by David Yeadon
As the sacred lunch and siesta time eased in at around twelve-thirty P.M., I drove back down those endless tornanti from Aliano and through that strange moonscape of eroded canyons and buttes feeling optimistic that somehow, before Anne arrived, I’d find somewhere in the village to live. But the slightly more urgent problem was, where to stay tonight? The previous night, sleeping in the DoDo on that bluff with views that went on forever across a Dakota-like landscape, was just fine. I had slept long and deeply, and would have slept even longer if the dawn chorus hadn’t been so gloriously frenzied.
But right now, I decided, I’d prefer a bed and a bathroom, at an inexpensive hotel or pensione, in a room with a big terrace and more huge vistas of mountains and gorges. Not much to ask, I thought, except that I haven’t seen a single hotel anywhere in this wild, empty land, since leaving Matera.
Just go and flow with the flow again, suggested my optimist. Something always turns up.
Oh yes, right, mumbled my more pessimistic self. It’s already siesta time, so nothing will be open until four o’clock, you’re in the middle of all this nowhereness, and you don’t even know which town you’re heading for.
Oh yes, I do, chirped my optimist. Accettura. I like the sound of the name, and it can’t be more than an hour over the Montepiano mountains to the north.
So, Accettura it was. And it did indeed take just less than an hour of fine upland driving across broad three-thousand-foot-high ridges bedecked with fruit and olive orchards and then through the great shadowy oak forests of Bosco Montepiano, where the air was cool and syrupy with mossy woodland aromas.
The trees ended abruptly at another high ridge offering more dramatic vistas. And there, a few hundred feet down the steep slope of a very deep, shadowy valley, sat Accettura, an appealing white, piled pyramid of houses and alleys rising on a rocky butte topped by a sturdy, castlelike church and bathed in brilliant silver-gold afternoon sunlight.
Perfect, I thought. Just the kind of place to relax in for a while if things work out right.
Which they did.
Thanks to Rosa Mingalone.
“SOMETIMES I WISH I were back in Nottin’ham. I really miss England, y’know.” The lady’s cheerful Italian face sagged a little, and she half-whispered her remarks to me as we emerged together from Accettura’s small (very small) supermarket just up from the main piazza. By chance (yes, I know “there are no coincidences”) I’d found this smiling middle-aged lady with a great halo of gray-white hair to be a most useful interpreter as I tried to discuss with the owner of the store the different qualities and characteristics of his five different types of proscuitto, all purple-pink and all equally enticing, despite hairy coatings of mold and other odd blemishes and growths, apparently indicators of fine aging.
“You don’t wanna pay all that for one of those Parmas; everyone thinks it the best, but I think our local hams are much tastier m’self.” She gave me a conspiratorial grin. “Listen, if you’re from Yorkshire like what you say, I bet you don’t normally pick fancy stuff jus’ ’cos it’s got fancy prices, now d’you?”
It was most peculiar chatting with this obviously very Italian lady with a fluent grasp of English, an English delivered in an authentic Midlands dialect. And she was right: I didn’t and I wouldn’t. Then came the clincher.
“’Ow long ’as it been since you had a nice strong cup o’ real English tea?”
“Weeks,” I said. “No, actually, months.”
“So, why don’t you come over to our ’ouse and have a cup and meet my ’usband, Giuliano, and taste some of his prosciutto?”
“He makes his own?” I asked, ever hopeful of the authentic experience.
She gave a loud laugh and then covered her mouth as heads turned in the tiny store. “He makes everything ’imself! We’ve just moved from up by the church to a new home he’s just finished so he can be closer to ’is olives and ’is oil and ’is fruit trees and ’is pigs and ’is cantina where he cures all ’is sausages and hams and coppa and pancetta and…everything else! Oh, and ’is wines. He loves ’is wines, an’ what else?”
She paused and then chuckled. “Oh and ’is bricks. He makes bricks and tiles and all kind of stuff ’imself. The old way. Everybody loves ’is bricks.”
I couldn’t believe my luck. Had I finally found a haven of homemade cucina di casa (casareccio) products? The kind of thing that northerners tend to assume is the birthright of just about every family living down in the Mezzogiorno, but which, when you actually get here, you discover is a little rarer than the Armani-Gucci romantics up there would like to think. And increasingly rare every year, too, as Giuliano made adamantly clear as we all sat sipping Rosa’s real English tea in their simply furnished new house, whose exterior was adorned with Giuliano’s various types of handmade bricks, cornice mouldings, and pantiles.
Giuliano was a stocky, ball-faced, middle-aged man with prominent teeth (six, to be precise), a stubbly chin, and eyes brimming with energy and enthusiasm. Despite a Notthingham accent, his English was not as extensive as Rosa’s, even though they’d left Italy and lived for more than twenty-five years in that city, running a special continental foods store. But what his conversation lacked in eloquence, it made up for in content and scope, and his remarks were usually amplified with self-explanatory gestures, shrugs, winks, and nudges. And certainly his views on today’s young generation and their lack of respect for the “old traditions” were eminently clear as he pointed to a very large and elegant funnel-shaped fireplace in the corner of the room.
“Y’see, that’s where you see the difference. Those are all my bricks.” He pointed proudly to the thin, rustic, rough-cut, salmon-colored bricks that he’d crafted so carefully into a three-sided funnel that met the ceiling in a flurry of his finely detailed miniature fired-clay sculptures of a Madonna and child (of course) and then looser renditions of some of his friends. “You don’t see many fireplaces built like that. People use factory bricks because they’re cheaper, but they just don’t have…” at this point he got up and waddled across the room to stroke his creation fondly “…this kind of feel and texture. Here, David, c’mon and touch it.”
So, there the two of us stood (much to Rosa’s amusement) caressing the rough bricks and even the grouting and admiring the subtle variations in color, including the three darker bricks he’d selected as focal features of his fireplace.
“These is very special. There was special minerals in that piece of clay so when they were fired they came sorta volcanic and melted inside the clay like.”
And that’s how they looked—centers of chocolate fudge–like swirl dotted with air bubbles, neatly framed by salmon pink clay edges.
“C’mon,” said Guiliano. “Let me show you som’thin’ else.”
He was one of these eternally restless types, so I allowed myself to be led and forgot whatever plans I’d made for the rest of the day, which wasn’t too difficult, really, as I hadn’t any.
As we left the house, Rosa gave another of her hearty laughs and called out, “Watch ’im. You may not be back ’til dinner!” And, as things turned out, she was right. But what a day it became—one of those days you always hope for when you let things happen as they will and just sit back and enjoy the ride.
GIULIANO WAS A FOUNT of knowledge about Accettura and the surrounding countryside, and he provided a rich running commentary as we sinewed along narrow alleys, up and down endless steps, moving from piazza to piazza in the intensely bundled and tightly bound little town.
ACCETTURA
“This is a very old place y’know. They’ve found things ’round ’bout that go back six thousand years, but our town today was started in the tenth century A.D. And we got many beautiful things: Our big church right on top of t’hill, the Annunziata—very old, lovely paintings. We got the Scarrone neighborhood with lotsa big carved doorways and palazzos more n’two hundred years old. We only small with people—maybe two n’half thousand or thereabouts—but we got so much. Lotsa shops, coffee bars, a real
big street market every two weeks, a new cinema we just renovated, a communal place for butchering pigs and sheep and cows, olive mills, and lotsa cantinas and tavernas [a more up-market kind of cantina] for makin’ and keepin’ wine. Lotsa those. I’ll show you mine later. You’ll like. Now ’ow ’bout some coffee?”
The man was irrepressible. Maybe not many foreigners visited his little town, but if they did, they couldn’t find a more congenial or energetic guide. And when it came to Accettura’s famed festivals, Giuliano’s eyes gleamed as he described the SanGiuliano celebrations in January, the great Mardi Gras–flavored Carnevale in February, the San Rocco di Spagna celebrations in September (“that’s a special saint for one of our famous palazzo families”), and the great Madonna di Ermoti celebrations—“The Flower Festival” and the Festa del Maggio (May), which he described as “the best thing you’ll ever see in Basilicata.”
Over our espressos he half-whispered the details, as if sharing some deep and ancient secret. “Every pagani know this festival. People come from all over Italy, all over the world, to see this special thing. They say it’s been done here for thousands of years as a big fertility celebration. Goes on for days. Thousands of people watching as our lads and those big white oxen bring down a huge oak tree from out of the Montepiano forest. Another bunch carries a holly tree from the Gallipoli forest, with lots of singing and dancing and food. And then—and this is the real pagani bit—they marry the two trees by grafting them together and lifting them a hundred feet, m’be more, into the air. And then it all gets real crazy. People shooting guns to knock prizes out of the trees—some others climb right up to the top—and there are processions and choirs and women carrying great cende candles on their heads. Supposed to be good for marriage, they say. It’s real beautiful. Like I said, the best thing you’ll ever see in the whole of the Mezzogiorno!”
Obviously my choice of Accettura had been most fortuitous. Now all I had to do was find a place to stay.
“Oh, thas no problem,” Giuliano said, grinning. “You stay at my hotel.”
“You own a hotel?”
“Well,” he said, chuckling. “It’s got my name on it, Hotel SanGiuliano. C’mon, I’ll show you. It’s a nice place, not so big but nice rooms, good food, and good people who owns it. I’ll see if Massimo’s around. He and his dad run it. See, there it is. Right on our big piazza.”
And a more enticing place I couldn’t have wished for. Set back a little from the cafés and bars around the piazza, the SanGiuliano rose four storeys from the cobbled street, its cream-and-lemon stucco walls gleaming in the late afternoon sun.
“Lovely,” I said, and then spotted a large terrace right on the top of the hotel.
“Is that one of the rooms up there, right at the top?” I asked Giuliano.
“I think. We ask. Okay?”
“That’s the one I want,” I said.
“Okay,” Giuliano said, chuckling again.
And very okay it turned out to be. Massimo was inside serving coffee to a couple of locals, and as soon as I saw his young, almost-cherubic round face and bright, genuine smile, and heard his pretty good attempt at an English welcome (“Please come in and have a coffee and very happy to meet.”), I knew I’d found the ideal place to settle down for a while.
And, yes, the room at the top with the huge terrace was free, and, yes, the vistas of the Montepiano and Parco Gallipoli forests and ranges all around, plus views over all the town and the main piazza, were magnificent, and, yes, the price was reasonable in the extreme, and, yes, the fine-looking restaurant offered truly authentic and delicious Basilicatan fare.
Once again, laissez-faire luck had worked its magic, and I was a very happy, if slightly weary, traveler.
The Market Fruit Seller
My brief sojourn in Accettura was characterized by a series of minor but memorable occurrences. The first was during one of my almost daily visits to the small covered market in the town.
Dawn, as they often say, tends to creep in. But that particular morning it arrived in a sudden spectacular fanfare of light, as the ponderous black clouds of night lifted faster than a curtain at a first-night opening on Broadway to reveal a horizon ablaze with color. And there were frantic noises, too: the sound of the market stalls being assembled. In fifteen minutes I was up, showered, dressed, expressly espressoed by Massimo, and out into the piazza heading for my favorite saleslady.
Maria Montemurro seemed so fond of her homegrown fruits and vegetables, which she had displayed neatly in precise pyramids on her small trestle, that selling them, even to people she’d sold them to for decades, seemed to saturate her elderly, wizened face with deep sadness. Every time one of the villagers walked away with a paper bag containing a few of her golden apples or outrageously red tomatoes or one of her enormous, tight-as-a-punching-bag heads of lettuces, she watched them go with a look that a mother might give a beloved boy-child as he left for a new life in some distant land. You could see her almost silently beseeching each customer to return and relinquish their just-made purchases so she could place them lovingly again on her meticulously assembled pyramids.
This time, I told myself, I will be strong. I will not watch her eyes or pay any attention to her expressions of anxiety and sorrow. I will simply buy my apples, a few of those beautiful little, juice-laden tangerines, a cluster of the crispest celery imaginable, and a kilo of vine tomatoes that taste the way tomatoes used to taste when I was a child—sweet, sharp, peppery, and with just the slightest aftertaste of anise.
I was in the process of picking six sun-golden apples from one of her perfectly mounted displays when she started up: “These are all for you? That’s too many.” I didn’t look at her and continued to make my selection. “That one is bruised. See? Look! They’re all bruised! Why do you want to buy my bruised apples?”
There were no bruises. Now, onto the tomatoes.
“Too ripe. Try next week. You like them harder.”
I wanted to say, “No, these are just fine. Thank you, Maria,” but I was determined not to turn this into a debate or even a mild discussion. I knew what had to be done. The tomatoes were perfect. Now for the lettuce.
“You picked a different kind last time. Why pick this one? You won’t like it. It’s very bitter. Come again next week.”
Lettuce selected. And the celery and the tangerines and for good measure a half kilo of green grapes. I was winning. I could hear Maria’s commentary. “Too sour. Too big. They have better ones across the piazza in the store.” But it all sounded halfhearted. Almost defeatist. Then she made one last effort, handing me a couple of grapes. “Try.” I tried and…unfortunately, she was right. They were too sour for my taste. But what to do? Should I be stubborn and insist that they were just fine or should I…
Mistake! I looked at her face, and if ever a face said, “Please, leave me something,” it was poor little Maria’s. I could swear her eyes were watering. So, I surrendered.
“Okay, Maria, you’re right. Too sour. I’ll wait until next week.”
Transformation! Her face lit up like a young child’s. She snatched the grapes from me and returned them enthusiastically to the table, almost caressing them in the euphoria of her little victory.
I handed her a twenty-euro note (then twenty dollars).
“Too big. I have no change. See if you have coins. Or you could come back later maybe. I’ll look after your bag for you.”
It was very kind of her to offer, but I dreaded returning to find all my purchases returned to their respective displays. So, I dug deep into my pocket and pulled out a batch of coins. However, I had only a little over two euros.
“Not enough. You need another euro. Look, why don’t you forget the tomatoes?” Maria began.
Not so fast, my tricky fruit-seller lady! There was another two-euro coin deep in my other pocket, and now I had more than enough to buy all my selections. So there.
Maria gave me my change slowly, packed everything into a bag, and said nothing. For a momen
t she held on to the bag, and then with a sigh she handed it to me across the table.
“Grazie, Maria,” I said, but she was already nervously watching her next customer.
Improvising at the Hotel SanGiuliano
A few days later I received one of those little uplifting boosts that made my Accettura interlude so memorable.
As hotels went, the SanGiuliano was not very large, or grandiose. And though its room heating did not always work effectively, that didn’t pose a problem; even though it was early March, the daytime temperature was already in the mid-sixties.
I THINK I was the happiest person in this compact little hill town on the edge of the verdant and mountainous oak forests of the Bosco Montepiano. Certainly I felt a lot happier than those sinister-looking village black widows appeared, wrapped defensively and identically in enormous black shawls and scurrying like beetles across the piazza in their black dresses, black stockings, and black shoes…black everything, in fact, including their perpetual shrouds of doom and gloom and the dark looks on their faces. When I or anybody else approached them, they would tighten their shawls around their mouths and chins, Islamic fashion, and glower through suspicious, coal-black eyes. I saw them as black volcanoes—little fiery Etnas—ready to blow at the slightest tectonic nudge of trouble. I had thought that this kind of thing had died out in Italy—this mourning for a spouse that can last for decades and all those deeply entrenched superstitions and pagani beliefs, including, around this part of Basilicata, the rumored shape-shifting and other mysterious protean abilities of elderly “sorcerer” women. But, as I was to learn later, ancient traditions had tentacles there, and strangenesses indeed remained.
Fortunately most of the other locals were a sociable lot, always ready for a little gossip ’n’ chat over glasses of grappa at the piazza coffee bars. I also happened to make friends with the hotel staff, particularly the burly chef, Bruno Mastronadi, who bore an uncanny resemblance to America’s portly Cajun-cooking celebrity, Paul Prudhome. It became a habit of mine to drop into Bruno’s kitchen after the siesta to see what delights he was concocting for that evening’s dinner, and inevitably after discussing recipes and unusual local ingredients and the like, we became bosom buddies of the stove.