by Jen Lin-Liu
Nonna’s upbringing resembled those of women in the East. She’d been born in the 1930s, during the Mussolini era, and she hadn’t gotten beyond fifth grade. She told me that when she was young, she’d lived in a society similar to the one I’d seen in Iran: single men and women weren’t permitted on the streets together; she’d never worked outside the home but considered herself freer than many of her peers. “Some of my girlfriends weren’t allowed to go out without their husbands,” she said. Even today, religion was the center of her life. She still prayed every day, and, until recently, attended mass weekly. Indeed, one still encountered the occasional woman draped in swaths of black cloth in southern Italy, Catholics as rigidly devout as strict Muslims.
Tradition: that was what had preserved Nonna’s dishes, but it had also limited her options. I was beginning to realize that “traditional” was a word I liked when it applied to food but not so much when it was associated with women. And could you have one without the other? Daniela, with her professional aspirations, wasn’t interested in cooking. Like many other young women I’d met on my journey, including Nur’s sister and Yasmin in Iran, Daniela associated cooking, pasta-making, and baking with being held back, being rooted in old ways.
I couldn’t blame them for not wanting to cook. Growing up, I hadn’t been interested in it either. My parents had never expected me to learn the skill, seeing it as irrelevant to my future. And for that, I was grateful. I’d come to cooking freely, as a woman in my twenties, and while I’d started to resent the task after marriage, it had been more or less optional. I wouldn’t have traded my position for Nonna’s. But still, there was something to bemoan if Nonna’s way of cooking was lost. I couldn’t help wondering, who would know how to make her orecchiette con cima di rapa or her rice and mussels after she was gone?
13.
After a week of la dolce vita in Puglia, I reluctantly packed my bags. I was hesitant about my next destination, Naples, but my Apulian friends convinced me that I had to go. Naples was home to many of Italy’s eating traditions, from pizza to ragù to a delicious rum-soaked cake called babà. As one of the biggest ports in Italy, it had enjoyed continuous links to the East and a storied past. And—as one friend had gushed—it was beautiful.
Beautiful? That was a word I’d never associated with Naples. Craig and I had planned to visit on our previous Italian vacation. On our drive from Pompeii to the Amalfi coast, we figured we’d spend the night, soak up the atmosphere, and enjoy a slice of its world-famous pizza. But as we got closer, the rows of public housing, the smokestacks, and the decrepit factories seemed too ominous. Rather than turning off the autostrada, we pushed on to Amalfi.
My Apulian friends understood. “It’s kind of like going to India,” Giuseppe joked. “You have to be prepared.” The Camorra, a Mafia-like criminal network of powerful family clans, unofficially ruled the city. Aside from controlling the lucrative port, they dictated how many things ran in the city, from essential services like trash collection to daily businesses like bakeries. They settled disputes outside of the law, and Camorra-sponsored gang warfare broke out unpredictably. Robbery and other petty crime—some related to the Camorra, some not—was also common. The stories gave me pause. But after traveling thousands of miles through Central Asia and Iran, I decided I was not going to let a little gang warfare get in the way of eating the world’s best pizza.
I deliberated over how I’d get to Naples. In contrast to other countries along the Silk Road, renting a car was easy. Driving it was another story. To begin with, I disliked driving; I’d never owned a car, having spent my adult life in cities with decent public transportation. When Craig and I rented a car, he usually got behind the wheel. It wasn’t that he liked driving more; in this case, I didn’t mind giving in to the societal convention. Plus, I truly did have a tendency to “misjudge distances” (as he kindly put it)—not just between cities but between the car and other objects on the road. Driving in Italy came with extra challenges—break-ins and carjackings were common, particularly in the south, I was told. I’d also have to reckon with crazy Italian drivers who treated pedestrians as nuisances and took the narrowness of sixteenth-century alleys as an invitation to speed down them faster.
But then I thought about showing up in Naples with only my bags and decided that the risks were probably worth it.
I was still in doubt the morning I left. The weather conspired against me—as I drove through the Campanian countryside, sheets of rain swept my windshield, the wipers swinging frantically back and forth to no avail. I had a headache from the measly amount of wine I’d drunk the night before, and it didn’t help that I was sleep-deprived from my intense schedule of eating and cooking. My friends’ last piece of advice echoed in my head: “Just don’t go anywhere by yourself and you should be fine,” they said, forgetting that I was, in fact, traveling alone.
That was the funny thing—everyone seemed to be surprised that I was traveling alone, especially because I was married. Where was my husband? Why wasn’t he with me? He was okay with my traversing a good part of the planet by myself? To the Italians and the others before them on my travels, that seemed to suggest that something was off.
And at that moment, I wondered if they were right. What was I doing alone on an autostrada in the driving rain? In Puglia, I’d felt more distant from Craig than I had during the rest of the trip. I’d been so busy cooking with Nonna or eating long meals that when he’d called we couldn’t talk for long. (Italians frowned at stepping away from the table to speak on the phone—it was a violation of their eating rules.) Late in the evenings when I called him back, I could manage no more than a few sentences before doing a face plant into my pillow. I wasn’t even sure where he was at the moment—somewhere on the West Coast of the United States, I thought.
As the rain continued to blanket my windshield, my loneliness turned to anxiety: my heart quickened, and I felt a panic attack coming on. Of all the things I’d done on the trip—which included visiting unstable western China, revolutionary Kyrgyzstan, totalitarian Turkmenistan, and the Islamic Republic of Iran—it was highway driving that gave me the greatest anxiety. Taking a deep breath, I moved to the right lane and slowed to the speed of a senior citizen in Florida. The Italian drivers who whizzed past me must have cackled with laughter. I thought about pulling over and calling Craig, but wherever he was, it would be early in the morning, and the roaming charges would be exorbitant. Better to wait to Skype later.
By early afternoon, I managed to make it to the boutique hotel I’d sprung for, in a neighborhood I’d heard was safe. I collapsed in bed and awoke to my guide, Marina, knocking on my door.
“You drove here by yourself?” Marina said, surprised. “I couldn’t do it. I get anxious when I drive on the autostrada.”
“It wasn’t so bad,” I said, shrugging off my earlier anxieties. I didn’t mention them to my husband either when we later spoke.
Marina was a pretty woman in her fifties with light brown hair that fell to her shoulders. She’d dressed formally for our meeting, in a blue blazer and slacks. She spoke in lofty sentences peppered with words that sounded as if she’d looked them up in an Italian-English dictionary. (“Naples is a city of integration. We amalgamate different cultures.”) She was born and raised in Naples, and had only spent a few years away when she was in college. “I’m Neapolitan DOC,” she said proudly, referring to a certification standard for fine Italian wine and food products.
Marina called her private tours “No-Stress Itineraries.” She wanted tourists to know that Naples could be fun if you ignored the media. Most tourists did exactly what I’d done the year before—bypassed the city on their way to places like Capri and the Amalfi coast. The few who came were often in search of their roots. It was a shame, because tourists missed out by skipping Naples, Marina said. For starters, they missed the Neapolitans themselves, who were loud and boisterous and more “Italian” than other Italians.
“We talk more with our hands,” she said. She curled her fingers so they resembled bristles on a broom and flicked them. “That means go away.” She tapped her mid-section. “I’m hungry.” She put a palm up in the air and bobbed it up and down as if she were weighing a heavy rock. “What are you doing?”
As we hopped on a bus that took us to the historic district, Marina gave me a brief introduction to Naples. Greeks had ruled the area, and much of southern Italy, early on. The Romans then took over, making the nearby countryside a cavorting ground for their emperors. Naples enjoyed a period of independence after Rome fell, but starting in the twelfth century, a string of small European monarchies colonized the area: first the Normans ruled, followed by the German Swabians, the French Anjous, the Spanish Aragons, and finally the Spanish Bourbons.
“As a result of all the conquering, we are very tolerant,” Marina said. In contrast to Puglia, I noticed more ethnic diversity in Naples—Africans, Chinese, and Orthodox Jews walked the streets. On the bus, Marina pointed out a few Sri Lankans, immigrants who’d begun arriving two generations before.
But with the mixing came tension. When a group of Neapolitan teenagers quietly harassed an elderly woman at the back of the bus, she shouted, “You boys are worse than the black people!”—a reference to the Sri Lankans. Marina mentioned that the recent revolution in Libya had brought an unwelcome wave of Arab immigrants. “They come here and take advantage of the system,” she said. “Italy has always been a paradise for them.” Though many likened Italy’s shape to a boot, Marina described it as a plank—an easy entryway to Europe.
Just as my Apulian friend had said, Naples was beautiful. Sure, the outskirts were dilapidated. Graffiti covered many buildings and the bases of statues. And yes, enormous piles of rubbish overflowed onto downtown sidewalks, a sign of an ongoing dispute between officials and the Camorra that had ground trash collection to a halt. But if anything, the grit heightened the beauty that managed to persist around it. Naples was full of striking modern towers and ornate historic buildings, legacies of its French and Spanish past. The city sat along dramatic cliffsides and atop steep hills. All afternoon, the rain poured, casting a Gotham-like darkness across the city’s narrow gridded streets: if there were ever a city made for Batman, Naples would be it. I instantly liked the place more than Venice or Florence, which had felt to me like giant museums clogged with tourists. Naples by contrast was full of ordinary people going about their usual business.
Marina guided me through the city’s thirteenth-century Duomo and the baroque Chapel of the Treasure of San Gennaro, the city’s patron saint whose name graces Italian-American festivals. In between, we stopped at a limoncello factory, where I learned that the best lemons came from the nearby Amalfi coast and that the secret to the digestive was to use just the very yellow part of the zest, which soaked for ten days in pure liquor made from sugarcane. At one of the best bakeries, I sampled the famous babà cake infused with rum-flavored syrup, as intensely sweet as the desserts I’d tasted farther east. The numerous butchers reflected a cuisine that had grown more meat-heavy since Puglia, though the two places were less than two hundred miles apart. Pork was popular and veal even more so, for its tenderness and because it was considered safer than beef—diseases like mad cow usually developed in older livestock.
Like many Italians, Marina only bought meat raised in Italy. “We respect the rules in raising animals. It’s not like other parts of Europe,” she said disdainfully. “That’s why the cow went mad.”
Our last stop was a pizzeria called Sorbillo, where we were invited into the kitchen. The owner’s son, Gino, gamely fielded my questions while making pizzas for the dinner rush. He didn’t spin the dough as I’d imagined, but stretched, slapped, and banged it against the counter in a rhythmic fashion before he sprinkled it with olive oil, buffalo mozzarella, fresh basil, and a light sauce made of San Marzano tomatoes—the classic Margherita. He graced other pies with various toppings: sun-dried tomatoes, black olives, and prosciutto, either the cooked variety called cotto or the cured version, crudo. Another chef, using a long wooden spatula, pushed the pizzas into a deep wood-fired oven, similar to the ones for lagmacun in Turkey. The pies baked for no more than a few minutes, just long enough for the crust to crisp but for the pizza’s center to remain chewy. As with the hand-pulled noodles in China and the bagel-like buns of Kashgar, the pizza’s secret ingredient was the local water, Marina told me.
I was practically drooling, but Marina said our time was up; her husband was waiting for her to make dinner. I tried to insist that I could stay for the pizza and return to the guesthouse alone, but there was no way Marina was going to leave me unaccompanied, especially at night. (Naples, she admitted, did have its dangers.) Her husband, Maurizio, a gruff man with limited English, awaited us in his hatchback, and just in time, as the relentless rain was turning the gutters into fast-moving rivers.
Marina and her husband dropped me off at a pizzeria near my hotel—“This place is pretty good,” she said—and then sped off. I sat down at a table, bemoaning my missed opportunity. I suspiciously examined the pizza that appeared before me. It was oblong like a tongue, rather than round, and only a sprinkling of tomatoes and mozzarella graced the crust. It hadn’t been cut or even thoroughly baked—the dough in the center still seemed raw.
But to my amazement, it turned out to be the most delicious pizza I’d ever tasted. Just like the best pastas, the best pizzas were made quickly, with the least adornment, I learned. The crust melted in my mouth, and the plum tomatoes were so fresh and sweet that they sent pleasure signals to my brain, amplified by the gooeyness of the fresh cheese. No pizza I tasted after that, anywhere else, came close.
• • •
Before dropping me off with apologies, Marina had invited me to her house for a traditional Sunday lunch the next day. She met me on the street, dressed in jeans and an oversize plaid shirt. With her hair in an unkempt bun and her large hoop earrings, she looked more like a homebody than the urbane fashionista of the day before. She greeted me with the usual Italian kisses on alternating cheeks and led me to her spacious second-floor apartment, where she introduced me to her two sons, Gianluca and Riccardo. Though their physiques made them intimidating—they were both muscular and more than six feet tall—they said hello shyly, peeking out of their shared bedroom. They were both students at a nearby university but honored the Italian tradition of living at home, sleeping in the same twin beds they’d had since childhood.
Marina told me she’d named Riccardo after her favorite movie star, Richard Gere. “Riccardo is my boyfriend, my lover. More than Gianluca. I don’t know why,” she said with a light shrug. “Gianluca is instinctive, a bit of an artist, temperamental. Riccardo is rational.” She worried when they went out with their friends on the weekends (“What if some woman takes advantage of them?”), and she waited up for them, only sleeping after they were safely tucked in their beds.
Her relationship with Maurizio seemed more distant. He occasionally padded into the kitchen, plunked himself down on the sofa to watch television, delivered a baffling sequence of Neapolitan hand gestures to his wife, and went elsewhere in the apartment before returning to repeat. Marina mostly ignored him as we cooked in the roomy, bright kitchen made colorful by a small turquoise refrigerator and green wooden chairs around a rickety old table.
My guide started on the ragù, the most important component of the Sunday meal. Ragù, which simply means “sauce,” refers to a mixture of gently stewed meat and tomatoes. While most Italians approved of dried pasta, they abhorred premade sauces. And “red” and “white” sauces only appeared on the same table in American restaurants. Indeed, southern Italians didn’t eat cream-based sauces; those existed only in northern Italy and, to the southerners, seemed suspiciously French.
Sunday dinner carried its own traditions. “Some people immortalize the day with fish. But most people make ragù,” Marina said, adding tha
t in the old days, meat was expensive, so often Sunday was the only day of the week families ate it. “My mother still prepares ragù every Sunday, even though she lives by herself. If you go to any apartment building in Naples on a Sunday, you’ll smell this sauce from the hallways.” The meal was typically eaten after mass, in the afternoon. But while not very many people went to church anymore—Marina did, occasionally, but the men in the family did not—the tradition of the Sunday meal remained.
Marina guided me through the cooking as deftly as she’d led me through the streets of Naples. She laid out on a cutting board two pork ribs, a slab of pork thigh, and a flank steak of Tuscan veal. Meat was the base of the ragù. She donned a pair of yellow-framed eyeglasses and cubed the pork thigh. She seasoned the steak with salt and pepper and placed two layers of thinly sliced prosciutto, one cooked, one salt-cured, over the steak. She grated Parmigiano-Reggiano over the meat and sprinkled it with a few bits of the cheese’s darkened crust. She rolled the meat and cheese together tightly and fastened it with toothpicks. The wooden sticks were called stuzzicadente, she noted, “teeth toys.”
She held up a bottle of olive oil to the kitchen windows. “Look at the color,” she said. It was translucent green. “It must be pure. Clean. Every year has a different taste, depending on the climate and the sun.” She doused the bottom of a shallow pot with the liquid. Olive oil was healthy, she noted—it had vitamin A and no cholesterol. Maurizio used to drive to the nearby region of Basilicata every year to fill a tin drum with olive oil from a friend’s farm, but nowadays they bought their olive oil from Carrefour, the French supermarket chain that was changing how people shopped from Italy to China.