We walk under the arch of stone that used to be the gateway to the old town, the Arco dell’Annunziata, a rare medieval survivor of the earthquake. The street climbs up to the top of town where a church anchors a broad view over the plains.
* * *
WE’RE WAITING FOR pranzo.
Fausta, at Baglio Occhipinti, and our friend Todd both told us not to miss a meal at Majore. “I warn you,” Todd wrote, “it’s all pork.” We find it on a street the width of a good sidewalk, stop in, and reserve, happily wandering until they open. This town reminds us of Tuscan hill towns with its lanes and townhouses abutting the street. How clean the steps and cared-for the potted plants on either side. One woman methodically polishes her doorknob, which is already gleaming—but, really, she’s checking out what’s going on in the neighborhood. It’s only us for excitement. She gives a nod and a buongiorno.
* * *
MAJORE’S KITCHEN STANDS just inside the entrance, a vast stove and a chef with raven wing eyebrows, a long nose, the better to smell when the roast is done, and a grizzly mustache and beard. He’s glowering at his pot of ragù—a pot large enough to bathe two babies—and at me asking about what’s in the giant frying pan. When I start complimenting his stove, he warms and smiles. Molteni. French. A workhorse of a stove. How does he manage in such a minute space? He gestures with his arms and seems to say that the kitchen is an extension of himself. Actually, there’s another prep kitchen. In the pan, he is sautéing about twenty stuffed pork chops. That’s what I’m having. There’s a large dining room, but we’re seated in a smaller one whimsically painted with a trompe-l’oeil window, a shelf of grapes and platters, a niche of wine bottles, all in faded colors.
In solidarity with Ed, who has to drive, I forgo wine. The waiter seems to think that is a shame, and it is. We have risotto, then the hearty pork, which lives up to Fausta and Todd’s raving. We were told not to miss the wine cellar, but we forget to ask in our rapture over the pork and the banter of the waiter who insists we have a glass of wine. Finally, we do.
Costata Ripiena
STUFFED PORK CHOP, SERVES 2
To match this super-hearty chop, Salvatore Laterra recommends Cerasuolo di Vittoria DOCG, 50 to 70 percent nero d’Avola, and the rest frapatto, a local varietal. When browning, turn the chops carefully to keep the stuffing inside. Secure with toothpicks if necessary. Serve with oven-roasted rosemary potatoes.
2 two-finger-high pork chops
3 tablespoons chopped raw pork tenderloin
2 tablespoons diced ragusano (or other cow’s-milk cheese)
1 hard-boiled egg, diced
1–2 tablespoons Sicilian salami, diced
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 onion, thinly sliced
1 cup chicken stock
Salt, QB
Make a big pocket in each chop and fill with the chopped loin, the ragusano, egg, and local salami. Brown the chops in the oil. When you turn the chops to brown the other side, add the onion and complete the browning. Add the broth and salt. Cover and cook over medium-low heat for about 30 minutes, adding a little water if necessary.
Ristorante Majore, Chiaramonte Gulfi, Sicilia
Fishermen in rubber boots and pants shout and call out their catch. A hawker in a red hoodie with no shirt underneath throws back his head in praise of a sparkling gray-mottled fish. His register reaches so high he sounds like a castrato. His neighbor, with wild hair feathering around his head like some exotic chicken, displays a tray of gleaming spatola, each one looped into a ring the diameter of a basketball. I’ve never seen this elegant flat, eel-like creature, a sabre fish in English. They have no scales, only lean, silver skin that looks like mercury glass. Each stares with a gold-rimmed black eye. Spooky. My shoes are wet with fish juices and blood. When an octopus tries to escape his bin, it’s smacked back into place. The shrimp wiggle, still alive. Just caught, the seafood smells salty and good, not fishy. One burly, black-bearded seller of hunky tuna in tubs of watery blood has plucked his eyebrows into delicate wings. The hub of the market: a rowdy pit loud with the hacking—knife like a guillotine—of enormous swordfish into steaks, crowded women shrieking back at vendors, big talk among friends. The daily Catania fish market makes Venice’s Rialto market look like Whole Foods. The faces of the men are even more compelling than what’s for sale. Crinkled from wind, sunburned too many times, crusty hands, pale lips that look hard as cockle shells, they have the look of everything the sea has done to them.
A boy pushes through the crowd. He’s carrying an armful of parsley. Fifty cents for enough to garnish fifty grilled fish. On the periphery, plucked and skinned chickens and rabbits hang from racks. Stalls display all the glorious produce grown in the magic soil around Mount Etna. Walnuts the size of a baby’s fist, purple cauliflower, waxy gold persimmons, pistachios for cannoli, cut prickly pear, lemons, lemons, lemons. There’s the artichoke master, roasting them almost black. The vegetable fryer scooping up singed red and yellow peppers and spreading them across his racks. Behind mounds of green grapes stands the most talented hawker of all. An unusually tall man swaying in a gray hoodie, he could be a priest intoning mass or a muezzin calling us to prayer, except that he’s louder. Uve, uve, uve, he ululates. Grapes. Even the prosaic un a-ur-o (un euro) turns to music. The words ring out like the first words ever spoken. We buy grapes.
The market trails off into a park where Africans sell cigarette lighters and tissue packs. Twelve or so groups of old men hover around tables where intense card games are in progress. Are they retired fishermen who must come down to market out of habit? The sky is as blue as it has ever been in the thousands of years of Catania Saturday mornings.
* * *
MY TRAVEL LIST for the south of Sicily did not include Catania. After the flight from Rome, we planned to pick up the rental car at the airport and drive straight to the south of Sicilia. Return the car after a week, then fly back to Rome.
One of the pleasures of travel is deviating from the best-laid plans.
* * *
DURING THE WEEK of exploring Scicli, cooking in Ragusa Ibla, wine tasting around Marzamemi and Vittoria, shopping for ceramics in Caltagirone, stopping into villages bypassed by time, I was also reading about other parts of Sicily. I kept turning down the pages on Catania. A church with a thousand ex votos, a library of ancient texts, a street of coffin makers, the enormous fish market, a history as old as time. We decided to add on two nights to the end of our Sicily explorations.
* * *
WE DROPPED THE car at the airport and took a taxi into the city. The entry, not auspicious. Run-down buildings covered with graffiti, scattered trash, chaos of cars. Neither of us is saying what have we done. I’m still clutching the sheet given to us at the airport telling all the ways to protect ourselves by not wearing jewelry, leaving valuables in the hotel safe, stowing handbags under the car seat when driving, etc. “Don’t go that way,” the driver points, as he pulls up in front of our five-star hotel. “Dangerous. Go that way,” he points in the opposite direction. “Best fish you will ever eat.”
* * *
BY THE TIME we arrive late in the day on Friday, we are both worn down from travel. Never have we felt reinvigorated so quickly.
* * *
QUICK RESEARCH IN Gambero Rosso lands us at Trattoria di De Fiore, a short walk from the Romano House, where we are lucky to find a room. Walking here, some streets are dark but as soon as it feels dicey, we suddenly come upon outdoor cafés and restaurants with boisterous life streaming around the tables.
When we reach our trattoria, I have doubts, as we’re seated on the sidewalk with motorcycles and cars a hand span away, my shoulder brushed by scraggly plants separating us from the street. We’re handed menus with cracked plastic-covered pages. Not good. No one has changed the menu in eons. Turns o
ut, there’s no need to. Totally traditional fare it is, and everything is delicious. We scarf up the mixed antipasti, especially the arancini, caponata, huge olives, fried eggplant. Little sardines stuffed with bread crumbs and pine nuts. Homemade pasta (similar to cavatelli) with artichokes, finely grated ricotta salata, and basil. Everything purely simple and happy. Happy, too, is the inexpensive house wine from Etna. A half-liter. Then another half-liter.
After the dinner hour is well under way, traffic lessens. We begin to see elegantly dressed people walking by. “The opera,” the waiter says. “Don Giovanni tonight. Three hours and twenty minutes. They’ll be getting out after midnight.” Men are in suits, some in black tie. No one is slouching along in jeans. The women have upswept hair, dark. They have not gotten the message: They’re tastefully bedecked in gold jewelry. They are wearing heels and good dresses with silk jackets or pretty shawls. “1960,” Ed observes. Many of the men with clipped mustaches and slick hair look as though they’ve stepped out of daguerreotypes from the 1890s. Ah, Catania, this also is who you are.
* * *
EARLY, WE’RE OUT. A few turns and we emerge onto the three-kilometer-long via Etnea, which leads from one piazza to another. At the end, Mount Etna looms, distant and eerie. In the first piazza we encounter, the university and liceo buildings on either side of a dignified square full of students and music. Then we enter the handsome Piazza del Duomo, with the surprise statue of an elephant topped with an obelisk. The surrounding upright, Baroque but rather severe buildings are charcoal gray, trimmed with white marble. Even the street pavers are dark volcanic rock. This sounds dreary but isn’t. (Gray and white, after all, are quite trendy now.) The dark color on the façades comes from volcanic ash mixed into plaster. The handsome town layout and buildings make you visualize the new Catania rising after the 1693 earthquake. The earlier city, like many, was destroyed and the rebirth not medieval but Baroque. What an ideal city it must have been—the grand scale, all new and gleaming. Straight as an arrow, via Etnea provides a long and leisurely passeggiata. Trees shade the numerous cafés. Like Rome, Catania lives outside. It’s exhilarating. I photograph street shrines, an old habit. We stop frequently to admire the extensive pastry selections—cannoli, baba au rhum, Turk’s hats, almond tarts, endless other tasty confections with cream and candied fruits. “Leave the gun; take the cannoli,” Ed quotes. I agree.
* * *
EVERYONE IS MINGLING on this warm October morning. We’ve visited the fish market and now, in front of the Carmine church where I see the ex voto collection, a vast market spreads for blocks. So many babies taking the air in their strollers. Lovers embracing every few steps. The ex votos are mainly from the 1920s to the 1950s, a new era for them in my experience. Most are of surgeries. The patient on the operating table miraculously saved by a saint, no credit to the doctor. A few show the saintly rescue from ships in storms, from falls from balconies, and spills from collapsing scaffolding. My favorite is of a woman at home in bed, her daughter praying at the foot as her mother throws up a long spurt of blood that lands in a bucket. The Virgin Mary rises in the upper right, and the panel to the left shows the woman resting in a hospital bed. Cured. I admire the simultaneous narrative.
We wander in a park dedicated to native son Vincenzo Bellini and photograph his bluish marble bust. I love the palms and the flowering tree that my plant app doesn’t identify. The blossoms look like small pink lilies. A man is singing Italian torch songs and we hear him work his way around high notes. We browse in Libreria Vicolo Stretto, the Narrow Street Bookstore, which is tiny and literary.
Restaurant row is via Santa Filomena, a narrow street lined with tempting places to eat. We have lunch outside at Blanc à Manger. Bowls of paccheri (huge tubular pasta) with mussels on a bed of roasted tomatoes. Good bread.
Then we walk. For miles. We come to a neighborhood we turn back from. Abandoned ornate buildings, empty, not menacing but somehow we won’t go there. In the afternoons, almost everything shuts up tight in these far south cities, even in October when the heat has abated and the climate seems made for the gods. Back at the hotel, we repack. Tomorrow we go. Can’t think now of all we missed seeing on this quick stop. The library was closed. I didn’t see the street of coffin makers. Or the opera.
* * *
FOR DINNER ON our last night, we’re back on via Santa Filomena. At Il Sale Art Café, we again sit at a table on the street but this time no cars, only the lovely stream of life passing our table as we get to feast one last time on the marvelous Sicilian food. The olive oil, Cutrera, from Chiaramonte Gulfi, where we visited, tastes spicy and fresh. Oh, the antipasto plate we’ve loved all over Sicily: caponata, this time with pine nuts and raisins; divine cracked olives; arancini stuffed with ragù; sweet sun-dried tomatoes to spread on the great breads. And we couldn’t resist the mound of grilled vegetables covered with melted caciocavallo, a cheese I could live on. Ed goes for the baccalà (salt cod) with a crust of shredded fried potatoes, and by now I hardly can face my stuffed pork filet with fried chickpea sticks.
We try Vivera, 2012, Etna Rosso Martinella. I wish I could say we tasted the molten lava of the volcano, but really it was a soft and fruity red, with a wash of mineral backtaste.
Best, we have another chance to witness the passing vibrant faces. A gypsy accordion player with sad eyes, a couple puffing on e-cigarettes, a woman with a shopping bag bulging with fennel, strolling studs in threes who surprise with their confident smallness and sexiness.
At the next table, so close I could spear a bite of swordfish, a couple with a baby are dining with friends. They are all young and polished, glowing under the low lights. The baby is lying in her carriage, waving her arms and legs constantly, rapt in an excess of joy. Intermittently, she smiles. Her parents are enjoying their evening in the warm air. She is, too, as she will innumerable times as she grows up in this city so abundant with life.
Back at Bramasole. For now, the luggage rack is folded and put away. My desk has space to put down a book without it vanishing into piles of notes and maps. We’ve traveled from the Brenner Pass in the North to Capo Spartivento, the bottom tip of Sicily, and dozens of fascinating places in between. Surely I could fly through PhD orals in Italian history, art, architecture, culinary and oenological history. The greatest gift of travel: the steep learning curve. Second best: how your vision refreshes and you see with infant eyes. Third: memory. How the places seen will layer into life as time moves on.
* * *
OUR FRIEND, THE terrific chef Silvia Baracchi, welcomed us home with one of our favorites at her restaurant, delicious steaks coated in dried olives with a tang of green tomatoes. Long into the night we sipped Baracchi wines and talked.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY we started to build a new pergola, inspired by our travels. Grapevines covered our old one made of tree limbs, but for the new, we wanted a roof; the linden trees drop ants and pollen constantly. Black ants on ravioli are not appetizing. The iron pergola is topped with a slightly peaked metal roof the color of rust. The view sweeps over the dips and pleats of hills up to green mountains in the distance, and shadows of clouds. Blond light sifts across the valley to the mysterious villa built for a pope’s visit. He stayed there only a single night (or so the story goes).
Everything seems renewed. I feel natural writing in my notebook outside rather than in my study. I relive the immense dunes at Piscinas in Sardegna, the emerald lakes of the Dolomiti, the watercolor harbor of Monopoli in Puglia, my grandson’s delight in taking the dangling cable car to the remote hotel Vigilius, where he found, perhaps for the first time, that undeniable metabolic connection to a new place. Troves of vivid memories. The series of waterfalls at Campo Tures: The higher we climbed, the more plangent the cascades. At the top, we were drenched by mist. We will always remember.
* * *
I’VE BEEN UNFAITHFUL to Cortona. I’ve imagined preferring to live in other places—Tren
to, Scicli, Monopoli, Parma, Massa Marittima, Cividale del Friuli. If I were looking for home now, I might choose one of them. But how would I? My aunt Hazel claimed her thirteen beaux sat on the front steps the afternoon she announced the one she would marry. Although I’m certain that’s apocryphal, I enjoy imagining such a dilemma.
* * *
THE FAMOUS QUOTE by T. S. Eliot, is it true?
We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
But I don’t find myself awash in discovery. Cortona remains the place I know best, where the compass needle points anytime I’m adrift. Still, Cortona is moved into a new light. Now I understand this town as a jagged little piece in the complex jigsaw of places forming the astounding country of Italy. We never finished the 1,000-piece puzzle in Puglia and I will never finish exploring this country.
See You in the Piazza Page 39