North of Naples, South of Rome

by Tullio, Paulo;

  For the quickest of meals try spaghetti all’ aglio e olio – the pasto del cornuto. While the spaghetti cooks, warm some olive oil in a pan with crushed or sliced garlic. Do not let the garlic brown, as this makes it indigestible. Add one or two teaspoonfuls of chilli oil and when the spaghetti is cooked strain the oil and pour it over the pasta. There is nothing simpler, and it is delicious.

  When the glut of tomatoes comes in summer they are traditionally boiled, skinned and put into preserving jars. They can then be used throughout the following year for tomato sauces. If there are three or four days of strong sun, you can try sun-dried tomatoes. I have managed on occasion in Ireland, so it should be possible anywhere in Europe. Take the tomatoes and slice them lengthways, if possible leaving the skin on one side intact, so that they open like a book. Put the tomatoes on a board, so that in the event of a shower they can be moved under cover quickly. Salt the exposed flesh well, and let the sun do its work. When they look like shrivelled bats’ wings, they are ready. Once again, preserve them in oil or they’ll become drier and drier.

  Some of the best food in Italy is cooked on the fire embers. This is not the same as using a barbecue, requiring a little more care. Any wood will do, but a mixture of dry and green is best. Wood such as apple or pear imparts a lovely flavour, as do beech and oak. Avoid tarry woods like conifers. Stack the wood high, like a tower built of matches. Let it blaze well before knocking it down and spreading it out. Now put a trivet or something similar over the fire, so that your grid will be no more than 2 or 3 centimetres above the fire. Wood embers emit considerably less heat than charcoal, so the food must be close to the fire. You also have less time to cook with wood embers, so get everything on at the same time. Pork chops work very well cooked like this, as do thin slices of beef – fillet or rump steak. Keep a jug of water handy to sprinkle on any flames caused by burning fat; there should be only glowing embers, no flame. When the meat is cooked, cut some slices of bread and rub both sides with oil and a clove of garlic. Brown both sides over the embers and you have bruschetta. Use the dying embers to roast sweet peppers. Put them directly on the embers, turning them until all parts are literally black. Wash them under running water and the black comes off, exposing perfectly cooked pepper beneath. Slice them into thin strips, add a little crushed garlic and plenty of oil, then put them in the fridge for a day. You may never eat peppers any other way again.

  Autumn is the time for gathering mushrooms. Common and good varieties include ceps, field and horse mushrooms, parasols and shaggy ink-caps. Ceps can be dried by slicing them and putting them on newspaper somewhere warm, such as over an Aga, keeping each slice separate from the others. They can be reconstituted in water later, when they are needed. The other kinds can be cooked and then frozen. The best mushroom sauce for pasta that I know needs 450 grammes of fresh mushrooms diced very small. A food processor will do it faster and finer. Cook the finely diced mushrooms in a frying pan with a little olive oil. Put a lid on the pan and stir occasionally, keeping the heat low. After half an hour remove the lid and add a little cream, stirring well. Now grate 125 grammes of caciotta or white cheddar into the pan, stirring constantly. Keep the heat low or the cheese will burn. If the sauce becomes thick, add more cream. Salt it very well and add some black pepper. This is enough sauce for a half-kilo packet of pasta. The best pasta for this is fusilli, a spiral shape with plenty of surface area.

  Finally, the larder contains wine and liqueurs. Making wine is beyond the scope of this book, but some liqueurs are easy to make and very good. Ideally to make a liqueur you need pure alcohol. In France, Italy and Spain it can be bought in any supermarket by the litre. If you have no access to some, you can get by with the strongest, least flavoured vodka that you can find. If you can begin with alcohol, take half a litre of water and warm it, dissolving 200 grammes of sugar into it. When it has cooled, pour it into a 2-litre preserving jar and add half a litre of alcohol. You now have a mixture of 50 per cent alcohol by volume. If this is stronger than you would like (whisky is 40 per cent), just add water.

  To get to this point with vodka, warm it as little as possible (so as not to evaporate the alcohol) and dissolve 200 grammes of sugar per litre into it. An ordinary bottle of 75 centilitres will need 150 grammes of sugar.

  With the liquid in the jar, take the finest orange that you can find, perfumed, ripe and without blemish. Thread string or wool through the middle of the orange. Now, holding both ends of the string, lower the orange into the preserving jar until it is a centimetre or so above the liquid. It is important that the orange is not in contact with the liquid. When it is in position, keep holding the string and close the lid of the jar, trapping the string and leaving the orange suspended. Put the jar away for three weeks and then open it, remembering not to let the orange fall. You will be met with the smell of Cointreau and a taste – if you used pure alcohol – indistinguishable from it.

  Lastly, to finish an Italian meal there is nothing quite like a digestive liqueur. In the Comino Valley this is nocino, made from walnuts. You need to pick unripe nuts in June or July when they are still soft enough to slice with a knife. Slice through both the green outer covering and the nut, cutting each one into four. Chop enough to loosely fill a 2-litre preserving jar, and pour a litre of alcohol into it. Seal it and wait eight weeks. Pour the alcohol, which will now be dark brown, into another jar with one vanilla pod and leave it for another month. Now add a litre of water in which you have dissolved 400 grammes of sugar, including as part of the litre a small cup of percolated black coffee as an optional extra. Now is the time to bottle it. You can drink it at this stage, but it will improve dramatically with time, mellowing into a fine digestivo.

  The basic recipe for any liqueur is a litre of 50 per cent alcohol by volume, 200 grammes of sugar and your choice of flavour. Graziano’s wild strawberry liqueur is made just like the nocino; steep the berries in alcohol for two months.

  A well-stocked larder not only lets you eat well, it permits impromptu hospitality, something Italians love. It also satisfies the desire in Italians to order their world, to sistemare. In the Comino Valley it has historical echoes: it is a bulwark keeping the wolf from the door, a daily reminder that poverty and miseria are a thing of the past.

  13

  Pyrotechnics and Drama

  It’s probably true that all rural, agricultural societies have markets. They serve the dual purpose of getting produce to a prospective buyer while fulfilling a social role, providing a time, a place and a reason for isolated individuals to come together. Of the twelve towns in the Comino Valley, seven have weekly markets. The largest one is in Atina and is held every Monday.

  Markets start early in Italy; the traders arrive before six to set up their stalls and shortly after people begin to arrive. I have this information second-hand, since I have never made it before ten. The drive to Atina is one to take with care – the road snakes up from the valley floor forming a series of hair-pin bends as it climbs. Sections of the road are lined with the remnants of the pre-Roman walls that once surrounded the citadel. As the road climbs it passes remains of Roman walls, more recent than the Samnite ones, part brick and part stone. Still further, it goes past one of the medieval gates, through which some of the later Roman buildings can be seen. From here on the road is hard to negotiate on market-day. Cars line both sides of the road, while people meander slowly in the middle of the street oblivious to traffic. At the top of the hill is the nearest thing Atina has to a flat space. In front of the impressive late-medieval gate is a wide sloping area, which, combined with the road itself, is where the stalls are laid out.

  This extra-mural part of the market sells hardware, shoes, clothes, leather goods, bootleg tapes and household goods. Anyone not speaking Italian, or unused to the ways of the souk, should either not buy here, or be prepared to spend over the odds. Haggling is integral to the event: it is expected. No stalls carry prices except for a couple of the shoe stalls – you have to ask. The trader then
appraises you and, using all the skills he has acquired over a lifetime, quotes a price that he feels you might just be prepared to accept. How much less than this you eventually arrive at is a function of how long you are prepared to argue, how keen the trader is to sell, and how well you can negotiate. The Italian for ‘shop’ incidentally is negozio, hence ‘negotiate’. There is little more annoying than haggling for ten minutes reducing the asking price to half, and then next day finding the same object in a supermarket for less. If you have time to spare, though, it’s fun to haggle and it is a genuinely Italian pleasure to shop at the market.

  There is a very visible hierarchy of traders. At the top of the tree are flashy new vans that open out like a concertina, becoming a high-tech shop. Then there are the dusty old diesels whose contents are emptied on to trestles with canvas awnings to protect the goods and traders from sun or rain. There are Moroccans, whose wares are on converted prams, constantly moving, because to stop and trade requires a payment to the comune of Atina. Just at the arch of the main town gate there is an old lady who sells wickerwork. She sits on a chair, with her produce arrayed around her feet. The little baskets that she sells are made specifically as cheese moulds. Fresh ricotta or curd cheese is put into these baskets to set, giving it the traditional pattern on the surface. Until recently, the toy stalls sold ingenious Eastern-European tin toys with sharp edges, mostly clockwork, of the kind that could be found in Britain in the 1930s.

  Inside the gate, in the old town centre, are the fruit and vegetable stalls, which surround the ducal palace, a fine building dating from the fifteenth century. There is a cornucopia of produce here which tempts by its very abundance. And every year my wife vows that she will never again get ripped-off at the market. The scams are as varied as they are ingenious. Scales, the old hand-held lever variety, are manipulated as though by magic; carefully chosen produce is switched under your nose for lesser quality as it is bagged; change needs to be checked punctiliously. So why do we bother? Because it’s fun to pit your wits against the traders, because it’s street theatre, because if you are careful, this is the best produce available. It’s colourful and noisy, the smells are mesmerizing and it’s a place to see and be seen. When you tire of the haggle, the cafés have welcoming tables set outside so you can drink a reviving espresso while watching the unfolding drama of market day.

  The best bargains to be had in Italian markets are shoes and leather goods. For real quantity and variety Atina market pales into insignificance compared to Sora or Cassino. There are literally hundreds of shoe stalls in these two markets. What makes the bargains so good is once again the slavish following of fashion. Every year the big shoe manufacturers of the north sell off what remains of last year’s fashion, at what must be a pittance, since the stall-holders charge so little. Top-quality men’s shoes cost around 50,000 lire, about £25, after a little discussion, and women’s shoes go for much less. Unfortunately there is no point in finding a style you like and asking, ‘Have you got this in a 37?’ If it’s not on display, they haven’t. People with either tiny or huge feet get the best bargains, as obviously shoes in these sizes are the hardest to sell.

  Markets are where you can find spurious leather goods, marked Armani or Valentino, but almost certainly made in Naples. Like Far-Eastern Rolex copies, they have a certain cachet and, at less than a tenth of shop prices, are worth examining. The local markets are the only place that you can get fresh fish and this is the reason that many women go in the first place.

  Love of drama is something that the visitor to Italy notices almost at once. Even simple events can be, and are, invested with a dramatic content that to a non-Italian can seem wildly out of proportion with what happened. A child falling and grazing a knee can result in huge numbers of adults stopping whatever they were doing and rushing to the scene. Everyone joins in the furore, there is a speaking part for everyone. ‘Do we need an ambulance? Shall I call a doctor? There’s a chemist round the corner, shall I get a bandage?’ Briefly, a sobbing child sits centre-stage surrounded by a cacophony of voice. Amongst the many things the child learns during these moments is that there is an ever-evolving drama out there in which he has a part. Life is for the playing. Do Italian women really find it easier to lower a basket on a rope from a first-floor window to calling traders than to go downstairs? By the time a basket has done all the journeys needed to complete a transaction, it surely represents more work, more ergs expended. And yet, where is the drama in going downstairs?

  Like markets, the festa provides for Italians a backdrop, a theatrical set against which the dramas of daily life can be played out. In the Comino Valley alone there are fifty-seven religious feste a year, many of them running for two or three days. In less prosperous times that was all there was, but these days more events have been added. According to my official gazetteer of events, there were 204 public events in all. As well as the feste there are film festivals, music festivals, art festivals, theatre festivals, competitions involving swimming, running, cycling, orienteering and hang-gliding, to name but a few. A recent addition to all of this has been the sagra, which basically means feast in the food sense. Over the course of the year there is a sagra of beans, watermelons, bread, figs, polenta, omelettes and wild boar – all this without leaving the valley.

  Italians love to dress up and participate, or to dress up and watch. They feel anxious if there is an event in which they could be taking a part but are not. There is an urge to be involved, to be seen to be there, to play one’s part in the drama. A festa is an excuse to put on one’s finery, to meet up with the gang and get out into the fray. I am no longer surprised at how few books can be found in the average Italian house; they really don’t have time to read when there is so much socializing going on. There seems to be a prevalent belief that being on your own is a sorry state in which to find yourself. If I stay in the house for an evening, there is always someone calling to find out whether we are coming out, or proffering an invitation to an event to entice us. Solitary is not the Italian way.

  The festa is the only excuse left for women to put on their traditional costumes. Many of these have been handed down over the generations, and some have magnificent lace and needlework. Each town in the Comino Valley had its own variation of the regional costume. It was possible to tell at a glance from which town a girl came simply by looking at the costume. The basic design is a pleated black skirt with up to ten petticoats beneath, a heavily embroidered white blouse, a black lace shawl and a lace head-covering. Gallinaro’s peculiarity was a flat, square board inside the head-covering, over which the lace hung, framing the face. In times gone by the costume was one way that a young girl could impress a prospective husband with the quality of her needlework.

  The men’s costume is less ornate: black breeches, black waistcoat and a white shirt topped with a red bandanna. On their feet they wear cioce, Frosinone’s traditional footwear. The feet and calves are bound in white cotton, and a leather sole is strapped to the foot, the thongs criss-crossing the calf, up to the knee. These cioce are what has given the province of Frosinone its sobriquet of Ciociaria.

  These costumes have now become little more than theatrical accessories – less attention is paid to local nuances and they are worn only to cut a bella figura at a festa.

  On 11 August Gallinaro celebrates the feast of its patron saint, San Gerardo. Preparations start about a week beforehand as the team arrives to erect the festival lights. On large latticework arches patterns of small lights are attached, with a cavalier disdain for safety. Fencing-wire is stapled to the lattice in paired lines connected to the grid, one positive, one negative. The lights are simply strapped across the pair. The fact that no one gets electrocuted must be thanks to the protection of San Gerardo. These arches of lights are placed along the main road every ten metres or so, and are very pretty at night.

  On 9 August the stalls begin to arrive, some the same as you can find in the market, but some specifically tailored for feste. The piazza outside
the Sanctuary slowly fills with fairground amusements and both sides of the road are filled with bancarelle, market stalls, up to the top of the hill. Festa favourites include stalls selling roast nuts and porchetta, suckling pig boned and roasted whole. Slices of piglet are served on fresh bread to be eaten at an amble. Other food stalls provide the unlikely delicacy of calf’s head, boiled until soft enough to slice. Apart from food, a perennial favourite is the stall selling minute cap-guns that deliver a quite disproportionate report, which appeal to the Italians’ delight in noise. Every year there is a toy which catches the imagination of the children. Last year it was a plastic slinky, in a variety of gaudy colours, which dangled from the hands of most of the small children.

  The noise is nearly overwhelming: the stalls blare music from cheap speakers, the stall-holders cry their wares, the cap-guns bang. To complete the discord, a prerequisite of any festa is the band, which plays at random times throughout the day. The musicians, uniformed and shuffling, wander the streets, a bored look on their faces and a wilful individuality in their playing. They seem to save their worst-rehearsed numbers for the start of the singing during the procession – for as long as I can remember the band has always accompanied the hymn to San Gerardo with an entirely different melody.