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I admit we weren’t dancing on the tables. It wasn’t that wild, but there was some heady acorn beer.  And there’s the clue. Every dish was enriched with wild plants foraged by Stefano Pucci, the environmental guide whose walks I often go on. After a week of over-indulgence, practically a legal requirement for Christmas and New Year festivities in Italy, I look back with pleasure on that convivial meat-free meal I had in October at the trattoria and micro-brewery La Collina at Loppeglia (Pescaglia).  Stefano has been foraging for wild plants since he was a boy. He’s never happier than when in his beloved woods on the slopes of the Alpi Apuane mountains, and nothing is too much trouble or too time-consuming for him. The acorns, for example. He collects them, cleans them and mills them by hand with patience and care. I daren’t ask how many hours of labour this entails, especially since he collects enough for Alessandro, the master brewer at La Collina, to make a batch of excellent acorn-flavoured beer named Driadi.  Driadi means dryads, the nymphs of woodlands. Whoa! Aren’t acorns poisonous? I remember learning when studying anthropology at Berkeley that California Coast native Americans had figured out how to remove the toxins. Maybe I’m misremembering; it was a long time ago. Stefano reassures me that they’re not dangerous, and I’m still here to tell the tale.  The three types of oak in our area (from left to right): Quercus cerris (Turkey oak), Q. robur (English oak) and Q. ilex (holm oak). Turkey oak is the best for milling into flour. In the kitchen Paola worked her magic on Stefano’s foraged plants and interesting varieties of more common plants from his vegetable garden.  Dining with the 'Dryads' 2021 The Annotated Menu Dish by Dish Nido di polenta al pesto Ombelico di Venere Nest of polenta with pesto of Venus’s navel It’s called navelwort in English without specifying whose navel, and Umbilicus rupestris in Latin. It’s a fleshy plant in the stonewort family (Crassulaceae). Stefano adds that it was an important food of mediaeval pilgrims. ‘Wort’ was used in English names of plants and herbs used for food or medicinally. Perhaps coincidentally but then again maybe not, wort is also the sweet infusion of ground malt or other grain (not to mention acorns) before fermentation, used to produce beer and distilled malt liquors.  Here it is growing in dry stone walling in my village. Who would have guessed this is what Venus’s navel looked like? I checked out Botticelli’s painting ‘Venus and Mars’ (‘Venere e Marte’), but she’s fully clothed.  Whatever you call it, it was an inspired dish. (Photo: Klaus Falbe-Hansen) Crostone con pomodoro fresco al Satiro Large toast with fresh tomato and Satyr’s herb In Greek and Roman mythology satyrs were lustful, drunken woodland gods. Drinking acorn beer, no doubt. From the libidinous to the botanist (not to imply that a botanist can’t be debauched), the scientific name is Satureja montana. In English we call it winter savory, which might sound less lascivious, but savoury can mean spicy and piquant.  Stefano collected the Satiro at 1000 metres (3280 ft). He didn’t reveal whether he met any satyrs along the way. (Photo: Klaus Falbe-Hansen) Maccheroncini ai porcini della selva pescaglina Maccheroni with porcini mushrooms from the Pescaglia woods Maccheroni in this part of Italy isn’t elbow macaroni. It’s thin squares or rectangles of egg pasta, usually made by hand, as it was in this case.  The green herb is nepitella (Calamintha nepeta), which is lesser calamint, a member of the Lamiaceae family which includes thyme, oregano, marjoram and mint. In Tuscany it’s the traditional seasoning for porcini. Casarecce all'aglione Casarecce with giant garlic Casarecce are a type of short, dry pasta. Stefano explained that aglione dates from Etruscan times and comes from the Val di Chiana, southern Tuscany. He grows it in his vegetable garden. It doesn’t contain alliin, the chemical which, when exposed to air, is metabolised to allicin which gives normal garlic its strong, characteristic smell and flavour. Finally I understand the dish you often see on menus around Siena, pici all’aglione. Pici are thick strands of spaghetti, and the sauce is a simple tomato sauce with lots of aglione. No wonder when I tried to make it at home, the garlic was always overpowering. In my ignorance, I used normal garlic instead of aglione. I wish someone had told me long ago.  No strong garlic flavour here Frittata con Silene Alba con patate rosse dell' orto di Ubaldo al forno Frittata with white campion and roast red potatoes from Ubaldo’s orto You probably know that a frittata is beaten egg cooked in a frying pan and, if you’re adventurous, flipped over when the bottom is cooked. Don’t tell anyone, but I put mine under the grill to finish the cooking, so as to avoid ending up with the frittata on the floor instead of in the pan. You can add almost any cooked vegetable to the egg before cooking it. Here it’s Silene alba or white campion, a wild herb with a slightly sweetish flavour. The red potatoes came from Stefano’s garden, named Ubaldo after his father, and were grown without any irrigation.  In Greek mythology Silenus was a woodland spirit often depicted as a drunken old man—blame the acorn beer again—with the ears, legs and tail of a horse. Ghianducci e Vin Santo This is a play on the word cantucci, the typical Tuscan biscuit or cookie containing almonds and often called biscotti in English. Instead of using wheat flour, these were made with acorn, ghiande in Italian, flour milled by Stefano. Vin santo (sacred wine) is a Tuscan dessert wine in which you dunk your ghianducci.  All this for only €23! If you live near Lucca and speak Italian, I highly recommend Stefano’s walks. You’ll always learn something new and interesting. You can find them at Stefano's website and Facebook page. If you landed here by chance and would like to be notified of future posts, you can sign up here http://eepurl.com/geSMLv
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What does Tuscan heritage mean to you? Do you think of Florence and its famous art and architecture? The leaning tower of Pisa? Maybe the landscape of vineyards, olive groves and pencil cypresses that give us Chianti and olive oil? My Italian friends from Lucca helped me design a tour based on their idea of their own heritage. They envisaged a tour that snaked diagonally across the region from Sansepolcro and Arezzo in the southeast to Lucca in the northwest. Chianti yes, but not the vineyards that leap to mind. Art and architecture yes. But no Florence. No Siena. No Pisa. Here are ten experiences they don’t want slow travellers to miss.  The Renaissance walls of Lucca 1: Sansepolcro (Arezzo Province) Why there? For two reasons. 1 The fresco of the ‘Resurrection’ by the hugely influential early Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca. You don’t have to be religious to be spellbound by it. Aldous Huxley called it the ‘greatest picture in the world’.  Fresco of the ‘Resurrection’ by Piero della Francesca. 2 The Tuscan cigar. I don’t smoke and I think it would be better if no one did. But it turns out that tobacco was undoubtedly a major player in the history of Tuscany ever since 1574 when it arrived in the very spot we’re staying: Sansepolcro. From smuggling to women’s work you’ll hear all the pros and cons of tobacco at Roberta’s tobacco farm. Whatever your views, it’s fascinating seeing how tobacco leaves are harvested by hand and smoke-dried.  Since tobacco leaves for cigars have to be perfect, they must be harvested one at a time by hand. (Photo: Klaus Falbe-Hansen) 2: Anghiari (Arezzo Province) An English friend who accompanied me on a research trip said that of everywhere we went, it’s the place she most wants to return to. Its striking position poised on a cliff edge is attraction enough. Add to that a tour of the Jacquard looms at the Busatti linen mill, and you’ll want to return too.  Beautiful Anghiari  The Jacquard looms at the Busatti linen mill 3: Chianti (Florence Province) Could Chianti wine be even better if they restored all the dry-stone walling that was demolished when tractors blazed a trail through the vineyards in the 1960s and ‘70s? You can judge for yourself during a vineyard tour and tasting.  During the Tuscan Heritage tour we spend one day in search of the black rooster - the emblem of Chianti Classico 4: White Truffle (Pisa Province) San Miniato claims their white truffles are better than the more famous ones from Alba in the Piedmont. Follow the Lagotto dog, find your truffles and relish lunch with truffles in every course (except dessert).  Turbo has found one! 5: Vicopisano (Pisa Province) When the Florentine Republic conquered the Pisans in 1406 they commissioned their star architect-engineer, Filippo Brunelleschi—famed for the dome of the duomo of Florence—to redesign the Pisan fortress at Vicopisano. My historian friend from Pisa says you mustn’t miss this magnificent castle, and he’s going to show you around himself.  After Giovanni Fascetti's fascinating tour, some of my guests said, 'That was miles better than an ordinary castle tour!' 6: Extra virgin olive oil My Slow Food friends are sure you have no idea how good extra virgin olive oil can be until you taste it here in Tuscany. It deserves the same attention you lavish on wine.  Which is better: green or gold? 7: Lucca (Lucca Province) Lucca is so conservative that it never tore down its Renaissance walls, as if waiting for another attack. It may as well be us. And who better to show us around than a descendant of one of the noble families who ruled Lucca in the Renaissance!  San Martino, Lucca 8: Puccini (Lucca Province) Baritone Mattia Campetti insists that every visitor to Lucca must hear the music of that great operatic composer Giacomo Puccini in his home town. Mattia will give you a vivid and amusing tour of Puccini’s home at Torre del Lago. Be prepared for an entertaining concert when Mattia is joined by his soprano wife Michelle Buscemi.  An evening with Mattia and Michelle always keeps you smiling. 9: Tuscan grill On the grill are a pig and a cow (no apologies for sneaking in two items here): the indigenous Cinta Senese pig (belted pig of Siena) and the white Chianina cow, possibly a descendant of the huge Palaeolithic aurochs. Their succulent flavour hasn’t diminished at all over the millennia.  Chianina steak cooked to perfection at a smugglers' inn 10: Cantuccio (biscotti in English) Every Tuscan meal must end sweetly with cantuccini dunked in vin santo, our Tuscan dessert wine.  Cantuccini How to book the Tuscan's Tuscany:
If my Tuscan friends have convinced you to come see Tuscany through their eyes, have a look at all the tour details here (click on the tabs below the introduction and read what appears in the window below) and email me for a booking form. If you landed here by chance and would like to be notified of future posts, you can sign up here. If you’d like periodic news about our tours and courses, sign up here.
Butter isn’t an ingredient you’ll find in traditional Tuscan cuisine. The people north of the Apennine Mountains have cows, and they make butter. In Tuscany we have sheep. Their milk is used to produce pecorino cheese (the word for sheep is ‘pecora’ and the cheese made from their milk is ‘pecorino’).
Pecorino maturing in the cellar at Cerasa farm (photo: Colin Dickinson)
In the Garfagnana we have a native all-purpose cow good for a bit of both milk and meat, which since the diffusion of modern specialised breeds and until very recently was considered good for nothing and nearly died out completely.
Cow and calves: three of the very few remaining cows of the Garfagnana
Families made a little butter which they used primarily in sweet dishes. In a local cookbook compiled by a woman of Lucca, out of 179 savoury recipes only four call for butter, three contain béchamel sauce and one is the recipe of a chef who had emigrated to New York. On the other hand, almost every single one contains extra-virgin olive oil. Out of 33 desserts, 23 use butter, mostly in the pasta frolla crust of pies.
Ricotta tart: the crust contains butter, but not the filling
Occasionally you come across a cow family, like the Nesti of Melo (Cutigliano) into which Daniela Pagliai married. (Women rarely take their husband’s surnames, although the children bear their father’s name.) Daniela had been her father’s shepherd since she was nine and in charge of making pecorino from the age of 14. When she married, she had to change gears. She now makes several types of cow’s milk cheese, yoghurt, gelato and butter. For more about Daniela, see my blog post: Like the Seasons: the Life of a Cheesemaker.
The butter machine gyrates the cream until the butter separates out.
When I take my guests to her, I always buy some butter. It conforms to two of my rules when buying food: very few ingredients and nothing I can’t understand. Andrew Wilder of Unprocessed October calls it the Kitchen Test. Daniela’s butter contains one ingredient: panna, cream.
Daniela’s butter
When I first started visiting her, butter was such a minor product that she didn’t even have a special label for it. She sold it in a ricotta wrapper. Now there’s not only a label, but also an informative essay.
You can learn something valuable from food labels.
Daniela says: ‘Completely natural artisan production. Its distinctiveness is that during the summer the cows graze in alpine pastures producing milk rich in betacarotene, whose colour transfers to the butter making it yellow. In winter, the feed is based on hay [not silage] and the butter is paler.’
They say that variety is the spice of life, and it’s often these tiny details that distinguish the truly artisan product from a standardised industrial one. Of course, nothing beats visiting the producer and checking their claims for yourself. If you landed here by chance and would like to be notified of future posts, you can sign up here. If you’d like periodic news about our tours and courses, sign up here. This blog was originally published on Slow Travel Tours on 25 September, 2016. If you come to Lucca for only a day, arriving from Florence late morning and off early the next to get to the Cinque Terre, you’ll miss the pleasures of Borgo Giannotti. Compared to the amphitheatre, the Guinigi Tower with oaks growing on top, the wedding-cake columns of San Michele church and the massive encircling walls of the historic centre, Borgo Giannotti doesn’t look like much.  Looking north up Borgo Giannotti Immediately outside the north gate of Lucca, it was a meeting point for merchants coming from the port of Viareggio, a place to stop and refresh themselves before turning up the Serchio Valley to sell their merchandise in the Garfagnana. It developed into a thriving artisan quarter, and retains that vibrancy of people making and doing things, occupations that the waves of mobile phone shops haven’t yet totally swept away. So come with me for a Saturday morning trawl in Borgo Giannotti.  Locals arrive in droves (and park anywhere) to shop and have things mended. We might be mistaken for drunks, rare as they are here in Lucca, weaving from one side of the street to the other following the trail of my favourite places. On the left we come to coffee importers and roasters Bei & Nannini.  Coffee importers and roasters It’s not my favourite coffee, but I like the shop front and, apart from the coffee beans themselves, it’s local. It was founded in 1923 by Guido Nannini and Giovanni Bei and is still in the ownership of the two families. There are many small groceries, delicatessens and specialist food shops in Borgo Giannotti. You can do all your shopping from the friendly vendors in the space of a few hundred metres without ever entering the anonymity of a supermarket. Crossing over to the right we find a fishmonger.  A handy lifesaver hangs above the blackboard listing the catch of the day. Over on the left is one of many fruit and vegetable shops. Since it’s Saturday, we’ll continue up the street to the farmers’ market.  Fresh fruit and vegetables Still on the left, look at that exquisite tiled shop front (it was even more beautiful before some developer painted over the ochre wash above).  Across: Porcelains, Laveno Ceramics, Crystal – Down: Cutlery, Crockery On the right we come to a bakery with many enticing goodies in its window.  Buccellato, Lucca’s answer to panettone  Torta di erbi co’ becchi I suspect torta di erbi is a relict of Renaissance, and maybe mediaeval, times when sweet and savoury were often mixed in a single dish. As strange as it sounds, this delicious tart is filled with Swiss chard, parsley, bread crumbs, raisins, candied peel, pine nuts, grated pecorino and parmigiano, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, rum and eggs. Becchi means ‘birds’ beaks’ and refers to the form of the pastry; shaping them is a skill in itself. Over on the left again is a tap where locals come to fill their water bottles for drinking at home. It’s free!  No need to carry bottled water. It’s on tap in the street. Next to the fountain is Angolo Bazaar where you can find almost any utensil or container you need for your household and many gifts to take to friends at home. It used to be on the corner (angolo), but moved down one space to make way for a discount sport shoe shop. Via Stalle means street of the barns—something like a mews in London.  Angolo Bazaar for every household need  La Cesteria Lucchese You could spend a couple of hours in this Aladdin’s cave starting with the baskets at the front and penetrating into deeper and deeper caverns stacked from floor to warehouse ceiling with crockery, wooden kitchen utensils, garden tools, hosepipes, canvas—an inventory too long to list.  Owners Marco and Paolo amid the treasures of La Cesteria I’ve brought my sickle and pennato lucchese (a kind of billhook) to be sharpened opposite at L’Arrotino. Many people take their utensils to artisan sharpeners, and itinerant ones come to some open-air markets. The Bertinis have been sharpening knives in Borgo Giannotti since 1956. They also sell quality knives from those forged traditionally in Italy to Japanese knives of Damascus steel. Every kitchen needs at least one!  Father and son knife and tool sharpeners Continuing on the right, we come to a delicious smelling grocery stuffed with tasty products, including tortellini fresh from the Favilla pastificio of Lucca.  An especially alluring grocery There’s something special along the road to the right, but first we’ll continue to the top of Borgo Giannotti.  Remember this monument for our return trip. When it’s lunch time, we can eat at Buatino, where the cook changes the menu every day to take advantage of seasonal ingredients.  Buatino We cross over the outer ring road and come to the Foro Boario. This has nothing to do with wild boar. Boario refers to cattle and the Foro Boario was the cattle market, used in September when herders brought their animals to sell in the city. The Festa della Carne e della Macelleria Tradizionale (Festival of Meat and Traditional Butcher Shops) held annually in the middle of September commemorates this practice. More in the old spirit of farmers selling their produce to the public is the farmers’ market that takes place at the Foro every Saturday morning.  Handsome gate houses to Foro Boario If you buy your fruit and vegetables here, they’ll be fresh and seasonal. You’ll meet the growers and can ask for recipes for ingredients you’ve never used before.  How does she cook that deep orange zucca Mantovana? Time for a coffee at the bar opposite the Foro and then we walk back to the monument, which turns out to be a road sign.  Monumental street sign pointing merchants to towns in the Garfagnana We turn left and if I weren’t with you, you’d walk right past this grey-green building and boring gate.  Unprepossessing façade You would be missing a great treat. It’s a handmade tile factory founded by the current owner’s great-grandfather in 1902 to make tiles in the ‘Liberty’ or Art Nouveau style, which was all the rage in Europe at the time.  Prize-winning tile factory A Tessieri & C, founded in 1902 Press your nose against the dirty showroom window (perhaps never washed since 1902?) and you can see some of the patterns that Francesco Tessieri’s four artisans still make by the same techniques.  Tessieri showroom They’re closed on Saturdays, but if we come on a weekday, Francesco will take us into the workshop and explain as we watch the process. Among his many commissions were restorations of floors in the homes of Gucci and Pavarotti.  Tessieri coloured cement tile Around the corner are some over-the-top examples of ‘stile Liberty’ houses whose floors are surely paved with Tessieri tiles.  Fantastical iron gate  Exuberance gone wild Our tour is done and it’s time for a delicious lengthy lunch accompanied by good wine and conversation. So like the merchants of old, why don’t you make Lucca your city to dawdle in, to catch your breath and refresh yourself?
If you landed here by chance and would like to be notified of future posts, you can sign up here. If you’d like periodic news about our tours and courses, sign up here. This blog was originally published on Slow Travel Tours on 13 January, 2013. If you’ve been to the mountains of Italy, I bet you’ve asked this question yourself. You’re probably in a car on a road hugging a river and you’re craning your neck to look up at a terracotta-roofed village improbably balanced on an inaccessible ridge. To find the answer you have to abandon your car, get into your time-machine, key in ‘Middle Ages’ and click GO.  A hilltop village With no discomfort on the way, you find yourself on a broad cobbled road nearly at the crest of the ridge looking down at that very spot in the valley you just vacated. You see the river running swiftly in the shadow of sheer rock walls that not even a mountain goat could scamper across. Your car is nowhere to be seen, because the road won’t be cut through the rock for several centuries. Your eyes follow the river to the left where it emerges from the gorge, still in the shade at noon, and disappears into a thicket of dense scrub on a river plain that floods in winter. You walk next to your mule laden with your jeans, T-shirts and iPad and in five minutes emerge into full sunshine at the ospedale next to the church in the village, where you are welcomed by a monk and offered a meal. As you tuck into your succulent boiled salt pork ribs, a large bowl of tasty chestnut-flour polenta and a skin of wine, you’re cooled by a soft mountain breeze that ripples through the golden farro in small terraced fields. A couple of enormous black pigs with pink belts around their middles wallow in a puddle formed by the spring that issues from higher up the mountain and provides clean cold drinking and washing water for the village. It must have been hard work creating the terraces, but the place is swarming with strapping young sons who look as if they’ve been down the gym pumping iron all morning, and it’s obvious time isn’t in short supply either. After lunch you’re not allowed to depart before having a snooze on a bed of hay in the inn, air-conditioned by the thick stone walls.  Arriving at the mediaeval village Although you’ve signed up for a slow travel tour, you still have to get to the next village by evening. A shepherd setting out with his flock offers to accompany you and show you the way, not that you need help to follow the broad, well-maintained mule track bordered by dry-stone walls. He’s been visiting his sister who married one of the men in this village, and his aunt and uncle live here too. There are many family connections between adjacent villages on this slope and those just over the top behind the village. It’s all so convenient living right on the main mule track; nothing is much more than an hour’s walk away. As you amble along, he tells you that the village you’re heading for lies just below a fort, part of the Republic of Lucca’s line of defense against the warmongering Florentine Republic. The ridge serves as an ideal lookout point, but the garrisoned troops are always drunk, and he’s sure those sheep that went missing provided Sunday lunch for the officers. Besides, he lowers his voice conspiratorially, he and a couple of other shepherds, who know the tops of the mountains like the eagles, had a good trade in contraband chestnut flour and firewood with the Florentine citizens just over the border. All at an end now, of course. After about 50 minutes, at a fork in the road, the shepherd bids you farewell as he continues up to his house in the summer pasture half an hour away and you saunter down the slope to the village bar just in time for a gin and tonic and a pizza margherita. Oops! You must have accidentally hit the ESC key on the time machine. You can tell because they didn’t have tomatoes in mediaeval times, and there are those telltale electric fairy-lights in the bar garden. Oh well, now that you’re back, let’s do the return trip as a 21st-century hiker.  The mule track, being inaccessible even by a Fiat Panda 4×4, has become overgrown, many of the cobbles have washed out and in places no trace is left. No matter. You shoulder your rucksack and set off down the tarmac road to the valley bottom, which takes 45 minutes. Turn left and walk along the state highway cut into the sides of the valley or raised above the boggy valley bottom. The sun finally got here at about 12.30 pm, the tarmac is still blazing hot and there’s no cooling mountain breeze down here. An hour later you arrive at a village in the valley bottom, built mostly since the 1950s to be near the factories that exploit the river water. Turn left and for another hour and a quarter climb steadily following the interminable switchbacks of the car road, built in the late ‘50s, to arrive after a grand total of 3 hours back where you had lunch. QED. Where did that mule go?  Another idyllic hilltop village If you landed here by chance and would like to be notified of future posts, you can sign up here.
If you’d like periodic news about our tours and courses, sign up here. This blog was originally published on Slow Travel Tours on 7 March, 2011. Did history lessons make you feel that a cloud in the sky outside the classroom window was absolutely riveting? They did me. If only I could have gone to the village shop for my lessons. The shop is only 30 seconds walk from my front door. You can get almost anything there from meat to dry goods to paintbrushes, and I go every morning to buy at least some bread that comes from a village 5 km away up the valley.  Renato and everything you could want at the village shop  Eugenia sometimes prepares ready meals you can buy in the shop One morning about a month ago I commiserated with Eugenia about her ankle which she sprained while getting water at the spring up at the cemetery to wash the grave stones of her ancestors buried there. She commented that we’d had too much rain and the stones were slippery with moss.  The guilty spring and its treacherous paving stones  Centuries of history in the Casabasciana cemetery Yes, I agreed, but it was beautiful yesterday and I went for a walk down to the river, across the foot bridge and up the valley along the road to the little dam that is part of a micro-hydroelectric plant.  A tiny madonna guards the micro-hydro dam.  A river both beautiful to behold and useful for electricity Renato explained that it furnishes the water for the main plant at the foot bridge, which used to be a silk spinning factory. I knew that silk was one of the main sources of wealth for the Republic of Lucca in mediaeval and Renaissance times and the silk industry had only completely died out in the 1970s, but I hadn’t realised that even at Casabasciana people reared silkworms. I take my guests to visit Stefania Maffei who rears silkworms like her grandmother did and runs workshops for school children to reacquaint them with their own history.  Ravenous silkworms at lunch  It’s worth the effort serving mulberry leaves to silkworms several times a day I asked where the mulberry trees were, since I hadn’t seen any. They’re mostly gone now, but Renato knew of one in a field near the little church below Crasciana (the village 3 km above Casabasciana). I mentally add that to my list of things to find. Talking about old industries, I remembered to tell them that I had just noticed the old kiln Eugenia had told me about last year, where they used to make terracotta bricks and roof and floor tiles. It’s only 5 minutes’ walk down the old cobbled mulattiera (mule track), just below where the modern road cuts through the track and above the madonnina (a wayside shrine). I’d never noticed it before, but this time I was looking from side to side for wildflowers and there were the ruins covered by brambles.  Beautifully constructed cobbled mule track getting covered by falling trees  The kiln becoming an archaeological remain — no wonder I’d missed it  Never-to-be-sold terracotta bricks produced at the kiln  Air vent beneath kiln Piqued by my apparent interest in building materials, Renato volunteered that there used to be a lime kiln at Crasciana which produced the lime for mortar and lime-wash used for centuries in buildings here. Actually, although I’m interested in architecture and the aesthetics of buildings, the mechanics of building have never gripped me. But now, the fact that these things used to be made right here around me, caught my imagination and when I got home, I looked up lime extraction and processing on the internet.  I wonder if the Crasciana lime kiln looked like this I’m going to find out where our kiln was and and try to locate the ruins. Two days later I learned from my landlord that one of the cellar rooms of the house was the calcinaia, where they used to slake the lime when whitewashing the walls of what was formerly one of the grandest houses in the village.  Basin for slaking lime to make whitewash for the walls of my house Everything begins to come together. Maybe that was what was wrong with history before. It was the equivalent of ‘fast travel’ — too many isolated facts without any connection to anything.
If you landed here by chance and would like to be notified of future posts, you can sign up here. If you’d like periodic news about our tours and courses, sign up here. This blog was originally published on Slow Travel Tours on 3 June 2012. As a tour designer and guide I don’t get many opportunities to experience what it’s like for you to travel to a place you’ve never been to before. The only chance I have is when I research a new tour or course. And I did just that in March 2018. I want to offer a mozzarella course (update: I now do). Since we don’t make mozzarella in Tuscany (not properly, anyway), I had to go to Campania in the south, the home of water buffalo and birthplace of mozzarella. You probably know Naples, Pompei and the Amalfi Coast, but I hadn’t even been to any of these.  Greedy girls It was a bit daunting going south of Rome to the infamous Mezzogiorno of lawlessness. But I had a big advantage over the average tourist: I had locals to show me around. I had met a Scottish woman on a Ryanair flight from London Stansted to Pisa. Her Italian husband was from the province of Salerno, just south of Naples. I knew that Salerno and Caserta provinces were famous for their mozzarella. When I told her of my plan, she said they live in Florence now, but her husband knew the Cilento area inside out (central and southern part of Salerno Province). A couple of months later I found myself at Santa Maria Novella station in Florence, boarding a train bound for Salerno with Audrey and Enrico. I was to stay at their house in Trentinara. They were renting a car and they were going to introduce me to owners of agriturismi (farm accommodation), a mozzarella dairy and restaurants. Everything I would need for the course.  Piazza with olive tree and church, Trentinara First a stop at an agriturismo Aia Resort Cilento owned by Vincenzo, an architect friend of Enrico’s. It’s perfect for the course: tasteful rooms with private baths, a swimming pool, pizza oven and BBQ.  Room with a view of the pool, Aia Resort Cilento It was after dark when we arrived at their house and, while Enrico lit the fire, Audrey took me next door to meet her mother-in-law Antonietta. Even though we planned for dinner to try the restaurant owned by Enrico’s cousin, it was compulsory to sit down at the table to sample Antonietta’s stuffed artichokes (carcioffule ‘mbuttunate), lately picked from her garden. I had to forcibly prevent her putting two on my plate.  Antonietta, Enrico and me (photo: Audrey Pate) The next morning we met my cheese and salumi courses colleague Giancarlo Russo, who had arrived separately, and proceeded a short distance down the road to a private house to meet Lilla and her son Antonio La Mura. Lilla is a great cook (as it seems is everyone from this area) and might give a short cooking lesson either during the mozzarella course or during an optional extension before the course. We gathered around the table in the kitchen to talk. But no talk without food in these parts. Antonio went to the cellar and came back with his own salsiccia (air-dried sausage). Lilla sliced her homemade bread, made with sour-dough starter and baked in a wood-fired oven, while Antonio uncorked a bottle of excellent homemade wine.  A frugal tasting, we assumed. Giancarlo and I have tasted a lot of sausage and salami in our day, and this was exceptional. Encouraged, Antonio disappeared down below again and re-emerged with two cheeses and a salami, all of his own production.  The table was filling up. Enrico (left) and Antonio (right) enjoy their native food. Last (at least we were hoping it was), a cured sausage called nnoglia, which was stuffed with lungs and other of the least noble parts of the pig. Usually it’s used to flavour vegetable soups, but Lilla threw it on a grate over the fire that warmed the room. More delicious than you can imagine.  The nnoglia on the grill was already smelling tempting. She just happened to have some pastries from the local shop, and we weren’t allowed to leave without coffee and a digestivo, her homemade finocchietto, alcohol infused with fennel leaves and flowers. Good thing we hadn’t booked lunch at a restaurant!  We felt enveloped by Lilla’s hospitality and cheerful disposition. After that feast of salumi, we had to see Antonio’s pigs…  The pigs get some grub and a good scratch. and his cows…  Antonio is very fond of his animals. in the oak and chestnut woods where they have parties in the summer.  I hope we’re on Antonio’s guest list. That evening at 10.30 Giancarlo and I had an appointment at Caseificio Prime Querce to watch the whole process of making mozzarella and its pasta filata (spun curd) relatives scamorza, burrata and caciocavallo. The head cheesemaker Antonio (everyone seems to be named Antonio) is, of course, a close friend of Enrico. He showed us every step, explaining the reason for each process and giving us generous samples to taste.  At the beginning of the process Antonio ‘il Lupo’ adds rennet to the warm buffalo milk. Even though hIs nickname means ‘the wolf’, he was very gentle with us.  At the end of the process each mozzarella is pulled off the mass of spun curd (mozzare means to separate or amputate). Some is made by hand like this and some by machine. But the mozzarella wouldn’t be at its peak until it had bathed in brine for another five hours. We finally left around 2.45 am. The next morning Antonio stopped by Enrico’s house to drop off two bags of mozzarella, one hand-formed and the other moulded by machine. It was a revelation! Juicy, firm and milky. How can I go back to eating week-old mozzarella in Tuscany?  Would you believe you can taste the difference between handmade (left) and machine-moulded (right)? We still hadn’t had a tour of the town with Enrico and Audrey, so we set off up the streets of Trentinara, hailed and stopped at every corner by Enrico’s cousins and friends. At the top we made the day for Zì Cosimo, the basket weaver. I learned that here ‘zì/zà’, literally meaning ‘uncle/aunt’, is a title of respect for older people.  Zì Cosimo glowing from our attention  Preparing canes for his baskets seated on the paving stones Enrico laid for the town.  The hands and knife of a skilled artisan  View toward the sea from the arch behind Zì Cosimo. The ruins of the ancient Greek city of Paestum are on the plain around to the right. On the way to the restaurant for lunch we passed Enrico’s aunt carrying a basket of freshly baked bread from her wood-fired oven.  Zà Erene shows us the broom made of barley ears which she uses to sweep her oven. We were wondering how we could stuff in lunch after gorging on mozzarella for breakfast, but we needn’t have worried. Locanda Lu Vottaro, owned by the chef Cristina—you guessed it, a friend of Enrico, was closed, but she opened specially for us and prepared a superb tasting menu.  Chef Cristina in the doorway of her inn…  …a Slow Food osteria  Simple local, seasonal ingredients creatively combined to make light modern dishes It was time to leave our friends Audrey and Enrico, this town and the people who we felt we already knew well. Suddenly I realised this must be what it’s like to go on a tour with Sapori e Saperi Adventures. You’re met at the station, transported to your accommodation, escorted to see places and meet people you could never find on your own. They open their arms to you because you’re accompanied by us, their friends. What better way to spend a holiday?
Take a look at the result of this course for professional cheesemakers and keen amateurs: Mozzarella & its Cousins. If you're not a cheesemaker, don't worry, there are less specialised small group tours and courses like Olive Oil: Tree to Table for you. If you landed here by chance and would like to be notified of future posts, you can sign up here. If you’d like periodic news about our tours and courses, sign up here. This blog was originally published on Slow Travel Tours on 28 March 2018. The guests on our inaugural Giants of Sardinia tour excelled themselves with a little help from our stellar food producers. They scampered to the top of the megalithic nuraghe Barumini.  View from the tower They picked and brined olives with Davide Orro and his mother Angelica.  Picking olives was child’s play.  The labels designed by Davide’s sister Maura made our jars look professional. They manipulated with dexterity the dough for Oristano wedding bread with Davide’s sister Ester.  Ester made it look easy.  And it was after a few sips of vernaccia di Oristano. It was no problem at all tasting the rest of Davide’s superb wines with seductive labels designed by his other sister Maura.  Correct preparation for a tasting lunch They learned the proper way to make Italian risotto with Marcello Stara’s rice under the tutelage of his friend Rossella.  Risotto should be creamy and the grains of rice firm but not crunchy. With butcher Paolo Lilliu they overcame the difficulties of stuffing Sardinian sausages…  Brava! …and ate them barbecued for lunch.  Delicious! Even if their Casizolu, a Slow Food caciocavallo-type cheese, wasn’t quite perfect, it was lots of fun modelling the curd.  If you weren’t careful, you could end up with a cheese with a giraffe-length neck. It seemed that making stuffed pasta culurgiones was going to defeat them, but practice makes perfect and success was theirs in the end.  Before (left) and after (right) I’m glad we didn’t have to do battle with the Bronze Age nuragic giants at Cabras.  Fearsome warriors from 900 BCE But I bet our guests would have succeeded in making a peace treaty, and the giants would have joined us for a blow-out feast at our agriturismo L’Orto!  Every meal was a feast at Agriturismo L’Orto. Come on one of our small group tours so you too can glow with achievement and join our guests’ hall of fame. Choose your tour now: http://www.sapori-e-saperi.com/small-group-tours.html
If you landed here by chance and would like to be notified of future posts, you can sign up here. If you’d like periodic news about our tours and courses, sign up here. This blog was originally published on Slow Travel Tours on 11 November 2018. According to the Italian National Organisation of Cheese Specialists there are 643 different cheeses in Italy. Wikipedia puts the number in the United Kingdom at over 700. Counting cheeses could rival sheep for putting you to sleep. Yet talking about and eating cheese is spellbinding, and making it can be addictive.  Just a few of the vast range of Italian cheeses at Slow Food Cheese, Bra, in 2013 What strikes me about the list of Italian cheeses is how many of them are traditional cheeses that have been made and eaten for centuries, some even for millennia. Scanning the list from the UK, I see lots of newly invented cheeses, many of them excellent I know from firsthand experience, but they haven’t yet stood the test of time.  Food-grade ink is new, but a cheese similar to parmigiano from the same area is documented from Roman times, and it appears in recipes in one of my 17th-century English cookbooks There are many motives for inventing a new cheese: curiosity, marketing, ego, a mistake during production that turns out to taste good. Among the Italian cheesemakers I know, none of these factors influences them. They’re proud of their heritage and want to make the cheese their parents and grandparents made as well as they can. It’s as if they have a Platonic ideal of, say, pecorino which they’re aiming at. And they sell it as ‘pecorino’. If they package it, the label will give the name and address of the dairy, but the cheese itself is ‘pecorino’.  Pecorino is pecorino at Verano Bertagni’s dairy.  Vitalina says, ‘We've always been the goat people’…  …and she still makes caprino (goat’s milk cheese). Why are there so many traditional cheeses? Geography and history account for much of the diversity. But I suspect so does that endemic Italian characteristic campanilismo, the conviction that everything within sight and sound of your own bell tower is best. You might occasionally eat cheese from elsewhere, but with a very few exceptions, you certainly don’t set up a dairy to produce it, and even less to give birth to your own invention.  How could my bell tower not be best when it looks like this? (Photo: John Morrison) Very few people outside Italy realise we have this huge variety of cheeses most of which are produced only in a limited area. For example, Gorgonzola is produced only in parts of Lombardy and Piedmont in northern Italy. Parmigiano is made only in part of Emilia-Romagna. Mozzarella is produced only in southern Italy. The expert Gorgonzola producers have never made mozzarella, and vice versa. Sometimes I get a request for a cheese course including all four of these cheeses, and I have to say no. My courses are taught by cheesemakers who have been making their kind of cheese all their lives. To get to these experts we would spend all our time travelling up and down the country with no time left for our hands-on workshops learning to make the cheeses. For example:  Here we are at Santa Rita Bio in the Province of Modena to learn how to make parmigiano Then, 45 minutes by car to Modena station.  Five and a half hours from Modena to Salerno on the train and another hour to get to our dairy Prime Querce…  …where we begin five days of full-on immersion in mozzarella. No, no. Too much stress! To me, the distinctiveness of each region is one of the beauties of Italy. You have to go to a particular place to eat a particular type of food. Massimo Bacci, who is one of the norcini (pork butchers) who teach my salumi course, always says: ‘If you could get my salami by mail order anywhere in the world, half the joy of travelling would disappear.’ I would add that the flavour of what we eat is influenced by our surroundings. You will never taste a better mozzarella than the one made six hours earlier in a nearby dairy which you enjoy with friends of the cheesemaker in Campania with the fragrance of the Mediterranean maquis in your nostrils, the sawing of cicadas in your ears and the Mediterranean Sea glittering in the distance.  I’m writing this blog to coincide with the British Cheese Weekender 2021, a series of live online events presented by cheesemakers, cheesemongers, cheese maturers and chefs in the UK. Click here to see what’s on today. If you landed here by chance and would like to be notified of future posts, you can sign up here: http://eepurl.com/geSMLv
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When you come on my tours I hope you’ll feel as if you’ve tumbled down the rabbit hole into a Wonderland of strange language, landscapes, white rabbits, mad hatters and cheshire cats. Relax and bask in another culture. There will be many green bottles saying ‘DRINK ME’ and food saying ‘EAT ME’.
The strangest of my tours is Celebrating Sardinia. Sardinia is only barely Italy, so don’t assume because you’ve explored the mainland, you also know that bean-shaped island off its west coast.
The tour is timed to enjoy the festivities for the patron saint of Sardinia, Sant’Antioco. His tomb is in the cathedral of the town of Sant’Antioco on the island of the same name, now linked by a causeway to the southwest corner of the island of Sardinia. The celebration takes place two weeks after Easter.
Sant'Antioco from across the lagoon
Stefano Castello welcomes us with a tune on the launeddas, a bagpipe without a bag, found only on Sardinia. Notice his cheeks.
The opening procession of the festival immerses you in the all-encompassing strangeness of the Sardinian Wonderland. There are many other traditional festivals in Italy, but here you have the sense of the past spilling over into the present. The fabric and needlework to make the costumes, the woodworking and decoration of the carts and the oxen which pull them, the music and the dance, all these skills were passed on to the present generation by parents and grandparents. They didn’t disappear only to be insecurely resurrected from hearsay, books and photos.
For the opening procession Sardinians come from the whole island in their individual village costumes and decorated oxcarts.
I think Sardinia is the only place where there are more sheep than humans. Giulio Basciu is one of the dwindling number of Sardinians living a traditional rural life.
Giulio makes pecorino with the milk of his own sheep.
Antonella Ajò learned to pot because she wanted to make ceramic models of every romanesque church in Sardinia. She achieved her goal, but having became addicted to the craft, she can’t stop.
Antonella is such a good teacher that even if you thought you couldn’t make anything, you’ll be surprised at your achievements.
Look what we made!
Something else you can only find here is bissu, a fibre made from the beard of a mollusc.
It shimmers like gold in the sunlight.
It used to be harvested from the bivalve Pinna nobilis, which was becoming extinct and was protected in 1992. Ariana Pintus has found another abundant shellfish whose beard has the same properties. It’s painstaking work cleaning and spinning the fibres.
Arianna carries on a tradition that many women of Sant’Antioco knew how to do.
It’s time for one of those green bottles with the ‘DRINK ME’ label.
Alberto uncorks the bubbly made by the classic champagne method in the winery of Sant’Antioco.
Not many places have salt pans you can visit to find out how salt gets from the sea to your table.
Look at that mountain of salt behind us!
Our guide Lisa (3rd from L) insists our tour isn’t complete without tasting her homemade limoncello.
You definitely won’t find delicious culurgiones anywhere else.
We made this potato-filled pasta shaped like ears of wheat. The flour was stone-ground old varieties of biodynamic grain.
For sure one of the highlights of the tour, and an experience it would be hard to find anywhere else, is making bread with Anna Marras and her friends. Antonella, the potter, told me about this group of retirees who amuse themselves by keeping alive their old traditions and teaching them to the young.
That’s Anna at the far end.
This is how you start.
Still a bit too young to learn, but she’s already got her party dress.
The men do the heavy work!
This porceddu (piglet) roast in a wood-fired oven definitely says ‘EAT ME’.
We were blown away by their hospitality.
I’d only asked for a bread lesson and we got a feast.
Three days into the tour fisherman Mauro Pintus, on whose boat we spend a blissful day on the lagoon, phoned to say he couldn’t do Wednesday, but how about Friday. The reason? For six months they’d had tickets for a pop concert in Milan, but he’d totally forgotten about it. I managed to swap Friday’s activities to Wednesday. And the weather was much better on Friday. Thank you pop concert!
Mauro reels in the net.
We congregate in Roberta’s galley for a preview. Her son Alessandro likes cooking better than fishing.
‘EAT ME’ is writ large here.
After an abundant lunch, we need a siesta.
On our last day we go to see another unique prehistoric Sardinian structure: a Bronze Age nuraghe built by a civilisation that endured from 1700 to 200 BC. They played the launeddas that Stefano demonstrated on the first day of our tour.
This is only the bottom half.
Spritz at a seafood shack.
The sun sets on a tour full of strange things and wonderful people.
I'm repeating this blog I wrote two years ago because, if it weren't for Covid-19, we would have been Celebrating Sardinia right now. Next year's tour is already confirmed, and there are only three places left. Why not join us for an extraordinary experience from 29 April to 8 May 2022? You'll find dates for 2023 and more details about the tour here.
If you can't wait until next year to travel to this Wonderland, the Giants of Sardinia tour takes place in October, by which time travel to Italy may be possible. If not, you may apply your deposit to another tour or have a refund.
If you landed here by chance and would like to be notified of future posts, you can sign up here http://eepurl.com/geSMLv
If you’d like periodic news about our tours and courses, sign up here http://eepurl.com/hVwz6
This blog was originally published on Slow Travel Tours on 28 June 2019.
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