With a tentative skitter and then a wild leap like an agitated kangaroo, it was up, up and away, finally, at last, at very long last. The open road lay before me, new horizons rushed to meet me, a sense of adventure embraced me. It was ‘the blithesome step forward … out of the old life into the new’, as the Wayfaring Rat put it in The Wind in the Willows.
The sun shone for the first time. The road ran along the edge of the coast. To my right the land rose steeply to the thickly wooded slopes of the Aspromonte. To my left the sea twinkled below. I saw a traditional swordfishing boat, with its disproportionately high mast at least twenty metres tall with a crow’s nest at the top, from which to spy out for fish, and its long, needle prow, thirty metres at least, from which to harpoon them. It was a detail from another age.
I roared up hill and drifted down dale. I sped round the odd pothole. I didn’t feel frightened. I didn’t panic. I didn’t feel out of control. I didn’t feel that I couldn’t cope. The scooter made a noise like a demented gnat, particularly going uphill. So long as the demented gnat sound didn’t drive me bonkers, and the machine could take the strain, everything would be fine.
Just beyond Nicotera, I sat in an olive grove and lunched on bread, salami, tomatoes and pecorino. The grove was full of borage, butterflies and light. The air was warm and fragrant. This was all right, I thought, liberty, lunch and loafing.
I looked out over the town back towards the Golfo di Gioia beyond. From up here the coastline was still seductively beautiful and romantic, in spite of haphazard development and container ports. Tankers, container ships and tramp steamers lay anchored in the bay of Gioia Tauro, larger versions of the Phoenician and Roman galleys, and the later Venetian and Genoese merchant ships that had once anchored there. The movement of boats is dictated by history. Present trade follows the pattern of past trade. Ships sail to and from the same safe havens, and follow the same invisible paths, century by century.
The occasional car ground past on the road. My scooter was still, its demented gnat noise stopped for a while. Its continuous state of high-pitched excitement, particularly going uphill, put me in mind of a then well-known DJ and media personality known as Ginger, and so Ginger it became. I grew dozy and stretched out on the ground.
Presently I was accosted by a toothless gnome in a peaked cap. He was the brother of the owner of the olive grove, he said, and just wanted to check that there wasn’t a dead body on family property, as if dead bodies were quite a regular occurrence.
I explained that I was having a picnic.
‘Ai, mangia,’ he said in a singing tone, giving a little chopping movement with his hand against his tummy. ‘Va bene. Buon appetito.’
Presently I roused myself from my reveries, and took myself across the hilly neck of the Capo Vaticano, past olive and citrus groves and herds of sheep minded by shepherds with dogs the size of wolves, towards Vibo Valentia and Pizzo.
While Calabria is rich enough in history, much of it soaked in blood, it seemed to be short on cultural artefacts and remains. War and earthquakes had destroyed most of them. However, Vibo Valentia – Hipponium to the Greeks, an ‘illustre et nobile municipium’, according to Cicero – had, it seemed, been spared the general wastage and was packed with churches and pictures of note.
There was, said the guides, the church of San Leoluca with ‘extremely fine stucco work’, ‘a superb marble group of the Madonna between St John the Evangelist and the Magdalene (notice the bas-reliefs around the bases)’ and a Madonna and Child attributed to Girolamo Santacroce. There was the thirteenth-century church of Rosario with a ‘strange baroque pulpit’, and the church of San Michele, ‘an exquisite little Renaissance church … with a fine but somewhat overshadowing campanile of 1671’.
I can testify to the quality of the campanile, and, indeed, to the classical elegance and beauty of the outside of San Michele, but of the rest – nothing. Every church I passed that wasn’t being done up with EC grants was shut. I banged on doors. I pushed. I prayed. No good. So, no strange baroque pulpit, no Madonna and Child attributed to Girolamo Santacroce, no stucco work, no bas-reliefs. So much for higher culture.
But who needs higher culture when agriculture is to hand? Quite by accident, I came across an unheralded market of dazzling variety. Here were broad beans, ready podded, like tiny green opals; fat, busty fennels; early season artichokes piled in spiky ziggurats; boxes of mixed cicorie selvatiche, bitter wild salad leaves; a great log of tuna, its flesh purple/carmine; and tiny red rock mullet, neatly laid out like a pattern in a kaleidoscope.
The two cheery brothers with blood-stained hands who ran the Macelleria del Mercato treated me to ’nduja vibonese, a local variant on one of the classic pig products of Calabria: a creamy, fiery sausage of pork and peperoncino or chilli, in this case liberally laced with fennel seed. It was eaten, they said, with raw broad beans, bread and wine. One of the brothers then carved me a long, thin slice of zingirole, the brawn of Vibo, from a large bowl, the inside of which was mottled with a blue, green and cream swirled glaze, like sunlight shining through sea water in a rock pool. Curls and whorls of ears, snout and other odds and ends were set in a pale amber jelly. The zingirole had a dainty, delicate flavour and a gently chewy character. They made zingirole only in winter, he explained, when the pigs were in the right condition. It wasn’t suitable for hot weather. This was the last of the season.
The pig has an almost sacred place in the food chain in southern Italy. Pig-loving traditions of Italy go back to the earliest times. The Romans, Martial and Cicero, recorded their partiality for pork products, especially those of Lucania, the modern Basilicata, a little to the north of Vibo; the omnipresent luganica is a descendant of that sausage. Both Norman Douglas in Old Calabria and Carlo Levi in Christ Stopped at Eboli write of the reverence with which pigs were treated, observing how they had the run of villages, and, in many cases, houses as well, until the day of retribution, of course. It was still true in Calabria that pigs enjoyed wide appreciation, even if they didn’t have the freedom of the houses and village streets in the way that they used to.
In common with most of Italy, Calabria is home to a bewildering diversity of salumi, cured pork products – capocollo, soppressata, ’nduja, ’nnuglia, frittuli, salato, scarafogli and spianata calabrese, to name but a few. These, in turn, generate their own multifarious families through geographical associations. So Spilinga and Poro are famous for their ’nduja, Cosenza for its frittuli, Acri for its salsiccia. Each is made with very express cuts of meat and with very precise techniques, but varies according to local custom in the use of spices, herbs and wine. Invariably, however, all contain chilli in varying quantities.
The most famous of Calabria’s salumi are capocollo, soppressata and ’nduja. Capocollo is the neck and shoulder of pork, boned out, packed into a pig’s bladder, cured, lightly smoked and then aged for at least one hundred days. It is eaten only as an antipasto, sliced thinly like salami. ’Nduja (apparently ’nudja is the Italianisation of the French andouillette – a reminder that southern Italy was regularly part of greater France) is a paste of pork fat and pork meat infused with sweet and fiery chilli, and other flavourings depending on where it is made. It can be spread on bread or heated up to make a sauce for pasta, typically maccheroni. Soppressata is an altogether more sophisticated number, and I had hopes of meeting up with a maker further north.
I said goodbye to the cheery butcher brothers. They wished me well and joy with the ’nduja that they had given me to complement the zingirole. A skinned calf's head peered at me mournfully from behind them.
Beyond Vibo Valentia, astride the coast road, was Pizzo. Scrambling up and down the precipitous side of a hill that eventually dropped vertically into the sea, Pizzo might have been designed by Piranesi and M. C. Escher. The streets and alleys above its piazza formed a maze of vertical disorder. The Vico Minotauro turned off the Via Minotauro; and the Vicolo Minotauro, scarcely wide enough to allow a plump English sightseer to pass with ease, turned off the Vico Minotauro. Stairs and steps and passageways fell up or down, round each corner, opening up a series of microvistas, truncated by the corner