There is always something of the thrill and bafflement of watching a magician in witnessing skilled people going about their business with effortless dexterity. The ladies took about five seconds to make each fusillo with easy nonchalance, hands moving with mesmerising assurance. Then came the hi-tech bit. The fusilli were spread out on fine-mesh drying racks with wooden frames, stacked on top of one another and then stacked on a trolley so that they could be popped into a special, state-of-the-art, computer-controlled drying chamber. Most were turned into pastasciutta, dry pasta of the kind you find in cellophane packets, and packed for sale. Some were kept undried for sale in Signora Golosa’s shop in Scalea. She explained that many women still make fusilli or maccheroni at home for special occasions, but that this was the only hands-on production line, as it were, doing the artisanal business.
For once the sun shone, the birds sang and God was in his heaven. On such days voyaging by scooter was full of joy. The road unravelled pleasantly beneath Ginger’s wheels. I could feel the warmth of the sun on my arms and back, and smelled the sweet freshness of spring leaf and flower. I revelled in the sense of freedom, and as I fancied taking this byway or that, why then, I did so, without the slightest concern. B roads, C roads and even, on occasion, tracks lured me down them. So I wove my way out of Calabria and into Basilicata.
Even for a part of the world where poverty is endemic, Basilicata, or Lucania as it was known until quite recently, is poor. Its glory days had passed with Magna Graecia, 3,000 years ago. Physical isolation, malaria, cholera and earthquakes kept the region in thrall until the 1960s. Its food – pork, lamb, kid, bread, pasta, pulses, salt cod – is specified by poverty, by the mountains that made up the greater part of the province, and by the seas that fringed it to the east and west. On the western side, up which I was travelling, the mountains end in gigantic natural flying buttresses, which drop vertically for a couple of hundred metres to the aquamarine sea. The road followed the line of the buttresses, apparently tacked on to them like a string of beads on the backside of an elephant.
Presently, at Marina di Maratea, I passed a scruffy side road with a battered handwritten sign that read ‘Al Mare’. Why not? I thought. It was a day to be beside the seaside. We turned off, Ginger and I, bounced down the track, passed a trattoria, and went over the coastal railway line to a small headland covered in umbrella pines and that characteristic Mediterranean green-grey scrub of broom, juniper and laurel. On either side of the headland were two small pebble-beached coves, apparently deserted.
Parking Ginger in the shade, I scrambled down to the further of the two coves. The sun winked and twinkled on the scarcely moving water. The harsh, ammoniac smell of rotting seaweed and flotsam mixed with fragrance of thyme and the spicy bush growing on and around the walls of the cove. The sea bed wobbled and rippled through the lapis lazuli water. I had been following the line of the Tyrrhenian Sea all these weeks and not so much as put a toe into it. It seemed silly not to have a little paddle.
I took off my boots and socks and rolled up my trousers. The water was pleasantly cool. The reflected sunlight shifted easily over the surface of the rocks. The winking light off the sea was mesmerising. Well, why not have a swim? Checking the high ground for potential voyeurs, I stripped to my underpants and slipped into the water. It was gently refreshing, and the sun was warm on my head. I paddled round and then eased myself out on to a rock and lay like a fat, white seal in the sun. And then the pagan spirit of the place took hold and I shed the last vestiges of civilisation and swam naked.
This is it, I thought. This is how I had imagined it would be.
That night, over an indifferent dinner at La Locanda delle Donne Monache – the Locanda of the Nuns – a suave hostelry made over with glossy, Provençal-style rusticity, in Maratea, I finally finished Old Calabria by Norman Douglas. Douglas’s voice had kept me company, chattering away incessantly during solitary meals, mornings and that last half hour before lights out. And what an invariably diverting, amusing, learned, kindly voice it was.
It was instructive to contrast the vision of Old Calabria with that of another classic record of life in southern Italy, Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi. Although Levi’s record, based on his experiences as a political exile to two remote Calabrian villages between 1939 and 1942, post-dates Douglas’s by twenty or so years, and the part of southern Italy about which he wrote was a little to the north of that which Douglas explored, the life they both describe cannot have differed very much in essence. Levi saw it as a northern Italian intellectual, a humanist and a doctor. For him, the closeness to nature was little different from that of beasts, and his doctor’s training led him to record the physical and social effects of repression, exploitation and poverty with rather less gloss than Douglas, essentially a classicist, was wont to do. It seems probable that the reality lay closer to Levi’s grim record than to Douglas’s cheery travelogue.
The fact is that the life of the southern peasantry has always been viciously hard. Aside from social neglect, political corruption, the tradition of latifundia and criminal exploitation, much of the landscape is still guaranteed to immure those who live there in peasant poverty. There are only small areas of cultivatable land, and which are not productive on any scale that is meaningful in modern agroindustry. It was not until the agrarian reforms of the 1960s that many agricultural labourers had any rights at all, let alone the right to own land. And even then the land that became available was, on the whole, so poor as to be unable to support anything other than the basic family unit, and then only with incredible labour. It is small wonder that there was a massive migration from the south. Between 1946 and 1957, more than two million people emigrated to the Americas and northern Europe, and between 1951 and 1971 a further nine million were involved in inter-regional migration, taking with them the foods of their own localities.
While some aspects of rural life have changed since the 1960s, social and cultural attitudes have remained generally conservative. That conservatism, however, has been instrumental in producing food of unmatched flavour and quality. It is one of the abiding ironies of southern Italy that the beauty of the materials, the artisanal ricottas and pecorinos, soppressate, extra-virgin olive oils, particular wheats, wild salads, mountain lamb and goat, so appreciated by visitors passing though, so sought after by buyers for the chrome and plate-glass food emporia in London, New York and Tokyo, are sustained by a resolutely peasant underclass.
On the one hand, a vocal, gastronomically enfranchised élite decry the globalisation and homogenisation of food cultures. On the other, they – and we – fail to recognise the true cost of keeping traditional, indigenous cultures alive to the people who carry the burden of maintaining them. We endorse labour and indignity that we would not tolerate in our own lives. As a tourist, it is easy to escape from such things. It is in the nature of tourism to seek pleasure, not truth; to look for beauty, not mundanity.
I took to Sapri after the faux rusticity of Maratea. It was another coastal town, just over the border in Campania, on the Golfo di Policastro. It was a workaday kind of place, without pretension but with a proper human scale, agreeable, getting on with the business of life, with a small port, a decent market and at least one very good restaurant.
It seemed to be the rule in southern Italy that the showier the restaurant, the worse the food; the better the shop, or, by and large, the trattoria and even ristorante, the less the exterior display. Southern Italians seemed to reserve display for personal glory in the form of clothes or cars, but when it came to architecture, public design, shop fronts, advertising, window dressing – well, forget it. But walk past an unremarkable doorway, peer into the shaded interior beyond, and suddenly there was a huge space hanging with salamis, or a long, immaculately clean, neatly laid-out butcher’s display, or boxes of fruit and vegetables stacked up, propped to present their wares to passing trade.
The Cantina Mustozza was one of these modest establishments. It had a slightly worn, warm, purposeful air. I knew that I was there to eat.
The restaurant was manned by an immensely conversational young man, and by his mother, who, after surveying the tables filling up, headed for the kitchen. When it came to my turn