A word on Sicily: La Sicilia is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea and an autonomous region of Italy, a nation famous for her profound regionalism, and virtual lack of nationalism. Sicilian wines are deeply influenced by the almost African heat and a culture borne of thousands of years of foreign invasions. It’s western coast features wines with incredible salinity, the soil soaking up great amounts of salt reclaimed from the Mediterranean, the fruit of fierce winds and ever-present sun.
I had never thought of a cannolo (‘cannolo’ is one, ‘cannoli’ any number higher than that) as an artisanal product before, not remotely. To be honest, I never much think of cannoli at all, their flavour has always been too sweet and rich for me. (I’ve always appreciated Hemingway’s saying, that dessert is for people that don’t drink enough).
And aside from impromptu birthday parties, I tend to treat pastry shops the way I do tattoo parlors and off-track betting places. I just ignore them, assuming that someone must be frequenting them. My vices have always lay elsewhere.
All of that changed today though, when I stumbled into Fratelli Rosciglione’s Dessert Laboratory, where cannoli are still made exactly like they have been since long before Italy was ever even Italy.
Domenico Rosciglione couldn’t be nicer, nor more eager to walk us through the process. ‘We’ve been at this for a hundred and seventy years’, he says when I ask, his hands going about their business disconnected from the rest of him.
‘I’ve got 11 siblings and all of them do something or other for the business’, he said. He’s a gentle soul, shy in that way that many artisans are, when you spend a lot of time locked away from others perfecting the craft.
The actual process is easy and the tools couldn’t be more pragmatic, such as these wooden dowels that have been used and reused longer than anyone can remember.
The ingredients are cake flour, water, sugar, vinegar, cocoa and vanilla.
‘The cocoa and sugar give the colour and a little bit of flavour’, he says. And in fact the raw pasta is brown, as if made of buckwheat.
‘And the vinegar’?
‘The pocks’, he says. With his shy smile you could be easily persuaded into thinking that he thought of the technique himself.
The pasta is rolled out into squares and wrapped around the dowels, all of it by hand.
The raw cannoli spend two minutes in boiling strutto, or rendered pig lard. The smell coming off the rolling liquid is porcine and gorgeous.
Saliva pools in my mouth at the perfume of the bubbling liquid. It’s heady, and it recalls more of the smell of kitchens in Mexico and South America.
Right out of the fat, the cannoli are boxed for shipping, even before they cool.
Just before serving they’ll be filled with sweetened ricotta. Sometimes chocolate chips mixed in. Sometimes candied fruit
Rarely in life are businesses labeled so honestly. The ‘Dessert laboratory’ is exactly that, an artisan’s work shop, adding a new twist in my mind to a dessert WAY too sweet for my tastes.
I decide that I need to have one..
I bite into one and taste the sweetened sheep’s milk ricotta. It’s so sweet that it makes my jaw ache. Energy bars for humming birds.I wrap up the second half in thin caffè napkins from the chrome dispenser and take it to go.Saluting Domenico and his brother Enzo behind the counter I mentally make a note, that cannoli are again like tattoos in that the same questions can be asked: Did it hurt and how much did it cost.
A Euro-25, and nothing that three black espressos can’t fix. No, no sugar please. I’ve had enough sugar to make me vibrate for a week.
But, clearly, I am not normal. Folks four deep line up and are buying the things by the cardboard rack. As I step out into the street a woman straightens her jacket before entering, as if about to appear on television rather than just to order a favourite dessert. The last thing I hear are the steady sound of wooden dowels being pulled from crispy cannoli, one at a time hitting the box, the glee of those in line strong enough to power a small city.
A word on Sicily: La Sicilia is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea and an autonomous region of Italy, a nation famous for her profound regionalism, and virtual lack of nationalism. Sicilian wines are deeply influenced by the almost African heat and a culture borne of thousands of years of foreign invasions. It’s western coast features wines with incredible salinity, the soil soaking up great amounts of salt reclaimed from the Mediterranean, the fruit of fierce winds and ever-present sun.
It was the first phone call I placed. ‘Nino’, I said. ‘I’m coming to Sicily’.
‘Outstanding! ‘The finocchietto in the garden is almost ready’, he said. There was a long silence.
‘Nino?’, I asked. ‘Are you there?’ I heard him swallow.
‘And I know where I can locate some excellent strawberries. I also have a friend that is a baker’.
I’ve only known him for a few years but you could hear it in his voice, that he was already mentally loading up his car with his favourite foods. A flat of little red strawberries. Bags of sweet and nutty bread. A cardboard box that clanks over bumpy road, resembling the highest two keys on a piano. And so that was that. Lunch was planned.
All I had to do was find a way to get to Palermo, where my five-week bicycle trip would begin with a lunch with Nino, one of my favourite people, ever.
‘Breadcrumbs’, I heard him mutter as I hung up the phone.
We met at the open-air market in Ballarò, downtown Palermo, a city that somehow seems just one town over from Istanbul, in every way but geography. You almost expect to hear crackly calls to prayer from warbly speakers. And it takes a few seconds to understand what the vendors are barking: their words are truncated here. Somehow, though, when you really listen, it’s still Italian.
The Ballarò market is the kind of market that’s almost too difficult to shop in: not because nothing looks good.
But because everything does. Let your mind wander even for a second and you’ll have enough for your next six meals.
As we walked Nino’s eyes narrowed as he spied some sgombri, the Italian word for ‘mackerel’.
‘How much are they a kilo’, he asked me, grinning like a proud father.
I looked again.
‘Crafty aren’t they, the vendors’, he said, laughing. He was referring to the little tails on the 9′s, the foxy little numbers that masquerade as ’0′s.
Back at the tiny four-story apartment I rented, his wife Angela starts to cut the finocchietto, a wild version of fennel that they grow in their city garden.
The clean, green, slightly licorice smell drifts down to the other three floors, until the whole house smells like an open field.
As the two of them unpack their bags and boxes of the stuff they brought from Marsala, I catch a sideways,slightly embarrassed glance from him. You see it a lot here in the south: Ask a Southern to go anywhere further than 20 minutes from home and they’re taking provisions.
It’s a trait that charms me completely.
He cleans some fresh sardines that smell like a cross between butter and cucumbers, mixed with a little seawater. What they didn’t smell like is fish.
Nino opens his Catarratto, a dry savoury wine he makes near Marsala. Although it’s one of the grapes that go into Marsala, his wines are more modern, more everyday.
A couple handfuls of pasta hit the water as Gina slips a Mina CD into the player. It’s 1959, and as you know,
Mina is love-lorn.
Angela starts to sway her hips while stirring the pot.
The finochietto hits the pan. The perfume increases 10 times. Raisins. Pine nuts. A little tomato paste. What’s surprising is that with all the smells, none of them speak ‘fish’.
A little raw oil and plates are passed around.
He opens a bottle of his Grillo, and again, the salty tastes emerge immediately. Sipidità, in Italian. If most wines are fruity, Nino’s wines are savoury, a concept that I always find intriguing.
We linger over the amber plates as he opens a third bottle, a dry moscato.
When the tiny oven ‘dings’, we plate the mackeral and another drizzle of raw oil. I take a sip of the moscato. Rather than matching the fish, it counterplays it, the same way, or rather the opposite, of how a salty cheese compliments a sweet wine. It’s fantastic.
After lunch he and I sit on the terrace and talk about wine, the south and how the rest of the world sees both.
A few hours later it’s an emotional goodbye, as good friends, 6-bottle and 5-hour lunches tend to produce.
A few hours later I’d wake up from a nap, long after dark, and I’d slowly begin to wash the dishes. It would be Mina again, just the two of us. I’d fill the tiny sink with soapy water and think about Nino and his wine. But most of all I’d think about my tiny, little 40-year old car back in Lecce and how I had left the back seat full of bottles of wine, olive oil and homemade pickles. Salami too. And that was just for a trip to the bank.
A word on Sicily: La Sicilia is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea and an autonomous region of Italy, a nation famous for her profound regionalism, and virtual lack of nationalism. Sicilian wines are deeply influenced by the almost African heat and a culture borne of thousands of years of foreign invasions. It’s western coast features wines with incredible salinity, the soil soaking up great amounts of salt reclaimed from the Mediterranean, the fruit of fierce winds and ever-present sun.
Meet Gaspare….
Philosopher…
Bicycle- enthusiast.
Ex-police officer.
Drinks wine every day.
Doesn’t know a damn thing about the stuff.
I just had rounded a stunningly-beautiful corner when Gaspare saw me looking at my map. He threw one leg over to the side of his bicycle and rode up, stopping perfectly, something a show-off teenager would do. I was endeared immediately.
What’s the best way to Trapani, I asked, fingering the tangle of spaghetti-like roads on the map.
Take the 187, he said.
How do I know which is the 187?
Well, it’s not marked but when you arrive in….or when you see the…..just take the…well, I’ll show you.
And we were off, to what would eventually turn out to be 45 kilometres together.
We rode over what is certainly some of the most breathtaking natural beauty Italy has to offer, a nation with more than its fair share. The countryside was an explosion of wildflowers of every colour, the intensity today, jarring. Blood red poppies streaked the blonde grassy fields, as far as you could see. The blue sky was supercharged, somehow bluer than blue, like it had just recently been cleaned. The lemons were so yellow that they seemed to burn right into my retina, leaving lasting images that I almost had to shake off. The fields of knee-high fava bean plants were green-green, the heavy and pendulant pods contrasting against the irony, red soil. Even the whites today were disturbingly-white, whites that don’t seem to appear normally in nature, like that magical, billowing clothes lines in detergent commercials or that teeth-against-the-tan of your average Hollywood star. And the entire time, the Tyranian would reveal itself ever few curves, in an afternoon-long game of a hide and go-seek, each time, a different shade of blue. Only bluer.
As we rode, Gaspare gestured at it all, employing that characteristic sign of confidence indicative to Southern Italian males, that absence of any body space, coupled with the need to constantly tap the other to reassure oneself that the listener is paying attention or to add a dramatic flourish, a sort of corporal punctuation. Some men even tuck in an arm, making the act of two men walking together as intimate as a tango. Others rest a hand on a shoulder for an entire conversation. Gaspere does all of this, only on bicycles, mine so heavily-loaded that my body often shakes just trying to stay up right. He ran me off the road more times than I could count, he ran me into mud puddles and into tall, Prince-purple-flowered thistle bushes, whose needles coated but thankfully didn’t penetrate, my neoprene pant leg.
He pointed out the bridge that his father worked on, the town where his wife was born, the place where he bought his last washing machine and a small obelisk erected to honour fallen police officers, gunned down by the Mafia.
They were colleagues, he says a few minutes later, tears rolling down his cheeks. Good boys too. The Mafia had always been a sign of a bigger problem, he said. His hand on my shoulder made his words seem all the more sincere. If the government wouldn’t give you permission to build a house, to fix your garage or to get a mortgage to buy your children their houses, what could you do? You had no choice. But that was before drugs. After drugs, the Mafia changed and started to become a parasite on good, decent people.
When did those men die, I ask, thinking that the government couldn’t be that slow if it had already erected a monument.
1977, he said, and then we rode in silence for half an hour or so, the stunning panorama seeming to lift him.
I never bring up the subject of the Mafia with Southern Italians and was a bit shocked that he discussed it so freely. For most Italians, the subject solicits the same feeling as if a visiting guest wanted to know about all the junkies at your local bus station or how likely was it that your local parishner was actually molesting a child this evening.
We rode through several small towns that had a row of nice, simple, family houses to the left, and then a row of dilapidated monster villas on the other, blocking the sea. He explained that everything on the beach was illegal (abusiva) architecture, there because the owners, aided by the Mafia, had successfully solicited building permits, albeit for public hotels, rather than private villas. Town after town, the copious beachfront was nasty, garbage-coated sprawl, left to swelter while most of the villas had clearly been abandoned for years if not decades.
So why solicit a contract, build a villa and then not live in it, I asked.
You can only live in so many of your villas, he said.
The rolling and expansive conversation was something that I’ll never forget and it was a turning point in my understanding of the Southern Italian view of government, society and anything that is ‘ours’ as opposed to ‘mine’ or ‘yours’. I grew up believing that the government, however misguided or even inept, existed for the betterment of the lives of the local people. My neighbours, staff, friends and colleagues in Southern Italy see government as the opposite, as a weapon of the few, aimed at crushing anyone gullible enough to go along with the plan. It’s living in a land where conspiracy theory is the true state religion. But talking with Gaspere, I didn’t have to put myself in someone’s else’s shoes for very long to understand what it would be like to live in a sea village (where the sea is everything), to be constantly denied the ability to provide for myself or my children, only to see access to the sea itself being taken by the government and given to someone that already has more than he can use in a lifetime. He was not an ex-cop talking, he was someone that understands the south, or least how it used to be. I hadn’t expected him to be sympathetic to the whole system.
That the local government no longer functions like this means little: it takes a long time to change minds, especially when so much is involved.
Gaspare and I talked about other changes as well, the flip-flopped proportions of young women to young men in Italian universities, the role of New Europe in Southern Italy and the importance of Northern and Central Italian wineries investing in Southern Italian wine.
Wine in Sicilia has changed more in the last 15 years than in the last 2000, I said.
Really? I wouldn’t think so, he said.
What sort of wine do you drink?
Normal wine, he said.
You mean sfuso?
Yeah, normal wine. Half a litre with lunch and another with dinner.
Ah.
I had suspected that sfuso, or bulk, unlabeled wine was what most Sicilians were drinking in Sicilian wine regions, for the same reason that I live in a wine region and drink sfuso at most meals myself. Only I tend to do it in defiance, to be one of the people. What I can’t imagine is to be living in one of the most dynamic wine regions in the history of the world, and at such a pivotal, self-exploratory-time and not knowing or caring about it. My guess is that Gaspere is the former, that anyone still so in love with his wife, that rides a bicycle that hard just for fun, that is so generous with complete strangers and one loves his birthplace with such sobriety, it seems impossible that he wouldn’t sit down to a bottle of Cusumano Alcamo Bianco and not feel something close to breast-feeding, right from the earth itself.
We shook hands and kissed, gave earnest wishes and separated, and a few kilometres up the road I stumbled onto a parade in a small village, where Jesus was reliving key moments of his life, re-enacted by local farmers, mechanics and beauticians, only this time in ‘living paintings’ pulled by big red tractors. Everyone talked on cell phones as the procession passed. Folks smoked. Kids wiggled. I snapped some pictures of the crowd, how intent they were to be at the social ‘thing’, whatever it was, and I scratched this question into my new Moleskin: Could it be that Southern Italy’s patina-thin sheen of religious tradition is really just the desire to gather, the desire to behave socially, just without the presence of government, which, historically, has always let them down?
Calabria is the ‘toe’ of the Italian ‘boot’, a sun-drench strip of land bordered by the regions of Basilicata and Sicily, and by two different seas, the Tyrrhenian and to the the Ionian. The region is famous for cherishing the oldest wines in Italy, originally planted by the Greeks, who saw unbridled potential in her wild,unsown fields. Gaglioppo, mantonico and magliocco are the main red grapes, and the world-famous greco, for the white. Look for stunning dessert wines, white grapes rendered into intense clovered- honey by the blue- blue Mediterranean sky.
A word on Sicily: La Sicilia is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea and an autonomous region of Italy, a nation famous for her profound regionalism, and virtual lack of nationalism. Sicilian wines are deeply influenced by the almost African heat and a culture borne of thousands of years of foreign invasions. It’s western coast features wines with incredible salinity, the soil soaking up great amounts of salt reclaimed from the Mediterranean, the fruit of fierce winds and ever-present sun.
I’m on a ferry, crossing the straight of Messina, the body of water that separates Italy from Sicily. To many it’s just a watery obstacle, something that a boat has to do to a train before they can continue on their way. To me right now though, it marks the end of Sicily and the beginning of Calabria and the rest of Italy.
At one point in my education I had five roommates, all from Calabria, all ear-nose-throat docs in training. Like most southerners that study away up north, they always returned to our student apartment with boxes and boxes of foods and wines from home. They brought loaves of gray-crumbed and black-crusted bread the size of car tires, which lasted for weeks. They brought entire cases of reused Peroni bottles filled with thin and watery tomato sauce. And they brought reused water bottles of red wine, which they loved and would pour with great ceremony on special occasions. And I was always eager to drink their wine with them, even if it seemed more like fermented prune juice… that had been left open for a week. It was Cirò, and to me it tasted like wine made by teenagers, prisoners or castaways, a beverage that was technically wine, but made under the most impromptu and desperate of circumstances.
And Cirò is where I am now, a city on the west coast of Calabria, on the Ionian sea, about half way up the inside of the ‘toe’. Taking the time and care to really taste the wines here (versus just assuming that I already knew the wines of Cirò), and now talking with the local wine makers, first-hand, I’m learning that the wines of Cirò really began to blossom when you could begin to taste what was under the all that oxidised prune juice.
The natural progression is always the same, says Valentino Zito, owner of Vinicola Zito, here in Cirò Marina. First the technology changes. Then wine makers decide to put pressure on the board. Then the discipline changes. Then the technology changes again and more changes come, but always slowly, more slowly than any of us would like.
I had asked him about the changes in Cirò, a wine so famous in Calabria as to be thought of as the wine of the region, a part of Italy where nearly everyone you meet still makes his own wine and is eager for you to try it * (See below).
Valentino was referring to the relationship wine-makers have with the DOC, or board that oversees who can and can’t label their wines as DOC, or as a ‘typical’ wine from that region, a title that always implies more that it states.
About ten years ago they changed the laws (the DOC laws, often referred to as ‘the discipline’, or the standards a winery must follow in order to sell wine under that region’s name, i.e. Chianti, i.e., which grapes may be use, the min-max for sugar levels at harvest, how long the juice stays in contact with the skins, the fermentation length, the time in oak, the time in a bottle before release, etc). And since those changes, Cirò has become a much lighter, less cooked wine. We refrigerate now, he says, pointing to the thick belts that ring his stainless-steel fermentation tanks. We harvest very late, often going into October (nearly two months after the vast majority of southern wine producers harvest), so the weather is already cooler. We water-cool the fermentation tanks and the wines really benefit from it. A lot, he adds, perhaps remembering how his wines used to taste (He actually says, assai, the southern slang for ‘a whole hell of a lot’, which makes a strong impression, the little southern boy that grew into a man that really cares about the wine he makes.)
In tasting the wines of Cirò, it’s the lightness, the savouriness that surprises me, as all the reds I know from here in Southern Italy are all high-alcohol powerhouses, jammy, fruity and most as thick as motor oil. That a spicy and light and almost pinot noir model exists, makes southern wine seem all the more varied.
How much do you sell abroad, I ask.
You can find Cirò all over the world, he says, but we’re having problems really penetrating the North American market, as our wines are so light in colour, and spicy versus fruity, the way North Americans like their wine.
Does that bother you?
Not at all. We’re in the process of changing the discipline, to be able to add 20% of other grapes to classic Cirò rosso. We’ll likely be adding 20% Nero d’Avola, to add colour and fruitiness.
Mondo vino, I ask, referring to the film, a cult favourite of most wine makers I know, the film’s crux that American taste is destroying diversity in the world’s wine.
No, it’s not like that. Cirò makes perfect sense here in Calabria, in that it’s a light and spicy wine to go with our hearty fish and vegetable dishes, especially in the warmer months, when you wouldn’t want a heavy behemoth. But that’s locally. You drink local wine differently than you do the kind you import.
What do you really, really think of gaglioppo, the grape used to make Cirò rosso?
I think its time has come. It’s a very old grape, most likely Italy’s oldest. I think that with today’s new technology Cirò is one of most interesting wines in Italy, even if the reputation hasn’t caught up with the quality…
….Verus something like Pinot Grigio, where the quality hasn’t kept up with the reputation. It’s become trendy without meriting it.
Exactly. I don’t feel that way about Cirò, and I don’t even mean my Cirò, but the general state of wine-making here. You can’t trust me, I love my own wines. But let’s put it this way, I think most wine drinkers outside of Italy would get even more pleasure from their Italian wine, drinking even my competitors’ wine, rather than a lot of the rest of the stuff exported from Italy… at 5 times the price.
We chatted for an hour or so and I thanked him and as we exchanged contact info, he loaded up my front bicycle basket with his Cirò classico superiore. Within minutes of being back on my bike, it started to rain and I ended up opening a bottle, alongside a bottle of Librandi’s Magno Megonio, (their winery is just up the street and I did a tasting there just a few hours afterward), a 100% magliocco, a southern grape I’d never even tried before. I drank the wines with some chain-smoking Rumanian teenagers, who found the fact that I both owned my own business AND still preferred to travel Italy by bicycle, completely incongruent facts. I continued on up Calabria’s Ionian coast, thinking that Southern wine makers are among the most generous people I’ve ever met, in every sense. I thought about Valentino as he lingered to talk with me, clearly not eager to climb back onto his tiny fork lift, to hoist more boxes of wine, to do all of the constant hard work involved in making wine. As I rode away, I watched him switch the thing into gear, me thinking that wine for a man like Valentino will always be something more than the thing you order in bars when you’re tired of gin and tonic.
*A note on accepting any of the frequent invitations to taste someone’s homemade wine in Calabria: Learn to smile politely and make some pleasant, slightly vague comments such as, ‘Sa proprio del sole’, or ‘You can really taste the sun’ is a good one. ‘Andrebbe bene con qualche tipico piatto piccante’, or ‘this would go well with a spicy, local dish’, meaning that you’d hope to burn out your taste buds before tasting this kind of wine again. The real lesson though, of slow travel in Calabria is the profound contrast between such nice, generous and eager people and how little they have, compared to the rest of Italy.
I’ve been on the island of Lipari for the last three days, resting up a bit, and passing Easter weekend in familiar surroundings. I rented a little room with a 4th-story terrace, and a kitchen, and I’ve been cooking again, with intermittent access (it’s the holy weekend) to markets and wine shops, many still peopled with the same folks I got to know when I passed four months here, almost 15 years ago.
There is nothing like it in the world, says Gilda, the owner of the place I’m staying. First the Madonna comes out. Then Baby Jesus. Then they are brought together and they kiss and then a million white doves are released and there are fireworks. Her eyes start to tear up. Nothing like it in the world.
Sounds pagan, I said. Why would Jesus and his mother kiss?
No, it’s Christian, she says, as if that explains it.
Still tender- and let’s just say ‘walking a lot like John Wayne’- from bicycling not only the height but also the width of Sicily, I headed for the marina corta Easter morning to see this festival, where hundreds of locals gathered to see the procession, quite literally all in their Sunday best. I couldn’t have been more right about the festivals pagan origins. And being right is such a rare feeling for me that I tried to milk it all morning long.
A life-sized Madonna was carried out of the duomo and shouldered down the island’s main street. A life-size statue of Jesus came down the corso as well (fully grown, although Jesus is often referred to as being a baby in Italian, even when fully adult). They met to sombre, marching band music and through some serious bowing and finagling, the carriers are able to get the two statues to ‘kiss’, just as fifty pigeons are released, and fireworks go off over the harbour. This of course scares the just-released birds, who then fly into open windows, light poles and just about everything else as they try to flee. I come to the realisation that, fireworks in the day time are really just expensive fire crackers in the air. I think the birds would agree. And regarding the festival, it’s difficult to believe that even the most fervent non-liparota catholic would see the festival for what is: the modern proof of the historical swapping of religious images without the swapping of new content. It’s a move from pagan fertility rites to the more modern Christianity, only with fireworks, the release of wildlife and simulated oedipal-necking, you know, that old chestnut.
I had reserved a table in the harbour right after the festival and had Easter lunch just meters away. I lingered over lunch, almost into dinner, nursing a bottle of Donna Fugata’s Tancredi until the waiters themselves sat down. It was nice not to ride a bike. Really nice.
And anyway, I came to Lipari to relax as I’ve said, but I also came to get a handle on Malvasia delle Lipari, a yellow, thick, sickly sweet dessert wine that is very expensive. However, perhaps, unlike last time I spent any real time here, I could actually learn to appreciate it, as one of the great dessert wines of the world. I bought a bottle made by Salvatore, the old geezer that makes my morning coffee- came in a glass Fiuggi water bottle, a reused beer cap secured in place with scotch tape (1 litre, 15 Euro). I bought a bottle of Hauner from the grocery store here, a fancy-smancy-packaged bottle (375ml, 18 Euro) and a bottle of Florio’s Passito, just for kicks (375 ml, 28 Euro). I tasted them all, side by side, from a Nutella jar/wine glass on my terrace, just before dinner last night. (It would certainly boggle the foreign mind to comprehend the quantity of wine consumed from old Nutella jars in Italy).
Here is what I learned. Dessert wines are mostly wasted on me, mostly because of all the sugar. The tasting was not unlike trying to drink pure honey and determine what sort of flower the bees ate. I could do it, but the overall effect put my jaw on edge. I felt a coating on my teeth. My saliva glands started to overproduce, perhaps trying to thin the think syrups. Asking around, and from my reading, I was supposed to find honey, flowers, jasmine, and orange blossoms. What I tasted was, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, honey, oak (in the Hauner and Florio), sugar and then maybe some orange blossoms, but only if I was really stretching. Further, for this kind of money, I could have had some damn fine wine, which I would have really appreciated, rather than drinking pure honey, looking for some hint of that orange syrup they use to make the sinister-sounding ‘orange drink’.
I packaged up the remainders of the bottles and gave them to my landlord, who tore into Salvatore’s right away, pronouncing it ‘buona’. I had dinner on the terrace tonight, a simple meal that to me really celebrates Sicilian island life: Pasta with a caper and green-olive pesto, pan-seared lamb with fresh herbs I had gathered and fresh artichokes, just sautéed. I rammed a pack of black-out candles into spent wine bottles and felt like a graduate student again, living meagrely but impressed with myself for making the most with what I had. A lot like island people themselves, however pagan in origin.
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Like a serious of long, sensual whispers, the brown and tan cattails that line the road outside of Trapani go on for hours, their sighing sounds seem to almost sizzle in the late afternoon as I near the old city, the shimmering salt pools perhaps one of the most welcoming sites I’ve ever seen. They seem imaginary, like some sales lot for unsold lakes, stacked side by side, the shores between them just thin strips of land.
The city of Trapani is hauntingly beautiful as well, the centre more European than Sicilian, more regal than you might expect from a city that has made its name by pulling salt from the sea using only the strong winds and sun, and then using that salt to dry and preserve food, long before refrigeration, canning and trucking changed everything.
What’s endearing, and maybe even promising, is how intact the cuisine still is even today, so little changed by tourism, refrigeration and more to the point, the bulldozing effects of ‘modern tastes’ (the thing about cuisine is that once it’s gone, it’s gone). Folks here still seem to prefer dried tuna to fresh, you find salt-cured capers and olives everywhere in the food and the pasta shape of choice is oddly called fusilli, even though they are fresh and look like tightly-curled telephone cords. Even in the better restaurants, my vegetables arrive with the tell-tale marks of the serrated-tooth scrapes of a common, plastic-handled table knife, a sign that things are still cut against the thumb rather than on a chopping board. Fish-based couscous is everywhere, and the desserts are so sweet that they make my teeth hurt just thinking about them: Trapani’s souvenirs from its Phoenician past. Taken together, the cooking here feels like it’s still ‘of a place’, something you find less and less, even in Italy.
Wobbling on my bike on the way out of town- the screaming winds ripping past my ears, and the sun burrowing into the back of my salty neck, I think about my school’s working definition of the word ‘cuisine’- how a people solved scarcity as a group over time ’- and it occurs to me that that pertains to Trapani itself as well. Harnessing their only resources, the sea, the famously-ripping wind, the cruel, bleaching almost-African sun and generation after generation of aching backs and blistered fingers, i trapanesi built a way of life and even a remarkable city together, which their food still reflects, beautifully. As I teeter along the white-capped and breaking sea, I think about everything we have in Italy today, and how little of it we actually earned ourselves.
