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Very few people I know have been to Sardinia. If they have, they went with the kids and stayed on the beach. If I ask people where in Italy they would like to go, Sardinia is rarely in their top 10. Yet it has so much to offer:  Lagoons with flamingos  Megalithic settlements of the Nuragic civilisation from 1700 BC  Mediaeval castles  Excellent food and wine  Friendly welcoming people, who have the longest lifespan in the world Even I only went to Sardinia by accident. Some weavers who were coming on one of my Tastes & Textiles tours in Tuscany asked me to take them to visit a woman who weaves ‘sea silk’, the filaments of the beard of a sea mollusc.  The cloth shimmers golden in the light. Reluctantly I agreed and hopped over from Pisa, only 50 minutes by plane to Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia. It wasn’t love at first sight. But, like people, I believe places merit more than a casual glance. Many reveal their treasures only to those who patiently dig below the surface. There’s no better way to get to know a place than to learn from the locals. Enter Antonio Arca. He was born in Alghero in northwestern Sardinia and moved to London in 2004, the same year I came to Lucca. His company Capo Caccia Fine Food imports the products he knows and loves from small, trustworthy suppliers.  Antonio and his Sardinian products: cheese, salumi, pasta During one of my research trips to Sardinia, Antonio advised me to go to Sa Sartiglia festival in Oristano, in the west central part of the island. You can read about it here. I was travelling with friends who wanted to go to Cabras to see the Giganti di Mont’e Prama, but I was too engrossed in the festival. I was meeting farmers and family food producers at street stalls. One of these was Marcello Stara, a local rice farmer.  Food stalls at Sa Sartiglia, Oristano I don’t know why I’m so excited by rice. Maybe it’s the flavour of good rice (not the bland quick-cook stuff) and its versatility in different cuisines from Asia to Italy. Maybe it’s the fact that it grows in water and required communal cooperation to provide the irrigation. Maybe it’s just how beautiful it looks in the field.  Rice in the field: golden against an azure sky In any case, I was already conjuring a tour to include Marcello and his rice during the harvest so we could find out how it’s processed and what freshly harvested rice tastes like. But one farmer doesn’t make a tour. I consulted Antonio. Did he know know other people in the area? Would he like to collaborate on a tour? Yes and yes. We planned a research trip together. First we needed a place to stay. For me it had to be an agriturismo (farm accommodation) so we would be investing in the rural economy. I found three suitable ones on the internet. Antonio chose L’Orto. Not only do they have enough private rooms with en suite baths, but they have a restaurant and dad is a fantastic cook. Everything local and perfectly cooked.  Antipasto at Agriturismo L’Orto  Porceddu (roast suckling pig) with crispy skin covering soft melting meat We visited Marcello and his rice fields.  Rice was first planted in the 1930s to feed the people from marshy land.  Marcello can’t bear to throw anything away. He and Antonio chat below his family’s antique wagons He introduced us to Davide Orro and his family in the next village. Davide could almost be a tour in himself. He’s an enthusiastic winemaker and olive farmer and his sister Ester makes decorated festival bread. He planned our day: start picking olives, cure and bottle the olives, learn to make decorate bread with Ester. Lunch: bread, local cheeses and salumi, olives, wine. One of the grape varieties is known to have been grown in the area 3000 years ago.  Davide in full flow as he explains how he makes his wine.  Decorated bread for holidays.  Davide’s olives ready for us to pick. Davide suggested we go see Sandro Dessé. He’s even more versatile than the Orro family. You arrive at his farm and see a paddock of sheep and goats, one of donkeys and horses, pigs at the back and dinosaurs over to the side. Behind the pigs are fruit trees and vegetable gardens. Sandro is a practitioner of the circular economy.  Production kilometre 0 — Circular economy Not only does he produce the raw ingredients, but he processes them as well. There’s a small abattoir, a laboratory for curing pork, a cheese dairy and a kitchen for drying fruit and making pasta. His dining room seats 250 guests.  Antonio is fascinated by the sheep milking machine. Sandro’s wild, wide-eyed enthusiasm is contagious, but we can’t do everything in one visit. We must have a tour of the farm, and it would be fun to have a lesson making the delicious stuffed pasta called culurgiones, which we can eat for lunch along with Sandro’s many other products.  Culurgione filled pasta shaped like an ear of wheat (sort of) Here we pick up the trail of some of Antonio’s friends. Paolo Lilliu, a butcher, who makes the salsiccia sarda, which you can cook when they’re fresh or air dry and eat like salami.  Sardinian sausage…  and proud Paolo who made it. On your morning with Paolo you’ll make your own, after which we’ll go to his friend Sandro Picchedda, a saffron and peperoncino (chili pepper) farmer for a barbecue and a traditional dessert made with saffron.  Sandro Picchedda farms hot, medium and mild peperoncini.  This field will be blazing red when we’re there. Some other friends of Antonio introduced us to cowherd and cheesemaker Giuseppe Sanna who makes the Slow Food Presidium cheese casizolu from the milk of his own cows. He's willing to let you try your hand at forming the cheeses.  Shaping casizolu takes some practice. My friends came back wide-eyed and enthusiastic about the Giganti di Mont’e Prama, bigger than life-size stone statues of warriors which probably date to around 800 BC. Having been an archaeologist, I had to see them too. Luckily they reside in the seaside town of Cabras, which is also a centre of bottarga production. We talked to several producers who told us about the technique for fishing the grey mullet, cleaning them and salting and curing the roe to make the much sought after and expensive delicacy bottarga. The gentle and generous Giovanni Spanu invited us into his production facility.  The pairs of roe are called 'baffi' which means moustaches. With a bit of imagination you see the handlebar type.  Bottarga can be grated onto pasta. The Giganti were even more impressive than I had imagined.  Giganti di Mont’e Prama: the glory of Sardinia’s past They immediately became the mascots of the tour—little-known giants, the heroes of their land. Our living giants are smaller and gentler, but fighting all the same to maintain their products of quality and the role of the small farmer and producer in an ever more global economy.
Find out more about the Giants of Sardinia tour here. 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 26 August, 2018.
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The etymology of the Italian word antipasto is ‘anti’ meaning before and ‘pasto’ meaning meal. My Italian-Italian dictionary adds that they are served before the beginning of the true and proper meal. So, how much can you eat right before you eat a ‘true and proper’ Italian meal? Remember that it consists of two courses, the primo or first course and the secondo or second course. The second course may have side dishes, contorni, and is often followed by the dolce, or sweet course.  A primo. Any foreigner would consider this the one and only course.  Secondo (one portion!) The Italians I know have differing opinions about the correct number of antipasti (plural of antipasto) to be served at a ‘true and proper’ meal. Stefano of Cantina Bravi in the Garfagnana can’t bear to serve fewer than seven. Nor can Agriturismo L’Orto in Sardinia (if you count the olives).  Stefano, it’s all delicious but seven antipasti are too many!  Antipasti at the final dinner of our Giants of Sardinia tour.  Five antipasti at my truffle hunter’s home. Still too many. Despite my begging her to reduce the number, Gabriella ignores me and continues to produce five at the seafood dinners she prepares for my salumi courses in Tuscany. Which would you choose?  Zucchini flowers stuffed with prawns  Marinated eels  Razor clams  Prawns wrapped in lardo  Moscardini (small variety of octopus) with polenta  Stuffed mussels, my favourite  I feel full just looking at the photo. Returning to the dictionary, it says the antipasti are supposed to whet the appetite. Personally, I find more than one puts a damper on my appetite for the rest of the meal, and finally I’ve found some Italians who agree with me. I invited Marzia (one of my cheesemakers) and her husband to dinner last night. Since I figured one antipasto would never satisfy an Italian, I decided to serve three. A bit meagre, I knew. By the time we got to the secondo, a stuffed roast guinea fowl, they said they were already full. They declared that antipasti kill their appetites, and they could easily do without any. I must remind them next time my cheese course is at their house for dinner and they serve seven antipasti!
Back to my question: how many can you eat? 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 31 March, 2019. 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. |
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