Wanderlust

The Tower of Rutino

    So, here we are back in the Cilento, partially recovered from the rigors of travel, and eager to start our new adventure.  Tuesday we had big plans to visit ‘The Valley of the Orchids’, about two hours away on the lower slopes of Monte Cervati, the highest peak in the Cilento.  The Valley is a vale between two spurs of the mountain where some 215 species of wild orchid have been found so far, out of some 315 that have ever been found in all of Europe.  And mid-May is peak season for orchid blooms.  But Tuesday morning brought a forecast of thunderstorms in Sassano, the little town that serves as a point of departure for the route, and four hours of drive time is a chunk of time to have wasted on an aborted excursion, especially when we have the rest of the month.  So we decided to reschedule for Thursday.

In the meantime, though showers threatened closer to home as well, our perennial wanderlust demanded satisfaction, so we headed down the superstrada and onto a lower spur of Monte Stella and to the promising little village of Rutino.

The medieval village of Rutino seen from the south

We had been to the outskirts of the village six years ago, on our way with Fernando to the imposing castle of Rocca Cilento, further up the ridge.  But Fernando just had to take a short detour to show us the panoramic views out over the Alento River valley and the mountains of the interior.  Plus, there was this strange little tower right along the road, a sort of whimsical tower whose upper floor is a fantastic condominium for birds!  Definitely a charmer.

Views from the 'Tower of the Birds'

But we never really entered the village itself, and one thing we have learned in our travels here is that practically every little village here is a medieval gem.  And Rutino is only 20 minutes away.  Irresistible.

We entered the village by the same road as before, agog at that panorama and smiling at our old friend the birdie high-rise, ambled into the Centro of the little town, parked, and began our stroll at the mother church, La Chiesa di San Michele Arcangelo. 

Chiesa di San Michele Arcangelo

The church was unusually large for such a small town, reminding us that during the reign of the Sanseverino family, Rocca Cilento was the capitol of the Barony of Cilento and Rutino an important satellite town.  The church was pretty in the typical provincial Cilentan way, but sadly, was closed, as so often.  But behind it we found a huge abstract sculpture which seemed completely incongruous until we discovered it is a ‘Totem of Peace’, a symbol of the yearning for world peace designed by famous Italian sculptor Mario Molinari.  This is one of some 200 such sculptures installed in cities around the world, and here was one in little Rutino!  Molinari himself explains the symbolism:  “The red sail symbolizes the voyage.  This Sea of ours, the cradle of our civilization, theatre of struggles and battles between the peoples who have lived here but also of trade, of commerce, and of the advances of knowledge.  The sea celebrated by the myth in which Ulysses is lost and continually wandering in a desperate search for the way home.  It is red to symbolize the quest, the sunset, and the return of the immutable rhythms of the universe.”

Molinari's 'Totem of Peace'

Rutino is one of those hill towns strung out along the crest of a ridge, in this case the ridge of the spur, and so is about three miles long and a hundred feet wide.  Eventually it scrambles up the ridge all the way to Rocca Cilento.  We could go up or down, but we figured the oldest part of the town was the upper, and so headed up.  Good call.  We wandered up narrow streets, completely immersed in a medieval world, what with the stone houses on both sides with their lovely old doors, seductive little courtyards, and the portali, the massive stone archways which mark the entrance to ancient palazzi.  Eventually we came to the gate of the Palazzo Cuoco, otherwise known as the Palazzo dello Colombaio, the palace in whose courtyard the ‘Tower of the Birds’ is located, and there saw the stairways that provided access to its upper floors. Easy to imagine some baron and baroness on some warm summer evening climbing to the top of the little tower to gaze at that spectacular view and enjoy the cool breezes and the twittering of the swallows that inhabited the tower’s top floor.

Medieval street scenes

For, you see, these little bird houses had a very practical function to go along with the whimsical side.  Swallows eat a tremendous number of mosquitoes every year, and down below in the Alento valley in medieval times the land had become swampy and malarial.  So what we are so charmed by is also a natural mosquito control!

We scrambled down a scala to the highway below to get another look at the tower and the elaborate alleé that leads up to it, in this case a combination of ramps, balconies, and stairways on basically four levels.  I like to imagine some visitor to the palace parking their carriage in the piazza at the base and strolling up the ramps and along the balconies, stopping at each level to marvel at those views.  Some people know how to make an entrance; the baron knew how to create one.

'The Colombaio'

The dramatic approach

We ambled back down to the center of the village and noticed a large placard for the ‘Flight of the Angel’ festival which we had just missed last weekend.  Now, every little hamlet in southern Italy has a festival of its patron saint and every one of them is a must-see, but I have to say, we are especially heartbroken to have missed this one.

The church rigged for the feast

'The Flight of the Angel'

This is what we learned after the fact:  The procession starts in the usual way.  The church faithful place the cult statue of St. Michael, the warrior archangel, you will recall, on a platform and it is carried through the streets accompanied by the priest, a band, and various Catholic fraternities.  All pretty standard stuff.  But then the drama begins!  In Sandy’s picture you will notice a cable running across the street about 30’ above the ground, and a small stage at the front of the church at street level.  A young man decked out in full Michael regalia and brandishing a sword and shield is mounted on a harness attached to the cable and slowly pulled across the length of the cable until he reaches the stage, where there are several imps (village children) accompanied by Lucifer himself!  Michael warns the Devil that he must repent his rebellious ways or face his inevitable fate, but Satan blusters that he’s ready to mix it up any time.  Michael flies on, to give Beelzebub time to change his mind, and the procession with the cult statue proceeds through the streets of the village in song and prayer and slowly returns to the church.

Then commences scene II.  Michael returns, flying in the opposite direction, and gives Lucifer one last chance to repent.  Spoiler alert: He refuses, and the fireworks begin!  And I am not just being metaphorical; the commencement of the battle is marked by a huge fireworks display (we saw the evidence behind the Totem of Peace, ironically).  Michael flails away at the Devil and his minions.  Lucifer falls to the ground, dazed and confused!  He admits his humiliating defeat and returns to the underworld!  Good triumphs over evil!  St. Michael flies in triumph to the balcony of the parsonage, is unharnessed, and receives the adoration of the crowd.

Saint Michael battles Lucifer

And all this in a tiny village with a population of less than 900 souls!  But that’s the Cilento for you.  We have seen gorgeous little hill towns in practically every region of Italy we have visited.  The thing which marks this unknown and uncelebrated part of southern Campania as special is simply that there are so many achingly, heartbreakingly beautiful little medieval gems.  We can easily name 50 every bit as charming as Rutino.  And the reasons for that are both fortunate and tragic.  The sad history of this area, blighted by wars, invasions, famines, malaria, plagues, and the pestilential depredations of the local aristocracy has meant that the area has been economically deprived for centuries and there has simply not been much financial incentive to tear down and modernize.  A happier reason I learned only recently, thanks to my seismologist friend Andrea.  We are located smack between two of the regions in all of Italy most vulnerable to earthquakes.  Basilicata to our east and Calabria to our south have been devastated repeatedly by tremendous temblors.  An earthquake in 1908 in Calabria, for example, killed well over 100,000 people (nobody knows the exact number).  And if you’ve seen the sad news recently about Amatrice, you know that every time a major quake occurs, several medieval towns lose a precious part of their historical essence.  Meanwhile, our fuzzy old mountains are in the Apennine Peripheral Zone, 60 km west of the upthrust zone, and there has not been a tremor here above 3.5 on the Richter scale since records have been kept.

The Cilento has it all:  spectacular scenery, with gorgeous mountains, a sparkling sea, crystal-clear to depths of thirty feet and more, and with more shades of blue than you can count.  Incredible people, incredible food, incredible history…. And another little medieval jewel, I swear to you, reader, every five kilometers!

A Lesson in Diversity from Our Friends, the Germs

I have now been researching and writing about ancient foodways for over 20 years, and only now am I starting to really know a little about the subject.  No one has yet accused me of being a brilliant scholar, but I am dogged and careful so that when a pearl of wisdom obtrudes on my dim intellect, it tends to be fairly reliable.  And in all those twenty-some-odd years, two fairly significant pearls have surprised, delighted and amazed me.  In fact, they have completely transformed my ways of thinking about food.

One of those I have mentioned several times in past blogs, but it’s worth repeating:  modern industrial food technologies are capable of producing foods more cheaply and more efficiently, but they are not necessarily capable of making them better.  As a child of the 1950s, we were indoctrinated to believe that science and its handmaiden technology make everything better.  Now, I’m no Luddite, but I’m here to testify, neighbor, t’aint so!  If you’ve ever tasted an artisinal loaf of bread from a wood-fired oven, you know perfectly well what I mean; there is simply no comparison with industrial bread.  The world’s finest cheeses, sausages, hams, and wines are still largely hand-crafted or at least follow the old ways as much as time and expense will permit.

Another article of faith that we learned back a hundred years ago is that germs are enemies to be avoided if at all possible, and if unavoidable, to be nuked with antibiotics.  Again, I’m no hippy-dippy whack job who believes that tetanus can be cured with the right dietary regimen.  Hey, I had scarlet fever as a kid and pneumonia twice as an adult, and that’s not to mention all the stab wounds from rusty nails and the dozen other hazards of roaming a farm in West Tennessee with my fellow knucklehead, Tom Barton.  But for the grace of antibiotics, I’d be dead by now at least five times over.  But our simplistic notion that all germs are bad has led us to a pretty grim place in modern medicine, as well as in modern food.

     We should have known better.  Germs are an intrinsic part of being human.  We now know that the average human body contains well over 100 trillion germ cells.  In fact, there are something like 10 times as many germ cells as human cells in the human body.  Some evolutionary scientists now suspect that so-called prokaryotes, the little critters which lack cell nuclei, especially bacteria, and which preceded our eukaryote ancestors in biological evolution by at least a billion years, subsumed viruses within an organelle to create what we now call a cell nucleus. And in that way were the first eurkaryotes born, and the evolutionary impetus that ultimately generated homo sapiens sapiens was set in motion. Thus it is possible that the human body is at a very basic level a host structure for a vast and multi-cultural community of bacteria, something analogous to the calcified reef that coral organisms create to live in.

So germ-hatred in a real sense is a form of self-hatred, and it has had some pretty dire consequences in modern medicine. Bacteria also have a preternatural ability to share genetic material and to mutate accordingly, and for that reason our excessive use of antibiotics has led (inevitably, we now know) to the genesis of super-germs which laugh at our puny biocins.  In my first book, I compared the use of a broad-spectrum antibiotic to kill off a germ living in one part of a human body to the use of a neutron bomb to kill off the crackheads infesting one street in a huge city.  Effective, at least in the short run, but pretty darned ham-fisted.

That anti-germ bias has made its way into the food industries as well, of course.  There are some really bad dudes which love to attack us by way of foods, things like tuberculosis and staphylococcus aureus, and botulism.  Those bad germs we call pathogens, and they richly deserve to be nuked.  But, the thing is, there are literally thousands of good germs in the food world which are our dear friends, often in ways we hardly yet suspect, and when we nuke the bad guys…  So we need to be discrete.

Some of my favorite little critters are the yeasts which give us alcoholic fermentations of beer and wine and bread.  Obviously, there is no beer or wine without yeasts, especially Saccharomyces cerevisiae, but lately it is possible to buy ‘bread’ which is ‘risen’ with industrial gases and no yeast.  A bigger problem, in my opinion, is that many modern bakers use S. cerevisiae to the exclusion of all other organisms.  In traditional breadmaking, bread dough is leavened with a starter, usually a portion a previous successful culture, which is mixed with warm water and a bit of sugar and allowed to sit out overnight to incubate.  During the night the starter is visited by a wonderful assortment of bacteria, and when the starter is mixed with flour to create the dough, these little guys ferment the sugars converted by their buddies the yeasts from the starches in wheat to produce a sourdough product.  And sourdough bread is a vastly superior product, more digestible, more nutritious, and infinitely more probiotic.  Look, if a doctor has diagnosed you with celiac disease, lay off the bread.  But if you think you’re gluten-intolerant, try a little experiment; eat some artisinal sourdough and, if nothing dramatic happens, continue to eat it regularly for a month or so.  I will give you better than even odds that your problem isn’t with gluten, it’s with the polysaccharides in bread that should have been predigested for you by some very friendly little germs.

The same scenario occurs with cheese as well.  So-called ‘processed cheese food’ is a perfectly good product, but it really shouldn’t be called cheese at all.  Real cheese is the product of the fermentation of milk sugars, especially lactose, by various lactic acid bacteria which metabolize lactose to lactic acid and create an acidic environment that makes the cheese safe, vastly more digestible, and delicious.  But the thing is, raw milk contains a whole sorority of these little germs, what is called a SCOBY, a ‘symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeasts’.  When milk is pasteurized for industrial cheese, the whole colony is wiped out, and then the milk is cultured, typically with Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactobacillus bulgaricus.  And the problems begin.  First, the cheeses never have the same complex flavors.  Second, a colony with only two strains of germ is inherently more susceptible to the attacks of bad guys, far less adaptable to the trauma, and thus far less able to fight them off.  Lab cultures are especially susceptible to viruses called bacteriophages that literally eat the good guys, and in order to fight these dread invaders, industrial creameries have to resort to ridiculous protocols for sterility and make massive use of chemical agents.  Meanwhile, high-quality raw milk typically contains six or more strains of bacteria and yeast, and these produce a healthful, highly digestible product which is complex in flavor and absolutely delicious.  And this under sanitary but by no means sterile conditions.

There is a famous example of a Benedictine nun in Connecticut named Sister Noella Marcellino who makes a French-style raw-milk cheese called Saint Nectaire using traditional farmhouse methods.  The germ police came calling when they heard she was using a wooden tub to produce her cheeses and, predictably, tried to force her to use stainless steel and sterilizers.  But Sister Noella knew perfectly well that the pores of her old wooden tub contained her SCOBY and they would do the dirty business for her, as they always had.  Oh, and I should mention, Sister Noella has a Ph.D. in microbiology.  She appealed to the state director of public health and, to his everlasting credit, he was willing to permit an experiment pitting sterile stainless against the good nun’s old oaken bucket and her secret allies.  Sister Noella deliberately infected both batches with strains of E. coli.  No need to tell you who won.  And Sister Noella and many others point out that pasteurization has in some ways encouraged more pathogenesis rather than less, because unscrupulous dairymen who know that their product will be pasteurized maintain far lower standards of dairy hygiene than do raw-milk purveyors.  Sister Noella’s milk comes from dairy cows lovingly tended and milked by the nuns right there on the estate, so they know that the milk they use is healthy milk from healthy cows.

The same scenario applies to some of the world’s finest charcuterie and beers, and it’s amazing how often the SCOBYs for these seemingly diverse foods have members of the same tribes, such as Leuconostoc and Pediococcus.  Even wine makers are returning to natural fermentations instead of defined inoculations because the wild yeasts, especially the so-called apiculate yeasts, produce a more complex product.  And if you’re not eating naturally fermented vegetables such as saurkraut and kimchi or naturally fermented beverages such as kombucha, you are depriving your system of some of your most dependable potential allies in the microflora of your gut.

There’s a lesson here for all of us, I think.  I know globalization scares a lot of people, not just here but over much of the developed world.  And it’s so easy to identify immigrants as ‘the other’; after all, they’re so often a different color, or speak with an accent, or worship in a different way.  Ironically, immigrants seem to be especially frightening to natives in the heartland, where there are so few of them.  I’ve had the good fortune to teach a large number of first- and second-generation immigrant kids at Cary High School over the course of the last 20 years, and I’m here to testify that those kids have been the light of my life:  hard-working, intelligent, respectful, and intensely patriotic.  Mixed cultures in foods are better than pure strains because they produce a healthier product far better equipped to fight off pathogens and spoilage organisms.  Plus, they create wonderful, complex, intense flavors in foods that would otherwise be boringly bland.  To borrow a metaphor, in the great, mixing pot of American culture, we could stand to take a page from the playbook of our little microbial friends.

Whew!

Green Gold

    

     It was beginning to look like we were jinxed.  As a reminder, one of our main objectives in coming to Italy in the Autumn was to witness, and perhaps even participate in, the vintage and the olive harvest and processing of olive oil.  But the cards have seemed to be stacked against us.  

     First we discovered that the summer weather here had been atrocious and that the grape and olive crops were severely stunted as a result.  So much so that our hosts, the Astones, decided not even to harvest the grapes but to buy from a purveyor in Puglia instead.  Well, that was a disappointment, but of course we understand.  Rolando and Filo are in their seventies, still vigorous, but no spring chickens, and the work is intense at the best of times.  Fortunately Rolando set me up with two of his brothers and I managed to help with a home-winemaking operation with Ciccio and Francesco.  Then Fernando kindly connected us with a friend, Carlo Polito, who owns a local commercial vineyard and winery, and we had a blast pretending to help with the harvest and vintage of some of their Aglianico.  Please refer to a previous blog.  And then, there was always the olive harvest, right?

    Well, not so much.  The Astone’s olive crop is even punier than the grape crop, and clambering up ladders into trees for little or no reward is a fool’s errand, especially for us oldsters.  Worse yet, the olive crop has been dismal almost everywhere in the Cilento, and lots of small orchardists are throwing up their hands and waiting for next year.  Olives are naturally biennial producers anyway—they’ll produce a bumper crop one year and a much smaller one the next while they store up energy—but this year has been a real fluke.  Fernando called our mutual friend, Roberto Volpe, up on the slopes of Monte della Stella at San Mauro to see when he was harvesting and Roberto delivered the shocking news that the total production for the year at his co-op frantoio (olive oil processing plant) was 50 liters.  Not 50 liters of Roberto’s oil, you understand.  Fifty measly liters for the whole community!

   Fernando is nothing if not persistent, and he sent out queries far and wide, and, mirabile dictu, not only did he find a zone over on the foothills of the beautiful Monti Alburni that has had a wonderful crop, but he discovered that our friend Antonino Mennella would be processing periodically for the next two weeks.  And Antonino makes, hands down, the best oil in the Cilento and one of the best in the world!

     A quick refresher course from an earlier blog:  the ancient Romans had a special mechanism on their olive mills that allowed them to completely macerate the flesh and skins of the olives to release that precious nectar without crushing the pits, which contain intensely bitter tannins and glucosides.  The old Roman system was pretty much ditched in late antiquity, but about 15 years ago, a small number of adventurous processors began experimenting with special mills that accomplish the same end using ultra-modern technology.  And discovered that Roman-style oil, called denocciolato, is a superior product!  Not dramatically so, but noticeably so, even by someone like me with a pretty mediocre palate.  So two years ago we went to see one such producer, Antonino Mennella, at the Azienda Agricola Madonna dell’Ulive over in Serre, a gorgeous little Medieval village perched at the foot of the Alburnis.  Antonino generously showed us his operation and explained the process, but of course this was in June, and olive processing, like the vintage, is a one-off thing.  And so, we could imagine the process, but not see it.

Azienda Agricola Madonna dell'Ulive

The Santuaria from which the business takes its name

Twin trunks of a common tree, 2000 years old

     Until yesterday.  Wow, was it worth the wait!  We arrived at the frantoio about 5pm and were warmly greeted by Antonino and offered espresso while we waited for a load of olives to arrive.  Meanwhile, we took a stroll through part of the orchard, where Antonino explained that we were probably looking at one of the earliest sites for cultivation of olives in all of Italy.  From Serre you look down the Calore and Sele River valleys for a good 25 kilometers, all the way to the coast and the famous Greek colony of Poseidonia, later Roman Paestum.  Here in Serre,  just above the Sele Plain, with a beautiful western aspect, was ideal territory for the olives Greeks had been cultivating in the mother country for at least 700 years before Poseidonia was established in 600 BCE.  Antonino showed us a number of pairs of trees and explained that these were not really two separate trees but in fact dual trunks from a single root system.  Olive trees can be killed back to the ground by fluke freezes, but their roots are almost indestructible, and, like redwoods and sequoias, they will generate new sprouts from the cambium of seemingly dead trunks, sprouts that often will eventually coalesce to form one giant trunk.  Or not, as in the case of our twinsies.  Which, it turns out, are probably the regenerated parts of trees at least 2,000 years old.

     The olives arrived, hauled in a large trailer, hitched to a standard car and wrangled by two young men who assist Antonino at the frantoio.  These were gorgeous olives:  fat little porkers in a range of hues from intensely yellow green to pink to violet to purple to almost jet black, and ranging in length from 3/4” to 1”.  Antonino explained that the variation in color is a good thing, since the green olives are the most intensely flavored but have the least oil, while the darker berries have subtler, rounder flavors and much more oil.  So in mechanical harvesting, olive growers look for that perfect ‘sweet spot’ between quality and quantity and let each little berry contribute its voice to the glorious oratorio which is intensely flavored olive oil.

    The load consisted of 6 large crates, roughly 4’ X 5’, and we learned that this represented some 1,000 kilograms of berries, a bit over a ton.  Ernesto, one of the ragazzi, quickly manned a small forklift and expertly carried one of these crates to the waiting hopper of the cleaner/crusher, located in a covered portico before the frantoio.  This was an amazing piece of technology.  The hopper feeds the berries onto an escalator conveyor, at the top of which a powerful fan blows foliage and dust off the olives and out through a long vent pipe to a composting pile.  Then the berries are blasted with cold water to clean them and conveyed horizontally before two powerful fans which dry them completely.  Antonino explained that it is absolutely essential to highest quality oil that the berries be processed in cold water and then completely dried to achieve the intense aroma of great oil.  Commercial producers, on the other hand, wash their berries in hot water and macerate them wet, which strips them of most of their aroma.  At the end of the conveyor,  our other ragazzo, Paulo, manually plucked out defective olives before they were delivered to the crusher.  The hopper of the machine was large enough to contain one crate, and as each was nearly completed, Ernesto brought another and carefully tilted it in.

A ton of olives is delivered

Ernesto loading the hopper

leaves and stems removed

    Meanwhile, the crushed olives were delivered via a large plastic hose into the laboratorio of the frantoio, with tiled floors and even tiled walls up to about 6’, and an array of stainless steel vats and apparatus, all so that spotless cleanliness can be maintained.  In the laboratorio the crushed olives went into one of two large mills, but in this case not the stone roller mills that are traditional, but a cylindrical vat containing a rotating, helical paddle which breaks down the flesh of the olives and more or less completely macerates it into an almost uniform paste, allowing the liquid element in the olive flesh to escape from the berries’ cells.  This paste is then pumped through a closed pipe, not to a press, but to the horizontal centrifuge, which can be calibrated so that elements in the paste with different densities can be extracted differentially.  First out are the solids, which fall into a hopper behind the centrifuge and are pushed by an augur outside to be composted and used as fertilizer.  Next out is the watery element which contains the bitter glucosides which make unprocessed olives inedible.  And lastly, that gorgeous, chartreuse nectar began to slowly ooze from a stainless pipe at the front of the centrifuge and pour through a cloth filter into waiting receptacles.  As these filled, the pipe was rotated to another and the precious oil decanted into a 200-liter stainless canister.  Antonino explained that this 2,200 lb. load of olives would yield about 100 liters of oil.  The oil would rest in the canister overnight to allow suspended solids to precipitate and then be sent through a filtration system to remove remaining solids and any remaining water.  Then the oil would be decanted into stainless storage vats, hermetically sealed, and the ullage purged of air with inert nitrogen to maintain the quality of the oil.  He noted that the oil can easily be stored for two years and maintain its organoleptic qualities, but that the polyphenols and antioxidants which make olive oil so healthful will slowly degrade.

Berries move up the conveyor to be cleaned and sorted

Paolo culling defective berries

The crusher

Ultra-modern mills

     Antonino showed me a large bank of gauges and explained that the frangitore, as the macerator mill is called, can be adjusted for various levels of quality.  The finer the paste is macerated, the more oil is extracted, of course, but also the more of the volatile esters and polyphenols that produce those heady aromas we were smelling would be lost.  And, of course, if the fractioning was very great at all, the more the pits would be crushed.  All of Antonino’s oils are top-quality, but he produces four grades even here, and today we were producing Itrano.  I noticed several canisters which were marked as Persano as well.

Macerated 'paste' is delivered to the centrifuge

The centrifuge extracts elements of the paste

Antonino controls the quality of the oil

Out flows liquid gold

Paolo decants new oil into a canister

   How can I describe the intensity of the aromas we were smelling in this frantoio?  They pervaded the whole building. Speaking of oratorio, it was like a chorus of scents had been trapped in prison for a whole growing season and, released from bondage, had spontaneously burst into song.  But not just any song; think "Hallelujah Chorus." The smell was delicious, incredible, almost intoxicating.  That is because those same esters and polyphenols are extremely volatile, and they were floating on the air of the room right to our nostrils.  But exposure to air for any length of time strips oil of most of its aroma.  Antonino explained that it is very important that the processing go as quickly as possible for this reason, and I was stunned by the efficiency of the operation; by my reckoning, Madonna dell’Ulive processed over a ton of olives in a bit over two hours.  Now think about even 50 years ago, when raw olives often sat for days in warehouses, turning to a putrid brown mush before being processed, then milled for hours between stones and pressed using simple lever presses.  Then the oil and aqueous element would be allowed to slowly separate themselves over several hours. The whole process could take days.  No wonder so much oil from the middle of the last century was intensely acidic, rancid and almost inedible.  These are glorious days for lovers of fine oil!

      Antonino cut open two whole berries, one green and one deep purple, and had us take a sniff.  The green had intense notes of green tomatoes and fresh-cut grass.  The mature berry had far more subtle notes of licorice and red peppers.  Then Antonino brought out small plastic cups to sample the unfiltered oil. He showed us how to roll the cups to release the aroma, just as in wine tasting, how to 'taste' with our noses first, and then how to ‘swoosh’ the oil into our mouths to aerate it and release the aromas and flavors.  The aromas were a wonderful combination of those we had smelled in the whole berries and many more besides which I cannot even pretend to be able to identify.  I just know this oil has all the complexity of a great wine.  The taste was incredibly peppery—Red and Fernando actually had a bit of a coughing fit—as well as slightly bitter from the unfiltered solids.  That and what I can only describe as intensely ‘olivy’ .  Like Colavita on steroids.

Tasting new oil

Large vats of oil in storage

      Antonino was kind enough to gift us with a half liter of Itrano, and one way or another we are going to wangle that boy home.  But if customs grabs it back in the States next week, I will not despair.  Antonino’s oil is available on-line from a great purveyor of artisinal foods called Olio2go, in Richmond, Virginia.  And I have inside information that there will be a consignment available there in the next few weeks.  Better yet, do us both a favor and order it all up before I get home.  We all need to support people like Antonino who have chosen to dedicate themselves to excellence rather than mediocrity.

A Christ-haunted Lanscape

     

Matera

     Thursday we made our first visit to one of the most unusual, evocative, and haunting towns we have seen in 21 years of travel in this endlessly fascinating country.  A place that can only be described as terrible in its beauty.

     Matera, Basilicata is one of the dozens of UNESCO World Heritage sites in Italy, the capital of the Province of Matera and one of the two major towns in Basilicata.  The town is splayed out along the top of a plateau above the Bassento River Valley, and is quite scenic in its own right, with its Byzantine basilicas, its palazzi, and its Medieval city scrambling up the side of a steep slope.  The town shows signs of Roman occupation, and some think the name, originally Mateola, is a deformation of the name of the Roman consul Lucius Metellus. It was dominated in turn by Byzantines, Lombards, Normans, and a half dozen other overlords.  But the part of the town which gives it its world heritage status is the Città Sotterranea, the subterranean city.  That part is governed by the geography of the site; the Gravina River has furrowed a deep ravine through the middle of the plateau before punching its way through the western side and debouching into the Bassento.  And all along the edges of the ravine are caverns and grottoes in the limestone layers.  And these and many others created by the hand of man have provided habitation for humans since the Paleolithic.

Perched on the lip of a ravine

The Gravina gorge

The Medieval city

     These rock-cut dwellings are known simply as Sassi, ‘Stones’, but that hardly tells the tale.  The Sassi of Matera housed a prehistoric troglodytic settlement thought to be among the first human settlements in all of Italy.  A community of cave men, in other words.  And there is a continuous pattern of settlement here, apparently for at least 35,000 years.  Many of the more recent houses are little more than caves as well, but many others have been laboriously hewn from the limestone into proper walls, ceilings, floors, and rooms.  In some areas, whole rock-cut streets and rows of dwellings can be visited.  This area takes its name, “La Gravina,” from the river.

    Elsewhere we clambered up to a knob detached from the main range of stone, one used by the Lombards to build a castle, half rock-hewn and half masonry.  On one side of the crag is the Chiesa di San Pietro Caveoso, “Cave-made Church of Saint Peter” one of no fewer than seven so-called rupestrian churches in the town, that is, churches wholly contained in or carved into a cavern.  These churches are a common feature of Paleo-Christianity in Basilicata, Puglia, and our Cilentan part of Campania.  For example, the cavern at Olevano sul Tusciano, about 30 km north of here, has no fewer than four little chapels, not excavated into, but constructed within, this huge cavern, complete with walls and even roofs!  San Pietro is almost totally natural, which for me adds to its evocative atmosphere, and on several plastered walls are the scant remains of once-beautiful Byzantine frescoes.

The Castle and Chiesa di San Pietro Caveoso

     We ambled down one of the main streets in La Gravina, ascending and descending stairways as the lanes zigged and zagged their way along the side of the cliff. Many of the chambers were long since abandoned, sad reminders of an even sadder past, but many have been refurbished as shops and art studios.  One large dwelling has been refurnished as a tourist site, one which we thoroughly enjoyed.  You enter a large living area, walls squared out and plastered so that, except for the absence of windows, you might well imagine yourself in a stone-built cottage.  At the far end is a sleeping area for Mama and Papa and a trundle crib for bebe.  Entering a second chamber, you find the bed of the children and, to one side, a simple kitchen with open hearth and a crude flue vented to the outside.  Passing through the living area, you enter the stables where the livestock was housed in winter and agricultural implements stored.  Descending a long flight of rock-cut stairs, you enter the cantina, with a pedestal to the south for ranges of the huge terra cotta ziri in which were stored wine and olive oil.  On the right is another pedestal, but this one constituting the treading vat and press bed for making the wine and oil to be stored in the ziri.

La Gravina

The pantry of the troglodytic house

Bedroom for children

Bedroom for Mama and Papa

The kitchen

The pantry

Rock-cut stairway

The cantina

    We retraced our steps and entered to the north the household pantry, where other foodstuffs would have been stored.  No sign of a latrine or running water.  Waste disposal will have been in chamber pots and then the old heave-ho, and waste will have washed slowly down the slope into the river,  Meanwhile, water was laboriously brought from that same river, some 1 1/2 kilometers down a simple footpath.  Electricity, even in the middle of the twentieth century, was a distant dream. Obviously, we are speaking of some very primitive living conditions.  In fact, when Carlo Levi wrote his famous book, Christ Stopped at Eboli, detailing the desperately poor, superstition-riddled lives of backward peasants in the Basilicata, and with its intimations that this region was so forlorn it was beyond redemption even by Christ, he tells us he used La Gravina as inspiration for his fictional town.  And, cynic though I am, it’s hard not to feel the disconcerting echoes of human suffering that the site evokes.  In the 1950s, remaining inhabitants were forcibly removed by the State to more modern buildings farther up the slope, and the town gradually began to grow upwards along the slope and the old town abandoned.  But in the late 1980s, tourism began, and today there are B & Bs, hotels, wine bars, and dozens of vacation homes in La Gravina, and more and more people are digging out the old deeds and either selling or developing the old dwellings.

A B&B in the Gravina

      From beneath the ridge, looking up and along the ravine and shielding your eyes from the modern part of the city above, you can easily imagine you are looking at a primitive village from Biblical times if not before, and numerous Biblical films have in fact been made here, most famously Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ.”  That story of human ignorance, cruelty and misery, and the distant hope of redemption, perfectly embodies the undeniable fascination of this haunted landscape.

A scene out of Biblical times

I Love you Trulli, Trulli I do!

Alberobello

    Why yes, I think I have heard that a pun is the lowest form of humor.

     Last week we headed out for a giro grande, an overnighter.  Fabio has insisted for years that we need to see the town of Matera, over in Basilicata, about 2 hours southwest of here.  This is a town where the dwellings were originally carved into the limestone walls of a deep ravine along the Gravina River, one of the most evocative sites in the country and the setting for numerous movies.  More about that later.  Meanwhile, back in the U.S., Sandy had stumbled across a web site for a restaurant over on the Adriatic coast, also excavated into limestone cliffs, but in this case with vistas out over the sea.  It was only another hour or so east from Matera, so we decided to trek over and spend the night in a B&B and have dinner at this fancy place.  More about that later as well.

     Our trip over was on Thursday, and Friday morning we decided to take a more southerly route back home and stop by the little village of Alberobello, ‘Beautiful Tree,’ and then head on down to the Ionian Sea to stop by a famous archaeological site at Metaponto before heading back up the Bassento River valley and back across the mountains to home.  Now, don’t get me wrong, Matera was a knockout, as I hope Sandy’s pictures will soon convince you, but I have to say that it was awe-inspiring in its austerity, almost a moonscape.  Alberobello, on the other hand, was completely enchanting.  Just imagine you’ve stumbled into a Hobbit metropolis.  I expected to bump into Frodo or Bilbo around every corner.  And as it happened, we did indeed meet a Hobbit, every bit as cute and charming as you might imagine.  But his name was Giuseppe.

     Alberobello and the area in which it is located, called the Murgia, is famous for its houses as well, but in this case a special type of dwelling called a trullo.  Trulli are circular, dry-stone huts with conical roofs topped by a cute little finial.  And they dot the landscape everywhere in this area.  It’s like stepping into an alternate world.

    As at Matera, necessity was the mother of invention.  The Murgia is almost entirely karstic geologically, that is, layers of limestone riddled with fissures and caves.  And Puglia is in the rain shadow of the Apennines, so rainfall is not plentiful.  What little rainfall they get seeps right through those fissures, such that there’s really very little surface water:  no ponds, no lakes, no rivers, nada.  But the soil is fertile and the hills gentle, so perfect land for wheat and olive trees.  The solution was to dig large cisterns to store the seasonal rainfall and then use it for irrigation in the summer.  But of course digging cisterns involved excavating large amounts of stone at considerable cost in effort.  What to do with all that rock?  Use it!  Everywhere along the roads you see fields girded by beautiful, dry-stone walls.  But even then, there was rock to spare, and not much forest land in the area to provide wood, so these ingenious Pugliesi used the stone to make their typical, evocative little huts and named them trulli, from Greek τρούλος, ‘cupola’.  Originally these were temporary shelters for farm workers or storerooms for tools and crops, but they were so effective that eventually they became the standard form of housing, often a series of circular rooms, all connected and each with one of those whimsical little cones on top.

Stone walls and trulli in the countryside

Street scenes in the Zona delli Trulli

     All the stonework in the trulli is dry-laid, that is, without mortar.  Plenty of limestone here, obviously, but turning limestone into mortar requires intense heat, and, again, there’s not enough forest here to make that practicable.  So the walls are dry-laid, based on bedrock and varying in thickness from 2-7’, depending on the diameter of the room, and all slightly battered, that is, sloped inward at about a 5% angle to provide more stability.  Walls are 6-7’ in height and circular or square, though circles are the norm.  Domes are typically formed in two layers, an inner vault with voussoirs, the standard Roman form, that is, with wedge-shaped stones laid on end and capped with a keystone to lock the whole system and make it self-supporting, and then an outer ‘skin’ of limestone slabs, corbelled—with upper stones overlapping lower ones— to create the conical shape.  These are tilted down at a slight angle to shed rain.

     Inside the trulli used as homes there will be a kitchen with a flue and chimney and often a bread oven built into a niche in the stone wall, one or more bedrooms, a large stall for the animals (Yep, inside the house.  Animals provide body heat in the winter), a pantry, and a cantina for the wine and olive oil.

The conical roofs are capped by a little finial called a pinnacolo, in various shapes such as disks, balls, cones, bowls, even a table in one case, all to identify the stonemason. Inner and outer walls are whitewashed and, additionally, whitewash is also often used for a large symbol on the roof such as a cross, a cross with a heart pierced by an arrow, symbol of the local patron saint, or a large circle divided into quadrants, each bearing the letters S,D,S, or C for Sanctus Christus Sanctus Dominus, Latin for ‘Holy Christ, Holy Lord’.

A B&B

Artist's shop

The mother church with its domes

    In the town of Alberobello there is a whole district full of trulli, along both sides of meandering lanes and courtyards.  A corso runs through the center, quite touristy, even in this off season, but duck into a side lane and you’re right back in Hobbit Land.  The little cottages are cool and comfy in the blistering Puglia summer, but they were murder to heat back in the day with nothing but an open fire; those stone walls and the conical ceiling just suck the heat right up.  The upshot was that the trulli, most constructed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were practically derelict as housing in Alberobello by the 1980s.  And then a very clever gent named Guido Antonietta bought up several dozen, fitted them out with modern kitchenettes and baths and some period furniture and began renting them out as a cheap alternative to the town’s hotels.  And made a killing.  You can predict the rest.  But the town has done a wonderful job of catering for the tourist crowd without ruining the charm of the district.  Today many trulli are shops for artisans, wine bars, restaurants, retail shops—at the top of the corso there is even a beautiful stone church with the conical domes all over the roof.

Pinnacoli

Deserted trulli

    We had a ball strolling the Zona delli Trulli, but I have to tell you, my favorite experience with them occurred before we even reached Alberobello.  When we were about 2 km north of the town and scooting down the provincial highway, we noticed on a little country lane over to the right, out among the olive groves, a little settlement of trulli.  Too cute to pass up.  Azura did a little giro and we ducked down that little lane so that Sandy could get a photo.  I pulled to the side of the road and as Sandy popped out of the car to get her shot, a cute little farmer in his 80s, decked out in his work clothes and gloves, opened a door and motioned us inside one of his trulli which he uses to house his equipment.  Yes, gentle reader, I’m going to abuse you with yet another wonderful, genial Italian who went far out his way to be hospitable to strangers.  Meet Giuseppe Argese, who lives in a four-trullo house across the lane and still works his olive groves at a right old age.  And who kindly demonstrated for us the various parts of the little trullo where farm hands used to set up house during the vintage and olive harvest, about this time of the year.  He showed us their kitchen with its chimney and flue and the place where the bread oven was originally, the bedroom area, the living area and the storeroom.  And provided us with 30 minutes of delightful conversation with one of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet.  

Giussepe's storage trullo

The hearth

And sleeping quarters

With our new friend Giuseppe

     As we were leaving, Giuseppe insisted we have a picture made with him and provided his address and left strict instructions to send him copies of the photos.  You may be sure we will honor that request.  And I will have a copy of my own framed, just to remind me of my only meeting with a Hobbit.  Strictly speaking, I didn’t get a look at those hairy feet, but I know in my heart they were there.