Seasons in Basilicata (44 page)

And indeed they did. I lost count after the twelfth bottle. And that was around half-past midnight, long before we even started on the
vin santo
and the grappa.

So, all in all, a remarkable experience in culinary simplicity and creativity right from the very first
buon appetito
and greeted throughout by all the guests with murmurs and exclamations of pleasure—
Mangereccio! Mangiabile!
Although, I should admit that before we'd arrived at Margherita's, at around eight-thirty in the evening (dinner was served late in those parts), Anne and I had already consumed quite a range of gastronomic delights.

First, Sebastiano and Rocchina had invited us for coffee and
biscotti
at their large, modern apartment in Stigliano and then for “just another coffee” at Rocchina's parents' house, deep in the wriggling alleys of the old town.

They were a most hospitable couple, he a tiny ball of restless octogenarian energy with shining, smiling eyes peering out from under his trilby hat—apparently a permanent fixture, even in the house—and she a talker and a large-featured woman who greeted us all with kisses and hugs and coffee and the traditional demand (never an option) that “you will all have a little something to eat.”

And so we had a kind of predinner dinner around a large kitchen table in a toasty-warm kitchen with a platter of
bruschetta
spread with tomato sauce (homemade of course), fat slices of pecorino (ditto), and beautiful red peppers stuffed with a mix of minced crumbled bread, anchovies, garlic, cheese, and egg and roasted in the oven with homemade olive oil. All of this was accompanied by glass after glass of the family's very dark and intense-flavored red wine. Then, as we were just about to leave for Margherita's, in walked a large segment of the rest of the family—burly husbands, demure wives, teenagers, a cousin, someone who'd just driven in
from Naples. And the whole wining and dining thing started all over again, with grandpa puffing wickedly strong little Italian cigarettes in the corner and calling out raucous comments, his trilby hat wobbling as he laughed, and grandma at the stove, happily stirring and frying, and acting as though this familial scene of bodies everywhere and everyone eating and talking all at once and babies bawling and
us trying to leave and never quite getting to the door was a regular part of her everyday life. Which, apparently, it was.

M
ARGHERITA AND
T
ORI'S ESTATE

But all this impromptu feasting was definitely not part of our own cultural background, at least, not until we arrived in Italy. And I guess, as this is now turning into a kind of gastronomic-overload confessional, I should mention that an hour or so prior to arriving at Sebastiano's in-laws' house, we'd had another afternoon snack at a local farmer's newly restored property a few miles outside Stigliano.

That also had not been on the agenda. Totally fortuitous, in fact. Sebastiano was driving us around the outskirts of the town, showing us some of the local places of interest, including an enormous seventeenth-century Palladian-style palazzo sitting, or rather collapsing, in sad decay on a hilltop with breathtaking vistas in every direction. He didn't know much about the building's history, except that it was known as Masseria Palazzo di Santo Spirito and had been one of many local
masserie
—massive feudal-like farmhouses-cum-granaries-cum–worker dormitories—that characterized the agricultural system of the region until the early, and even the mid-twentieth century. Most locals seemed to be unaware of the place or certainly reluctant to talk about it (another one of those “dark side” mysteries?). There it sat, in a huge unkempt field. Its roof was badly collapsed, but it had maintained its odd combination of dignified Palladian proportions, with its distinct, fortresslike corner defense towers complete with narrow slits for arrows or guns and enormous bolted and locked gates set in massive arched stone doorways.

We mooched around for a while but, other than opening a small side door into a cryptlike storage room leading nowhere, we found it impossible to get into the main part of the structure. So, in a chilly drizzle, we decided to move on.

Sebastiano explained that the “peasant rebellions” of the 1950s in the area had convinced a reluctant government in the North that maybe it was time to focus on the plight of the poor Mezzogiorno sharecropper
terroni
or
mezzadri.
So, they started carving up the vast
absent-landowner estates and giving land grants and even new housing to the peasants. For a while things quieted down, but the now-named
contadini
continued to find small farming a pretty inadequate way to make a living and started to move to the northern cities and also, of course, to America, in search of a better life, often abandoning their brand-new houses.

But then, among the decaying relics of a good-idea-turned-bad (a familiar state of affairs in the South; even the vast, new factories around Potenza are largely echoing, empty shells today), we spotted a remarkably fresh, whitewashed restoration of one of those abandoned houses, set amid rolling wheat fields overlooking a broad, green valley and the Pollino range to the west.

“That's most unusual,” Sebastiano said. “Let's see what's going on” (a man after our own serendipitous explorer's hearts).

And what we found there was a very encouraging example of what might happen to those other small farms if they had more men, like Francesco Lombardi, with the vision and ambition to revive them.

Francesco had a deeply tanned, cheerful, bright-eyed face and a most gracious manner. He welcomed us without hesitation, despite the fact that in the rain and skiddy mud of his forecourt, we had almost hit one of his new stone walls with the car and narrowly missed a cluster of newborn kittens frolicking in the wet grass.

Soon we were all sitting at a table inside a series of just-restored rooms—what were previously one-room workers' quarters and now transformed into a small, state-of-the-art cheesery ready for pecorino production on a substantial scale. As Francesco plied us with some of his superb three-month-old cheese, crusty bread, and his homemade wine, he told us how he wanted to keep the traditional small-farm way of life alive, and had applied to the EU for a matching “small farmer” grant.

“It was all so easy I couldn't believe it,” he said, with a look of amazement still on his face. “I didn't have to get tangled up in that bureaucratic stuff or ask any favors from anyone or play any
gens
games. Just a few forms and a couple of visits by EU people and I had a fifteen million
lire
grant [around $75,000]. I matched this with
some of my own money and now I keep a hundred Merino sheep—very good milk—and built my own cheesery and I plant a hundred hectares of wheat. Hard wheat, the type we use for pasta.”

We toasted his good fortune with, I think, at least three glasses of his excellent wine as he told us that his son was now at agricultural college and would be joining him at the farm. They intended to ensure that the place would become a model for other, more skeptical farmers that this kind of life was still feasible in an era of mega-farms and huge cooperatives.

“I have three basic values that I try to live by,” he told us, filling our glasses once again and hacking off more fat chunks of his tangy, yet creamily-sweet pecorino cheese. “First, my family. I want us to be able to work together. Like in the old days. Second, I want to build something to last. Like my father tried but could not make it work. And third, I want to show my love and respect for this region, my home, and how proud I am to live here and to be a good farmer here.”

We had no choice but to toast him once again, sincerely and full of admiration. Of course that meant a fifth glass of his strong, deep red wine.

 

S
O
I
HAVE
no idea, after those previous afternoon and early evening indulgences, how we possibly managed to eat and drink our way through Margherita's magnificent and innovative “mushroom medley” dinner, happily blasting away all our normal gustatory limitations. But somehow we did, and despite the language barrier, we also managed to conduct long, heated, but always good-natured debates over the course of our six hour get-together at her farm. And none of her friends were left out of the raucous and often overlapping diatribes. The professor, the tax collector, the barber, two farmers, a teacher, the headmaster (Sebastiano), the restaurateur, the businessman (he was very vague about exactly what kind of business), and all the wives: each one was part of the typical Italian roundtable discussions, full of gesticulations, great oratorical outpourings, punchy little philosophical aphorisms, and regular toasts
to nothing of any real importance. I seem to remember that at one rather rowdy point in the evening we even toasted the Neolithic caves on the estate “with shelves too!” Margherita said. “Seven-thousand-year-old shelves!”

The subjects ranged from the general (the latest politics, a terrible bombing of Australian tourists in Bali and what that would mean to President Bush's antiterrorist campaign, and the rising and falling standards of education) to the poor Italian grape
vendemmia
due to the rainy summer, and the antics of a certain local priest whose “remuneration” for his high position on a number of local boards was apparently making him a very wealthy servant of God.

A particularly raucous segment dealt with the impact of Carlo Levi on local economic conditions (of course, a favorite subject of Basilicatans) and the future role of the Mezzogiorno. The barber suddenly spoke with fiery eloquence about “our great Italian writer, Luigi Barzini, who told us over and over that ‘Italian history has been a vain and sickening search for
Il Buongoverno
(good government) down all the centuries.' And it is clear we have not yet found it. We still have rudderless governments with an average lifespan of less than a year led by weak, corrupt politicians and an incompetent perk-laden
statale
bureaucracy!”

Anne and I had heard all this many times before, particularly the “why can't we have what they have” cry, referring to the southerners' plight when compared with the ultra-affluent, ultra-stylish, ultra-hedonistic, self-focused, greedy North.

And I don't know why I did it. Maybe just one glass too many of that deep-flavored, black currant–hued, homemade brew, or maybe I was tired of hearing that old “why not us” complaint, or maybe because, when I was a city planner, I had a particular interest in macroregional planning. The big picture. Seeing local problems as challenges in a broader context.

“Maybe we're thinking too small,” I suggested quietly and, I thought, modestly. “Why should the South try to have what the North, or anywhere else, has? Why doesn't the South try to capitalize more on its own unique attributes and see itself in the context
not just of Italy but of the whole of Europe. After all, that's what the EU is trying to create, a one-nation context within which every part plays a unique role.”

“And what, Mister Englishman,” asked the professor (of philosophy at Turin University, no less), “do you think the South's unique role might be?”

There was a noticeable hush. Maybe I'd pushed this too far. After all, I was a first-time guest in this coterie of old friends and lovers. Anne was giving me hard nudges and “you've gone and done it now” glances, but the
vin santo
gave me courage, and I decided to continue.

“Well,” I said, thinking as fast as my befuddled brain would let me. “We know the South has a valuable role in large-scale wheat cultivation, so that's a given. And oil. In 2000 that UK company Enterprise Oil discovered the largest oil field in continental Europe, here in Basilicata, although so far it doesn't seem to have had much impact economically. But…well, let's take Florida, for example, in the United States. At the turn of the century it was a horribly hot, humid, mosquito-ridden swamp and semitropical desert producing some fruit and not much else. Then entrepreneurs began to realize that it had fine beaches, cheap land, a constantly warm, body-nurturing climate, and it started to become a vacation area. A bit like the vacation resorts and holiday villages along your Calabrian coast. And then gradually, bit by bit, as older people lived longer and got richer and air-conditioning became more universal, Florida found itself a favorite place in America for retirees. Inexpensive, safe, warm, easy to reach, clean beaches and ocean, plenty of room for golf courses…the lot. Pretty much like, say, Basilicata's Metaponto-to-Taranto coastline could be. It's largely empty now, except for a few lidos and holiday villages and a rich agricultural plain. But imagine if it were promoted as a retirement haven, well connected by highways to the rest of Italy, as it already is, and offering inexpensive land, and, well, all those other Florida attributes or like those ever-expanding ‘costas' of Spain that transformed the whole economy of that country.”