This text is part of the special book Plaisirs
This region of southeastern Italy appeals to food lovers of everything: good food, good wines, beauty.
It is a promise of picturesque and wild beaches. feasts and dolcissima vita. She is Puglia, the Italian region that corresponds to the heel of the boot. A corner of the country bathed by two seas: the Adriatic to the east, the Ionian to the west. An end of the world shaped by fear and the wind.
From these seas came so many conquerors… The Greeks. The normands. The Ottomans. To protect themselves from it, the villages of the coast have curled up behind the walls of impressive fortresses and those of the hinterland have become labyrinths. Today, it is these same villages, where a thousand alleyways wind, that amaze us. We venture there to track down the typical vestiges of past civilizations and archlocal culinary specialties to put in our mouths.
Invariably, these specialties will come from a cuisine casarecciahomemade, nourished by the traditions of the campaigned and backyard fricotes.
Thus, in the medieval city of Bari, the capital of the region, mamas make orecchiette, ear-shaped pasta, in front of their house and put them to dry in the sun on large racks. Recipe ? “Wheat semolina, hot water and years of practice!” says Angela Lastella, a grandmother who learned the technique from her mother at the age of seven, who herself inherited it from her mother and so on since Methuselah.
Behind her micro-counter, here is Maria plunging bricks of polenta — they look like sponges — into a pot of boiling oil. At aperitif time, we devour our sgagliozze before deciding where to sit. On the restaurant menu: burrata (local cheese par excellence), fried octopus, orecchiette in meat sauce, rice with mussels and potatoes (a relative of paella), all preceded by taralliwhite wine rusks that would have been born in the… XVe century, in times of famine. Notice to grazers: salads are scarce!
A pantry in the valley
Not far from Bari, on the coast, Monopoli is another of those fabulous towns with tower houses and churches far too rich to have been charitable with anyone. It is also a perfect base camp from which to explore the land of olive oil and wine: the Itria Valley.
And off we go for a rural tour with guide Alessandro Perrone, employed by the Canadian company ToursByLocals. Between orchards and vineyards arise masseriefortified farms, and trulli, round dry stone dwellings with conical roofs where agricultural workers once lived. Straight ahead, Mr. Perrone points towards an ocean of olive trees, veritable living sculptures.
“Some of these monumental trees are thousands of years old! he exclaims. He specifies that the region has 60 million and that with their olives, we produce 40% of the oil of the country and 10% of that of the world. Let’s hope that the invincible bacterium that has been killing the trees of Salento for a decade, Xyllela fastidiosadoes not rise so far.
We then disembark at Alberobello. The sight of some 1,500 trulli, these cabins with dry stone walls and dome listed as World Heritage by UNESCO, is striking. At the bend of an alley in the Aia Piccola district, the sweet smell of figs leads us to the Giardino di Anna, where the blazing sun is just in the process of candying these fruits, stuffed with almonds.
Rising above the vineyards, the beautiful perched village of Locorotondo invites you to taste wines made from primitivo (zinfandel) and minutolo, a white grape that gives a thirst-quenching wine with citrus aromas.
Finally, in Ostuni, you get lost in steep alleys before arriving at Typicus. Beautiful to bite into, this shop brings together the best olive oils in the region, which you can taste, as well as the local limoncello, the Rosolio di quattro agrumi.
Puglia naked
The further south you go, the more the olive groves are decimated. It’s a bit sad, but the eye gets used to it, piano, piano, until the beauty of Salento takes over again. That of Lecce, a southern Florence, dotted with Baroque splendors in blond stone and 2000-year-old Roman remains. That of Otranto, to the far east, a gust of wind from the Balkans.
Otranto is downright spectacular. It twists in the shade of walls, ramparts and the most beautiful of Charles V’s castles.
On that day, in a cathedral whose floor is covered with a thousand-year-old mosaic, a high mass is celebrated to commemorate the 800 victims of the siege of the city by the Turks in 1480. In the process, the chapel which exposes their bones in high windows is open to the faithful, who rush there. But after this memento morithis reminder of our mortality, basta! We’ll wrap it all up until next year. And make way for the party, the fireworks, the puccia con pezzetti di cavallo (round bun topped with horse meat), with good wine. Make way for life!