Day 4 Thursday
After breakfast we all gathered together in the hotel lobby,
and trooped off to the Testaccio
again. This region is so-called because
there was a giant man-made hill of old broken oil and wine amphora here. In fact now, city planners and archeologists
have made this into a small park. This
was an undeveloped area in the late 19th century, and Mussolini
turned it into the Roman ‘Back of the Yards’.
He built a large slaughterhouse area, and a lot of low income
housing. The slaughterhouse was
abandoned for years at the end of the 20th century, but it became
such an eyesore / drug hangout that eventually all of the drifters and grifters
were kicked out, and they have repurposed the slaughterhouse as a museum/public
space/and part of Roma
Tre University. Meanwhile, all of the low income housing apartments have
been revamped (and some combined into larger spaces), and now this is a solidly
middle to upper middle class area. Of
course, everyone still uses the area for street cred, just as someone from NY
would say they are from Brooklyn, or in Chicago, Bucktown.
Anyway, we meet Katie and her friend Lydia in the Piazza dei Testaccio, which was bustling with school children at recess. In the evening it’s full of families, and later at night by young people. Katie leads us to the new covered marketplace. This was built 20-30 years ago. It has many food stalls, but to be economic there is a little bit of everything for sale here - - clothes, leather goods, a hair salon. The nearby university gives the food vendors a lot of traffic during the day, and take away food has become increasingly popular.
Next we sampled some flat meatball things. This dish is pretty recent (the last 30
years) and was started up by a retired butcher who did not have a cooked food
license (these licenses are like NYC taxi medallions). However, his food was so popular that he was
eventually granted one. We watched him
making a brisket sandwich - - true Italian Italian beef.
Afterwards we had some smoked goat cheese paired with some regional natural wines. Finished with the market, we went into the repurposed slaughterhouse area for a quick look around. Katie had us walk around Testaccio a bit to see some artwork - - the famous she-wolf of Rome as painted by the Belgian graffitist/muralist ROA. She looks rabid and ready to destroy the city - - this was painted when Italy changed from the Lira to the Euro, and everything suddenly doubled in price.
We
walked past a modern church built to look like it was from the early
Renaissance, and then headed over to Trapizzino
for one of their World Famous pizza pitas, invented about ten years ago. I had a meatball, and Cindy had oxtail. There are a lot flavors, including tongue in green sauce, but neither of us where feeling adventurous.
After this sandwich we went to Linari for coffee and pastries.
This was the end of our time with Katie. We had the rest of the afternoon free. Cindy wanted to go to a the Montemartini museum,
which sounded really interesting, but it was a walk opposite the direction of
our hotel, plus, our tickets to the Barberini also gave us access to the Palazzo Corsini,
near to our hotel (and I was a bit tired), so I forced our hand to go there. This was a bit of a disappointment - - why
don’t I always listen to Cindy. This was
a nice small museum, but filled with lesser works- - all of the good stuff was
on loan somewhere else, or at the Barberini!
Afterwards we stopped for an afternoon gelato of chocolate spiked with lapsang souchong tea, and another which was ginger, honey, and chestnut.
Chiara took us for cocktails and antipasti instead of a
dinner on our last night in Rome. We
went to the Ferrara Enoteca. This is in a building from the 1200s that
spent some time as a convent and also (I think) as a prison - - or are they the
same thing? Anyway, as well as seeing
some old wooden timbers, we also went down into the wine vault, which was big
room underground. We bread flavored with charcoal, a salume plate, fried
polenta, batter fried cheese and batter fried vegetables.
It was raining on the way back to the hotel, but we stopped
for one last gelato – I had pumpkin with caramelized pumpkin brittle, and a
little whipped cream, but I don’t recall what Cindy had.
Day 5 Friday
This was the rainiest day of our trip - - lucky that it was
the longest (too long) travel day. Before
leaving Rome, Cindy and I visited a nice grocery store that
specialized in local products, especially organic foods. They had a lot of candy and tea also. We bought some licorice as well as some other
food things.
We assembled in the hotel lobby for a 10 am touring bus that took us to the outskirts of Naples and then Bari. This was not managed well - - originally the tour itinerary had us taking an express train from Rome to Bari, about 4-5 hours travel time. I’m not sure why this was changed. The bus left late; about 10:30, and took over an hour to get out of Rome.
The masseria is a converted old stone keep/fortified farmhouse in the middle of olive and wine groves. The owners or overseers would live on the top floors and look out over the fields to make sure the work was getting done. Half of the ground floor was used as a stable.
I’m sure earlier in
the year it would be very charming, but the stone rooms are cold in late
November, and it got dark at 4:30 pm. If
you wanted to go to Bari at night, it would be a 30 minute taxi ride costing
about 70 Euro. No one bothered. Anyway, we schlepped our luggage up to the
rooms (ours was on the third floor, and you had to walk across an exposed roof
to get to it), and then went downstairs for some cocktails and to meet up with
Dan Pashman before dinner. I was a bit late to this get together, because I had
to explain to the front desk that the brass doorknob had come out of the door
that gave us access to the rooftop passage!
We went up to the room, and no although we turned up the
forced air flow heater the room was shivery.
Neither of us wanted to get out of bed the next morning, but hail on the
roof woke us up!
Day 6 Saturday
After a breakfast buffet, we got into a large van and drove
into Bari, where we met up with Massimo
Bruno. He explains that although
there is shipping and some industry around Bari (mostly textiles) there is also
a lot of agriculture. Puglia is known as
the ‘table’ of Italy because it is so flat, but also because it is a very rich
agricultural area with table grapes, wine grapes, olives, fruit trees and durum
wheat. Our first stop is at Paneficio
Montecristo to get some focaccia
- - they make it by putting the bread on oiled sheet and baking/frying it. It’s
topped by tomatoes which caramelize while roasting in the oven, and super
greasy. Wonderful! We also get some
small panzerotti which
are like small empanadas or calzones.
This was filled with cheese and tomato sauce and you had to eat it with
a hinge at your hip to prevent spillage onto your clothing. I preferred the focaccia (we actually saved a
number of pieces that people (including us) had for dinner that evening). The food is even better because the bakery is
right up on the Adriatic, so we can eat while looking up and down the rocky
coastline (all of the good beaches are on the Ionian coast in the instep).
Next we drove to the second restaurant, Ghiotto Panzerotto. To get there we drive through much of the working neighborhoods of Bari, with endless blocks of apartments. The restaurant is pretty packed when we arrive (around 2- 2:30), and filled with a much younger crowd, but they are all gone by the time that we finish. Again, we try the assassina, but we also have assassina with broccoli rabe, and some chicken wings with a corn bread crust.
Afterwards we went to Polignano a Mare, a suburb on the southern outskirts of Bari. This old town is full of B&Bs, with a breathtaking view of the Lama Monochile beach, which reminded me a bit of Positano. This area is mobbed with tourists in the summer. There is a statue of Domenico Modugno atop of the beach. This is Polignano’s favorite son - - the composer of Volare, movie star, and later an Italian MP.
We drove back to the masseria in the dark, and as mentioned before, had some leftover focaccia for dinner!
Day 7 Sunday
We left early from the masseria - - around 8 am, so the
hotel had prepared little plastic bags with treats in them that were left in
our room the evening before (breakfast did not begin until 7:45). There were some tangerines, a peach juice box,
some cookies and crackers, and a hard-boiled egg. I think we were all a bit wary of an egg that
had been left to sit at room temperature for who knows how many hours (even
though room temperature was probably under around 60); I don’t know if anyone
ate their egg. We had some of this food
on our 90 minute bus ride to Lecce,
but other bits we saved for the end of our trip.
The drive to Lecce was uneventful. We were on our way to a winery, but we took a pit stop in Copertino to visit a pastry shop, caffe 900, and sample pasticciotti, a pastry filled with custard or egg cream. The pastry shop had a lot of flavors, and of course many of us wanted coffee as well as a bathroom break, so we were late for our meet up at the winery with Silvestro Silvestori.
Silvestro is the head of a cooking school in Lecce, the Awaiting Table, and has done a lot to promote southeastern Italian food and culture. When we arrive at the Marulli winery he barrels out the door along with two of the winery employees, Vito and Rico. Vito is the heir to the winery, I think Rico is his cousin or nephew, but Rico has much better English. The three of them pop into a car with Dan, and we follow them to the outskirts of town into the vineyard.
Obviously, most of the wine has American root stock with grafts (mostly primitivo (Zinfandel) and negroamaro (which either mean black and bitter, or black and black; there is some controversy whether the amaro is derived from Latin or Greek), but they are experimenting with old European roots that survived in South America, as well as near natural wine (not as crazy as what we had in Strasbourg this summer). The vineyards look like vineyards. After listening to Rico, with occasional additional explanations by Silvestro, we head back to the winery for a tasting.
They give us three different rose wines (maybe the most common type of wine produced here?) along with some
bread and olives. They taste fine, but I like reds more. They do the fermentation in some steel vats,
but they also have old cement tanks that they use for their higher end
wines. However, for every day table
wine, you can also bring a large bottle and use a gas station hose to fill it
up for a few euros per liter!
After the tasting we drive back to Lecce, where Silvestro walks around town. Everything is constructed out of soft sandstone, and there is some very intricate carving. Prior to the Spanish Inquisition Lecce had a very large Jewish population (may be up to 40%!), but they all left for the less legally encumbered Arab world (like Thessaloniki). There is a Jewish Museum; however. Anyway, the food culture here is very hyper local. There is no ground water (most of modern agriculture in the area is from tapping underground aquifers). Because of the lack of water, there was little animal husbandry in olden times, and the Puglians developed a very vegetable forward diet - - little wheat flour, little dairy as well.
After our jaunt around the city center, we end up at Silvestro’s home which is also his cooking school.
We make pasta which
is water, and about 4 parts of durum semolina to 1 part barley flour. After mixing, kneading, and rolling the dough,
we cut it into pieces about the size of a stick of gum. Some are going to be fried and used as
garnish, but the rest will be tossed in a soup that is mostly chick peas with
carrots and onions (the carrots and onions are strained out) This is called cicero
e tria. We also thinly slice fennel,
including the fronds, which is dressed with oil, vinegar and salt. We cut up wedges of cabbage which is grilled. Silvestro has already prepared another local
dish, a fava puree (like hummus) with chicory, known as fave e cicoria. There are also roasted carrots and peppers. For dessert he serves us roasted chestnuts
(we scored the nuts earlier) and tangerines.
Of course, all of this is eaten with generous helpings of wine and
locally pressed olive oil. Silvestro says these high quality oils should be
kept on the table and used as a garnish, not for cooking. They were delicious.
Next: On our own again in Alberobello and Matera.
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