust to give that perfect crunch. A stack of proofing trays had been positioned by the oven. Parmjit or Singh would grab the length of cloth on which the breads were proofing in the trays and give it a tug to separate adjoining loaves. Celestino would then pluck a loaf up quick as a flash so as not to distort the shape and place it on the waiting pala, bread shovel, which Giuseppe proffered to him, and Giuseppe would quickly run the shovel into the forno and with a quick jerk of the hands leave the breads in exactly the right position so that they didn’t touch another but the oven could be loaded to the max. And the process was repeated. Giuseppe loaded from left to right or vice versa and half way through the process all three men as well as the stack of trays would reverse position and the process proceed from the opposite side. When the oven was fully loaded Giuseppe slammed the door and sealed it below with a length of cloth soaked in water.

The first breads to be fired were the ciambelle and the first ones came out literally five minutes after the first loaf went in. Giuseppe wielded the pala again, nabbing a loaf, pulling the pala back and giving a small jerk backward to flip the loaf onto the threshold of the oven. Using his bare hands, which must by now have the consistency of asbestos, he then tossed it into a waiting hamper and another baker would stack it on end to create ranks and files of breads. (Continued below)