Eating Up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa

1

WHETTING THE APPETITE

MELITO DI PORTO SALVO – REGGIO DI CALABRIA

Crostino di pane di grano con pomodoro, peperoncino e origano

The biscuity gold slice of toast was heaped with tiny cubes of cardinal-red tomato, shiny with oil and juices, and flecked with dark green particles. The crostino was explosively crunchy, with a slightly malted flavour. The tomato was clean and sweet, its flavour sharpened by the exhilarating intensity of the dried oregano, the warmth of chilli rising up through fruit and herb.

1

WHETTING THE APPETITE

MELITO DI PORTO SALVO – REGGIO DI CALABRIA

First came the antipasti: neonati, minuscule fish no bigger than a toothpick, fried to crisp little nuggets; a couple of slices of burly prosciutto di Calabria; fleshy, acrid black olives; and some chewy hanks of melanzane sott’olio, aubergines preserved in oil; tomato, chilli and oregano, on crostini. The biscuity gold slice of toast was heaped with tiny cubes of cardinal-red tomato, shiny with oil and juices, and flecked with dark green particles. The crostino was explosively crunchy, with a slightly malted flavour. The tomato was clean and sweet, its flavour sharpened by the exhilarating intensity of the dried oregano, the warmth of chilli rising up through fruit and herb.

Next there was the primo piatto, tagliolini with tiny artichokes and fennel braised to an amber, emollient, vegetal softness. It had a sensuous, sybaritic luxury, slithering down my throat. Another plate, the secondo piatto: a random selection of very fresh grilled baby cuttlefish and fat prawns, their caramelised, marine sweetness cut by the sharp acidity of lemon juice. Finally a salty, sharp young pecorino and a couple of early nectarines, full of juicy sweetness that trickled down my chin.

An agreeable sensation of repletion suffused my being from the tips of my toes to the remote corners of my brain. This was what I had come for. Each mouthful was a reminder of the essential plainness, and grace, of Italian food. There were no extraneous sauces, no distracting garnishes, no mint sprigs or dashes of fancy oils. The flavours were clean and clear. The beauty of each dish lay in the quality of the ingredients, and in the understanding with which they were cooked. I mopped my chin and finished off the last of the red wine, which tasted of chemicals and damsons. Lunch was done. There was time for an espresso.

‘I think you need a glass of bergamino as well, signore,’ said the waiter.

‘Bergamino?’

‘The liquore from the bergamotto.’

In my ignorance I had always assumed that oil of bergamot, a staple for a thousand perfumes, eau de toilettes and aftershave lotions, not to mention the fragrant, vaguely medicinal liquore, came from a flower. Indeed, the fragrance of the flower, la zagara, filled the blustery breezes here in Melito di Porto Salvo, the southernmost point of the southernmost coast of mainland Italy. But it was the large, rounded, lemon-yellow fruit that was the basis of a substantial industry in the area, with a consorzio del bergamotto based in nearby Reggio di Calabria and a tightly controlled group of producers.

Prominent among them was Signor Enzo Familiare, whom I met later that afternoon. He was a short, handsome man of around seventy, I guessed, with the lively manner of an elderly leprechaun. We wandered among the ranks of immaculately maintained trees in his groves tucked away off the main road, just outside Melito. As he pottered from one tree to another, he caressed their trunks or let the leaves trail through his fingers, speaking about them all the time with the fond indulgence of a kindly uncle. Words gushed from him. I watched his lips. I listened to his voice. I understood perhaps one quarter of what he was telling me.

‘The name bergamot probably comes from the Turkish begarmudi, meaning the Lord’s pear,’ Signor Familiare said. ‘The harvest is over for the moment. Picking the fruit lasts normally from November to March. The tree also grows in Central America, but there the skin of the fruit is not as productive or as fragrant as those that grow only on a narrow strip about one hundred kilometres long between Villa San Giovanni and Gioiosa Ionica and between the sea and the slopes of the Aspromonte a few kilometres inland.’ Bergamot, he explained, was ‘un incidente felice della natura’.

A happy accident of nature – it was a cheery way of describing the anomaly of this oddball member of the citrus family produced by spontaneous genetic modification. No one seems to know exactly how the first bergamot came about, although one account I had come across claimed that during the eighteenth century a tree was discovered growing in the gardens of the Archbishop of Naples which bore fruit that looked like something between a lemon and a grapefruit. Naples has an impressive record in the annals of miracles, but, if true, the sudden appearance of the bergamot may be counted as among the most enduring.

The qualities of the genetic freak were quickly recognised after its discovery, and during the eighteenth century a substantial industry sprang up to exploit it. In those days the essential oils were painstakingly extracted by hand, the skin of the fruit being striated to allow the oils to ooze out on to a sponge, which rested on a stick over a bucket. Little by little the oils would then drip out of the sponge into the bucket – a process that sounded soothingly ruminative. Needless to say, those days are long gone, and today the extraction is done by the quicker, more reliable, but less romantic machine, with the consorzio in charge of ensuring quality control. It takes two hundred kilos of fruit to make one kilo of essence.

Even Signor Familiare admitted that the gastronomic possibilities of bergamot were limited, although it had found its way into the food chain in the form of bergamino and bergamotto, and via them into ice creams and sorbets. It also has a curious connection with British culture through Earl Grey tea, which is perfumed with bergamot (a tea, incidentally, which is more likely to have been the product of some marketing man’s imagination than the favourite tipple of Earl Grey, an inconspicuous Prime Minister between 1830 and 1834). Otherwise the flesh of the fruit goes for agricultural feed, the thick pith to make pectin and the oils to the perfume industry.

‘But all my production,’ he finished proudly, ‘goes to Manchester for Body Shop products,’ and he showed me a photo of the Body Shop’s founder Anita Roddick standing among his trees.

From Melito to Manchester – it was difficult to associate the two in my imagination; but then it struck me that it is the true nature of commerce to act as a link between improbable parties and places. The association was certainly no more improbable than my arrival here from the cheery purlieus of Acton, a less than fashionable suburb of London. I wondered what other curious conjunctions this odyssey through Italy would bring me.

I have been in love with Italy for most of my life. It’s an affair that began in 1958, when I was eleven, and we took a family holiday at Cervia on the Adriatic coast. I remember little of the cultural side of things – the endless churches and monasteries around which we were dragged, or the celebrated mosaics and frescos that seemed to clutter up every available surface. On the other hand, I can still taste the ice creams with which we were bribed every step of the way, and visualise the vast cold buffets, complete with swans sculpted from ice, that appeared in the dining room of the Hotel Mare e Pineta at lunchtime each Thursday, and the grapes, slices of melon and segments of orange coated in light, friable caramel that we bought from a vendor on the beach who cried out ‘A-ro-via gelati e vitamine B-B’, brushing away swarms of wasps as he wandered past.

I consummated the affair as often as I could thereafter, but perhaps its intensity was maintained by the short duration of my visits. A question always lingered in my mind as to whether what I felt was true love or merely another Englishman’s infatuation with sunlight, landscape, food, wine and people seen through the distorting glass of sentimentality and self-delusion. So this journey, from the very southernmost tip of the country to Turin, eating as I went, was to be an attempt to sort through the waffle of interior monologue. Food, in all its forms, was the medium through which I would try to understand this beautiful and baffling country. Of course the journey had a certain sybaritic appeal, too. Quite a lot of sybaritic appeal, in point of fact.

I had considered walking, or doing the trip on a bicycle, but dismissed them as being impractical. A car? Too boring, too conventional, too … middle-aged. No, a scooter, a classic Vespa, design icon, landmark of Italian culture, sound, sensible and slowish. A voyage of exploration on a Vespa – that was the thing. It was true that I had flunked my road test in England for ‘failing to maintain sufficient forward momentum’, or ‘Not going bloody fast enough’, as my taciturn tutor, John, had put it, but speed was not of the essence as far as I was concerned. Anyway, the Italians did not seem to worry unduly about road tests for machines under 150cc, and I wasn’t going to go near anything with that kind of zip.

To make things yet more practical, I had arranged to do the journey in three sections, allotting one month to each. The first would take me from the tip of Calabria to Naples; the second from Naples to Ancona; and the third from Ancona to Turin. Why stop at Turin? Well, the theoretical justification was that this route, from south to north, described the course of the unification of Italy.

That was why I had come to Melito di Porto Salvo. It was here that Giuseppe Garibaldi landed in 1860 with 10,000 men after his conquest of Sicily. He progressed northwards up the western coast, routing the forces of the reactionary Bourbons as he went. In fact, I had taken lunch in the dining room of the Casina dei Mille, un ristorante con alloggio, a handsome, imposing, cream-painted house that had served as Garibaldi’s headquarters.

The building had been preserved as a monument to the great man by the owner, Signor Romeo. The rooms had a certain gloomy magnificence: one barrel-vaulted, the other square; both had a red-brick ceiling complementing a brown tiled floor, and the walls of each were hung with various pictures, photographs of the great man and documents pertinent to his life. In most pictures, his distinctive dome-like forehead had an imposing nobility, in spite of the receding hair being brushed up and over. The eyes were quite narrow and slightly slanted. Much of the lower face was hidden beneath a beard, in different lengths in different photographs, but always conveying the same bushy masculinity. Even in apparent repose, he exuded tremendous energy. The force of his personality was palpable, his sense of his own rightness incontrovertible. I couldn’t help feeling that, inspiring beyond measure though he was in warfare, what a pain in the neck he must have been at other times.

For all its place in history, Melito di Porto Salvo was a queer place, devoid of any charm or notable feature that I could make out. On the town’s seaward side, a shingle beach, on which litter, detritus and brilliant wild flowers mingled with louche promiscuity, gingerly skirted the edge of the town. Beyond that, the flat grey sea and the flat grey coastal plain merged one into the other. The only thing distinguishing the two was the fact that, out at sea, there was no scab of indiscriminate construction of depressingly tawdry buildings. It may not be the most distinguished piece of coastline in the world, but any charm it might have had had been completely buried beneath a haphazard mish-mash of ribbon development, the consequence of bureaucratic corruption and the absence of civic control. The sad, transitory nature of the coastal plain was emphasised by the brooding magnificence of the tree-covered crags of the Aspromonte, the southernmost tip of the Apennine range, which could be seen rising up further inland.

I found it curious that, the Casina aside, no effort seemed to have been made to commemorate Melito’s place in history. There was no Garibaldi visitor centre, no Garibaldi heritage trail, no shops selling replica red shirts or mugs celebrating 1860, fake powder horns or plastic muzzle-loading rifles or memorabilia medallions. In fact, there was nothing to indicate that the first practical step towards the unification of Italy, which I thought might have merited a bit of razzmatazz and celebration, had been taken here, in this unkempt, dusty, down-at-heel town.

Eventually I tracked down a monument of a kind, just off a dirt road that ran along the shore. Its place was marked by a concrete pinnacle of peculiar hideousness, which stood on a low mound covered with trashy, 1950s crazy-paving ceramics. There was a stone set into the earth with an orotund inscription, much of which was lost among the cracks and weeds growing over it. It was a desolate spot. The wind blew stiffly, hissing through the sea thistle, gorse and mimosa that grew in clumps on either side of the monument, causing the mimosas to rock their yellow heads vigorously, and any number of plastic bags trapped between the stones and haphazard detritus, rusting cans and cannelloni of concrete piping to flap back and forth.

I wondered how far Italy was really unified in any social or political sense. Its post-unification history had been chequered to say the least, but the total neglect here of someone whom I had always thought of as one of the country’s true heroes struck me as very rum. Perhaps food might be a more accurate gauge of Italy’s unity. Pasta, prosciutto, pecorino (the ubiquitous sheep’s cheese) – those, surely, were universally recognised from Melito to Milan. Well, I would find out. I headed back up the desecrated coast to Reggio di Calabria beneath lowering skies.

‘This swordfish,’ Silvia Cappello addressed the proprietor of Baylik, one of Reggio’s suaver restaurants, through a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘Is it Italian or Greek?’

‘Italian,’ he replied firmly.

‘Are you sure?’ Her voice rang with disbelief. ‘It’s very early for swordfish here. I think it must be Greek.’

‘Absolutely not,’ he countered with spirit. ‘They are just beginning to catch them in the Straits of Messina.’

‘Hrrummph,’ said Silvia. ‘I’ll have the sea bass.’

She was, if anything, more passionate about food than I. Her large, grey eyes sparkled when she talked about the differing qualities of this café or that, or held forth on the provenance of pastries or the distinctions between the multiplicity of Calabrese dishes. I had met Silvia at the Italian Institute in London, where she taught Italian to people like me. She was Calabrian born and bred and had offered to initiate me in the mysteries of her native cooking. She was in Reggio, visiting her mother, and I had contacted her to take her up on her offer.

‘What was all that about?’ I asked, when the battered man had beaten his retreat with our order.

Silvia explained that the swordfish made their way up the Calabrian coast through the Straits of Messina to spawn. Usually they only arrived at the end of April or the beginning of May. That’s why she was suspicious about the provenance of the swordfish. It was too early for the true Italian catch.

‘So? What’s the difference between a Greek swordfish and an Italian one?’

‘As they come up through the Straits, they are getting amorosi, ready to spawn. It makes their flesh più dolce, più delicato, più morbido – sweeter, more delicate, softer, better in every way.’

‘Can you really tell?’

She looked scandalised. ‘Of course,’ she said in a manner that brooked no further argument. I wondered how many British teachers or food enthusiasts could pontificate knowledgeably on the mating habits of salmon or trout, let alone on how these may affect the edibility of the fish.

I had the swordfish, and I couldn’t have told if it was Italian, Greek or Turkish. But to regard that as important would have been to miss the point. In a sense it didn’t matter whether or not there was a difference. It was believing that there is a difference, believing that quality matters; that was what was important.

Silvia had abiding high expectations in all matters to do with food. For most Calabresi, indeed for most Italians, that I had met, excellence was assumed to be a common goal when it came to eating, and their critical faculties never seemed to rest. Italians discuss what they have eaten, what they are eating, what they are going to eat, with the same matter-of-fact passion that we reserve for the weather; and, in absolute contrast to the English, they criticise openly and fearlessly if they think that food or drink is not as good as it should be. The expectation of gastronomic virtue is as natural as breathing.

I learnt another valuable lesson about swordfish, which applies equally to tuna. If you cut a swordfish or tuna steak about three centimetres thick and cook it right through to bring out the flavour, the flesh dries out and becomes fibrous and tough. So British chefs came up with the bastard concept of the seared tuna. This produces a nice brown crust about half a centimetre deep, beneath which is not nearly so nice, cold, raw and virtually tasteless fish. They tried to persuade us that it was a good thing, when we knew, in our heart of hearts, that it was really pretty nasty. The Italians have been at the business of cooking swordfish and tuna rather longer, and have got it worked out. They cut the fish into slices about one centimetre thick, and cook it very fast by grilling, frying – a padella – in olive oil over a very high heat, and then add salmoriglio (which is no more than olive oil, lemon, garlic and oregano), or just a splash of lemon and a dash of salt. The result is that the fish is cooked through, which brings on the flavour nicely, and still tender and toothsome.

Reggio di Calabria was the urban equivalent to a veteran boxer, not without dignity and a sense of history, but scuffed, tatty and rather beaten up. Long, long ago, as part of Magna Graecia, Reggio had been prosperous, but the combination of earthquake, war and political and criminal exploitation seemed to have knocked the stuffing out of the place. Most of the architecture was of the general-purpose neo-classical style of the 1920s–1940s. In spite of the odd elaborate detail – wrought-iron balcony, cornice or frieze emerging from the broken plaster like that on a social security building – it had a rather Victorian feel.

But among the streets that scrambled up the hillside from the edge of the Strait of Messina were hidden glories to which Silvia introduced me: cafés – Caridi e Lagana, Caffé Malavenda, Le Cordon Bleu. They were efficient, immaculate, gleaming, with pristine display cabinets stuffed with voluptuous pastries: cannoli, kind of boat-shaped, pinched in the middle and stuffed with sweet ricotta; sguta and cuddhuraci, traditional Easter pastries of Greek origin; fancy cakes of chocolate or strawberries; mostaccioli, mzuddi, brioche ripiena di gelato – buns stuffed with ice cream; and sfogliatelle, like pastry oysters, stuffed with ricotta again and dusted with icing sugar. The variations on pastry, almonds, ricotta, candied fruit and sugar seemed endless in their refinements.

The shapes, combinations and ingredients, in particular the use of almonds, were a continuous reminder of how much the cooking of Calabria owes to the Arabs, both directly, through the control that the Moors exerted on the coastal regions in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and indirectly, through Sicily on the far side of the Strait of Messina. It was curious, although, on reflection, perhaps not surprising, to discover just how closely Sicily and this, the western, side of Italy, had been linked to the culture of northern Africa, while south-eastern Italy, the Adriatic side, owed more to Byzantium.

For obvious reasons it would be inaccurate to blame the Moors for one of the most distinctive features of cafés and pastry-shop windows: the high-kitsch Paschal lambs formed out of marzipan, covered in white chocolate and decked out in the most fearsome colours, that filled the windows and display cabinets around Easter. These were a reminder, possibly a remainder, of the eighteenth-century southern Italian passion for the more vivid and gruesome aspects of baroque art.

Taking pity on my solitary state, Silvia invited me to lunch on Easter Sunday at home with her mother and her mother’s sister. Signora Cappello was a handsome woman, with a powerful and decisive mien, and her sister, a civil servant, had a dark languor and sharp intelligence. Home was a large flat in up-town Reggio, cool and dark. The walls were hung with an extensive collection of pictures, and the furniture had the heft of old-fashioned virtue. This taste for shade seemed odd given the prevailing weather conditions, but, for most of the year, blinding light and severe heat are the principal enemies. Houses had been built as fortresses against the sun, just as they had been in Britain in the nineteenth century, when it was the fashion for them to face north for fear that too much sunlight would cause curtains and carpets to fade quickly.

I had always thought that my own family’s tribal feasts were pretty substantial, but nothing prepared me for the majestic sequence of dishes of a traditional Calabresi Easter feast. This one started with rigatoni al forno, the kind of dish that anchors you to the table in more ways than one. It consisted of fat, short, ridged tubular pasta with meat balls, mozzarella, provola, cooked ham, Parmesan, melanzane, hard-boiled eggs and sugo – tomato sauce – and it had been baked in the oven.

The difference between sugo and ragù had been something of a mystery to me, but Signora Cappello briskly cleared this up for me.

‘Normally sugo is simply tomato sauce, and ragù is a sauce with meat in it, like a ragù bolognese, but down here ragù is a bit different. First I make a soffritto (the great Mediterranean base flavour of onions, or onions and garlic, stewed in olive oil). Then I put a piece of beef and a piece of pork on top, then add the tomatoes. Now I let it bubble quietly for four hours or more. The meat is kept nice and moist, but also it gives up some of its flavour to the sauce. So you can eat your pasta with the sugo, and then eat the meat as the secondo piatto. It is a very practical way to cook, no?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

Braised lamb with potatoes came next. ‘It must be pecora – ewe,’ said Signora Cappello with the certainty of an ex cathedra Papal bull. ‘It is more tender and tastier than agnello – ram.’ For a moment I wondered if, like swordfish, it was più amorosa as well.

Then there was a salad of Romaine lettuce and fennel; involtini di vitello, thin slices of veal stuffed with breadcrumbs, parsley, garlic, Parmesan and then grilled; fried artichoke, which had been sliced, dipped in egg and breadcrumbs, and fried; and a classically unctuous melanzane alla parmigiana – ‘The melanzane must to be female,’ said Signora Cappello, which prompted a long discussion about how you can tell whether a melanzana is female or not.

My mental grip rather loosened by too much of everything, I foolishly suggested to Signora Cappello that it was inevitable that even in Italy traditional cooking and eating habits would gradually become like those of the rest