Seasons in Basilicata (58 page)

As I turned the corner into Maria's street a black-clad widow suddenly scurried out of the darkness, almost bumping into me in her haste. Despite the black scarf drawn tightly around her face, I saw a flash of fierce eyes that were distinctly unfriendly. There was no response to my cheery “
Buona sera,
” which was odd because even the most reticent of the village black-clad widows—and most looked as if they wanted no contact with anyone or anything—usually gave some kind of mumbled response from behind their
burqa-
like shawls.

I was approaching what I'd been told was Maria's home, a tiny bare-stone place with an ancient unpainted door. There was a single window, heavily curtained, but a slight chink in the drapes showed there was a light on inside.

Well, I thought, all I'm going to do is say hello. Can't be any harm in that, surely. I'm not here to
embarrass the lady, just to ask in my still-neophyte (“cute,” as Felicia, Giuseppina's daughter, described it) Italian whether Anne and I could arrange to have a brief chat with her at her convenience.

G
IULIA
V
ENERE
(L
EVI'S WITCH
)

The light went out.

I had just raised my hand to knock on the ancient wooden door and the window went black. I think the curtains may have moved a little, too, closing the chink. It was hard to tell in this particularly dark part of the alley. I could hear no sounds inside. My hand was still raised.

And then lowered. For the very first time I felt a tiny frisson of fear and uncertainty. Was it possible that Giuseppe and all the others who had, for one odd reason or another, felt unable to help me meet Maria had some credible justification for their obvious, and in some cases adamant, reluctance?

There I was, standing with my loaf of bread, waiting at the door of this utterly silent, dark, but obviously occupied, house and wondering what to do next. If I knocked, the knock would be ignored. I was not wanted there. I suddenly felt sure of that. I was definitely not welcome.

Normally my what-the-hell self would have taken over at this point and forced the situation to one conclusion or another. But on this occasion, the often foolishly intrepid part of myself failed to step forward and offer his services. Even he seemed to be saying, “Let it go this time. You can always call again. Maybe in the daylight, or maybe when you return to Aliano later in the spring.”

And so I found myself wandering homeward slowly down the dark alleys, clutching my loaf and feeling rather foolish, maybe even a little ashamed at my own trepidation.

But then I sensed—I knew—that Maria's door had slowly opened behind me on creaking hinges…and then abruptly closed again, with an angry, cracking slam.

Just like a warning. A definite
procedere con prudenza.

Celebrating the Old Ways with Roberto Rubino

Another meeting I'd been looking forward to turned out to be far more successful, and encouraging, particularly from the point of
view of Basilicata's possible future “small is beautiful” role in the Mezzogiorno.

 

“H
OW ABOUT A
little lunch?” said the tall, elegant, moustached man driving his polo-green estate car across the wild, rock-pocked upland moorlands high above and beyond the city of Potenza.

“Fine,” I said, but hoping it would not be another of those multicourse marathon midday extravaganzas that invariably left me leaden-framed and siesta-somnolent for the rest of the day.

I looked around. We were on a narrow, winding, watershed road with huge vistas of mountain foothills and the spikey silhouettes of bare, frost-shattered ridges. Deep in the hazy valleys were salt-sprinklings of tiny, whitewashed farms. On the highest peaks, snow-she-ened summits looked like melting dollops of ice cream. Fantasy-like hill villages perched on impossible pinnacles, as they did throughout Basilicata, but here, rising out of serpentining mists, their Tolkeinesque flavor seemed even more pronounced.

We continued winding along the ridgetop road, and I wondered where in all that upland wilderness of weather-chiseled strata and stunted grasses one could possibly find a restaurant.

In a hollow, we passed through a remnant of an ancient oak forest.

“Good truffle-hunting here?” I asked the man next to me, who had recently been described in Corby Kummer's intriguing book
The Pleasures of Slow Food
as looking like “the hero of an early 1960s Italian neorealist film, except that he smiles a lot. He even gestures like an Italian movie star, with big, sweeping arm movements and that language of the hands only Italians know.” All in all, I thought, a very apt description.

“Oh yes. All around,” he said with hands-off-the-steering-wheel enthusiasm. “And I helped start the autumn
tartufo-
gathering here.”

There was no boastfulness in his voice, just a simple statement of fact. For that was what Roberto Rubino did for a living: He started things. As director of the regional Experimental Institute for Agricultural Research, linked to Potenza University and the Italian
Ministry of Agriculture, Roberto acted as a catalyst for protecting, enhancing, expanding, and promoting indigenous resources and almost-forgotten processes of agrarian production. Particularly traditional methods of cheese production.

“Everyone told me when I came here that there were no truffles in these forests,” he said with a wry smile. “But they were wrong. I had my dog from Calabria, where truffles are everywhere, and we went out together and found many here. Big ones. Lots and lots of them. At first the people did not believe, so I took them into the woods and showed them.”

“Seems you had the same kind of battle with your cheeses: making people believe in keeping the old traditional types of cheese and production methods in Basilicata—particularly for your
caciocavallo podolico
cheeses, your ‘white cow' cheeses.”

“Yes it was—it still is—not easy. You always have to figure on that old negativism. Everywhere. Defeatism. They call Basilicata
marginale
—marginal in quality of land and production and most other things. But I hate that word. There is no marginality here! We can do—we are already doing—so many things and making things better.”

“I think Carlo Petrini and his
Slow Food
movement has to fight similar challenges of negativism and indifference—the steam-rollering inevitability of homogenized everything.”

“Oh yes, Carlo Petrini, a very good man and a good friend. His Slow Food movement is now worldwide—seventy thousand members in almost fifty different countries. What I am trying to do at my institute and with our new organization, Cheeses Under the Sky, and our cheese magazine,
Caseus,
is like what he is creating with his movement. It's all about Slow Food. To grow and produce foods naturally, to let them fully mature, to share them with others in a traditional way as part of everyday life. Carlo calls these “ark” foods and spends much time identifying them and helping to maintain, improve, and market these types of foods. That's what I hope for, too—with, of course, cheeses playing a very big part in all of this. I want to keep all the aromas, flavors, textures, and surprises of cheeses that can differentiate one region, even a single valley, from
all the others. It would be terrible if—what is that phrase that McDonald's uses? ‘One Taste Worldwide,' I think, something like that—it would be terrible if that happened.”

“But where did you suggest we meet this morning in Potenza?”

Roberto laughed a warm Cary Grant–type of laugh. “Yes, I know. Good joke, eh? To meet in the McDonald's car park. Well, Potenza is a difficult city, so I thought it would be better for you. But you didn't go inside I hope.”

“Only to use the bathroom,” I said.

“Ah, well, that is permissible. They have very nice bathrooms. Someone told me! But I promise my lunch for you will be far, far better than any fast food anywhere.”

Still no sign of any restaurant, I thought.…For the simple reason that there wasn't one.

We drove off the ridge road and onto a rough track, then past a sign reading Azienda Montana Li Foy, and into a farmyard with a huge new barn and pens filled with a fascinating mix of goat species, as I was to learn, from all over the world.

Roberto stood beside me, admiring his flocks. “Aren't they beautiful?” He beamed. “These we use for our experiments in animal husbandry and cheeses. We have Maltese and Ionica—those white ones. The ones with those big twisted vertical horns, like corkscrews—they're Girgentana from Sicily. Those with the really big horns are Orobica, found mainly in Lombardy today. The smaller ones are Sarda, from Sardinia, and my favorites are the floppy-eared ones with those beautiful red coats—Rossa Mediterranea, from Syria. And look at our cashmere goats. Can you see that beautiful wool on their stomachs? Only fifteen microns thick. Top quality.”

“And what are those over there in a huddle?”

“
Ma!
Those are Scottish. We bought them recently from a farm north of Edinburgh. But I think they are all sick.”

“Not foot-and-mouth disease, I hope! They had a lot of problems with that in Britain recently.”

But he'd turned away, disgusted by these new arrivals, and called out, “Lunchtime!”

We entered a simple building that could have been a farmhouse but was used by the institute mainly for onsite courses and “long, slow, dinners.” A huge log fire roared against the far wall. A long dining table with benches took up most of the room, and at the far end sat a picnic basket crammed with delights that Roberto was slowly unpacking. “See what I have brought for us—some different local cheeses, my homemade beer and wine, sausages my wife makes, a lovely big piece of
guanciale,
which we'll eat with
bruschetta
using my local baker's bread, some
manteca
[a small ball of
caciocavallo-
coated ‘ricotta-butter'], and a real specialty…” He held up one of the moldiest round cheeses I'd ever seen and stroked it like a newborn lamb. “Our
caciocavallo podolico,
the one we are most famous for. The Podolico cows are a special white breed, originally from the Polish border. Normally it's aged for only up to a year. But this one,” he whispered dramatically, “is one of my own, and it's over six years old!”

I will not recount (again) a crunch-by-crunch description of our lunch, except to say that everything tasted even better than it looked. Pride of place indeed went to Roberto's six-year old masterpiece of skill and patience, a pungent golden-cream creation made from the unpasteurized milk of pasture-grazing white Podolico cows and possessing the most enticing aromas and flavors of herbs, hazelnuts, and pineapple (yes, pineapple!), and distinct overtones of a truly mature parmigiano-reggiano.

Roberto accepted my accolades with professional modesty. “I didn't make all these wonderful things. I just help local farmers keep doing it the way they always have. We learn from them, and in our education courses we pass on their knowledge and techniques along with new research and enhanced processes.”

“What makes this
caciocavallo
cheese so special?” I asked.

“Oh, so many things. The free-grazing Podolico cows and their unpasteurized milk, the maturing of the curds in a whey mix in wooden vats, which keep in the special bacteria—that's the kind of thing that makes the EU very nervous! And then the
pasta filata
method of kneading and stretching the curds as they become elastic
in heated water. It makes a very unique cheese—someone called it the institute's ‘calling card.' It's what makes people realize that keeping old cheese-making processes alive is totally possible. We have proved it. And we teach this and many other things to over a thousand people a year—farmers, students, hobbyists. Many types of peoples.”

“Where do you teach them? Not here surely!”

“No, no, this is just our farm and upland grazing area. The kind of pastures that used to exist on the common land all over Basilicata, when they practiced transhumance—moving the flocks in summer to upland grazing areas. Some still do, but it's a tradition that's fading. We hope to revive it but…No, our trainers are in the town of Bella, you will see. We go there now, okay?”

On our way he explained that his great love for traditional cheese-making methods came from his having grown up near Battipaglia, the world-renowned center of true
mozzarella di bufala
cheese-making south of Naples.

“I realized that if you were true and honest to traditions and made the best possible product you could, the world would…how you say…”

“Beat a path to your door?”

“Yes. That's right. So, when I became director over twenty years ago, I knew we had so many things to offer the world—better cheeses, better aging processes, better animals, better grazing on lands full of wild herbs that give unique flavors to the cheeses. And better work for Basilicatans. The government said we were
marginale,
so they kept sending money and factories down here. But these people are not factory workers, they are people of the land. So I wanted to find a way, a profitable way, for them to stay in their farms and on their pasturelands and produce some of the finest cheeses in Italy.”