By any qualitative criteria, Italy is the world centre for ice cream, and Pizzo is its self-declared capital. The rest of the country would certainly dispute this claim, but at Pizzo there was certainly a lot of ice cream packed into a small area. I counted nine bars around the Piazza della Repubblica alone, each of which made its own ranges of ices.
The history of ice cream, in which we must include granitas and sherbets or sorbets, the Moors’ gift to summer refreshment, is also a long and complicated one, going back to the sixteenth century, and, to be frank, only really of interest to the food historian. The point is that the ice creams in Italy have an intensity and freshness that are foreign to British and American ices, where flavour is sacrificed to sugar, cream and air.
Angelo Belvedere was something of an ambassador for the ice creams of Pizzo. He gave off an aura not of romance or woolly artisanality but rather of canny commercial nous. He wore a Pepsi baseball cap and a many-pocketed waistcoat. Metal-rimmed spectacles framed shrewd eyes, and he seemed no stranger to the interview – ‘I am the grandson of the founder of the Gelateria Belvedere, which was established in 1901. My grandfather was un gentiluomo molto elegante – an elegant gentleman.’ Grandfather Belvedere had a sharp nose for business opportunities as well.
‘My grandmother started making the ice creams for family weddings, birthdays and christenings. She used snow packed into blocks to freeze the ice creams. It was very hard work.’ Then came technology, with freezing salt and a hand-cranked freezer. Her husband noticed that locals gathered in the Piazza della Repubblica on high days and holidays to listen to a brass band, sweltering in their respectable suits in the sun. ‘So he set up a kiosk on the corner of the piazza, and my grandmother, she made more ice creams and they became famous. I followed them and now my sons work the kiosk and the café.’
The latest generation of the Belvedere family used modern technology as astutely as their ancestors. The ice creams were made in small batches of a few litres at a time, and contained only fresh fruit and high-quality flavourings. I rolled my tongue up and over a hummock of jade-green pistachio and glossy, dark mahogany chocolate held in a cone. The texture was smooth and lusciously creamy, the pistachio more intense and perfumed than any nut, the chocolate powerful, with a clean, penetrating bite.
‘Every producer has his own particular way of doing things,’ said Angelo, ‘but most of them use an industrial ice cream base as a stabilising agent, and add eggs and milk to that.’ He was vague about exact proportions. ‘They vary according to which ice cream you want to make. I am not going to tell you exactly what we do. There are too many sharks out there,’ and his eyes glittered.
One of Angelo Belvedere’s sons was manning the kiosk. He told me that the reason the gelaterias were so consistently good here was that they were family businesses. In Palermo or Reggio, he said, gelaterias change hands every ten years or so and traditional recipes are lost in the process.
‘My family is an example of continuity,’ he went on. ‘I studied law in Messina, but in the end I came back to work here. I could never have been a lawyer. I’m an ice-cream man.’ He peered down at the ice creams lined up, brilliant and glistening, in their metal trays in the freezer display – cioccolato, nocciola, croccantino, stracciatella, zuppa inglese, cioccoriso, caffè, nutella, dolcelatte, fiordilatte, pistacchio, spagnola, melone, cassata, frutti di bosco, fragola, banana, limone, ananas, latte di mandorla. He could have been talking a load of baloney, of course, but it made a fine tale.
After Pizzo, I turned inland, vaguely following the erratic course of Garibaldi’s progress northwards through the foothills of the Sila, the next range north of the Aspromonte. The landscape became less dramatic and savage than that further south, more classical than pagan, more wooded than forested, more Lake District than Highlands. Rock roses, yellow brimstone butterflies, irises, ox-eye daisies, vetch, broom, borage and knapweed thickly populated the verges.
Not far from Pianapoli, well off the beaten track and some way down an unbeaten one, I found La Carolee. The house stood on the edge of a sharp escarpment, looking out over voluptuous, tree-covered hills. Pinky terracotta new paint notwithstanding, it was formidable, square, with a round tower at one corner and a courtyard at its centre. It had a squat, purposeful presence. It also had a squat, purposeful past, having been built as a kind of fortified manor house, to be defended against the bandits who roamed the countryside in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Carolee was a local dialect name for a variety of olive that grew in profusion in these hills, and the house had been named after it. A few years ago, Armando Gaetano had bought the estate from the Catholic Church, restored it, and turned it over to organic production to provide olives for the family frantoio – oil mill – not far away. The nominal owner might have been Armando, but responsibility was shared by the whole family, with his son, Federico, running the estate, and his wife, Maria, a small, elegant, birdlike woman, and Federico’s handsome wife, also Maria, sharing cooking duties and other jobs.
Federico Gaetano was a stocky young man, with soft brown eyes and thinning hair, the curve of his cheeks carrying the blue-black bloom of perpetual stubble. He led me away among the trees, wading knee-deep through lupins and beans mixed with ox-eye daisies, buttercups and clovers, all in full flower beneath the trees, a thick shag-pile of vegetation enamelled with colours. These would be ploughed back into the earth in the fullness of time, he explained, to fix nitrogen in the soil and so provide natural fertiliser.
To anyone used to the chemical blitzkrieg methods of modern farming, the constraints of organic production seemed to require a disproportionate amount of trouble and ingenuity, but that was the way, said Federico, ‘to respect the integrity of the soil and the integrity of nature’. It was difficult to know whether this was simply an article of marketing faith or a declaration of a more profound conversion to the organic way. Either way, organic methods at La Carolee produced superb olive oil, rich, spicy, deep, dandelion-gold, which they could sell at a premium. High-mindedness had a sharp commercial edge.
There are various grades of olive oil: extra vergine, the first oil from the press, which, according to Italian regulations, has to have a level of oleic acid of less than 1.2 per cent; the less fine vergine, which is made from olives that have been simply pressed, but which may have a slightly higher level of acidity – 2 per cent; straight olio d’uliva, a blend made by heating pressed olives, which helps extraction but affects the chemical balance in the oil, pressing them again and chemically treating the oil to lower the acidity; and finally a whole range of lesser grades of olive oil mixed with vegetable oils.
The winter of 1985 was the worst in living memory for olive producers. Of twenty-two million olive trees, seventeen million froze where they grew. Many died (although olive trees have almost miraculous powers of regeneration). Oil production dropped by 40 per cent. However, the Italians are the most pragmatic of people. Faced with a shortfall in production, they set about reducing the damage in terms of income.
To the hierarchy of oleic purity, the Italians, led by the thrifty Tuscans, began adding refinements. First came the single-estate oils in fancy bottles. Then came single-estate, single olive varietal oils. Then came, well, the whole panoply of food snobbery and marketing legerdemain. Since then, of course, olive oil has become one of the commonplaces of modern life. It is a culinary essential and fashion accessory. The bottle in the bourgeois kitchen is as socially defining as Nike, Nokia, Prada and Porsche. The distillation of Mediterranean sunshine and culture, olive oil occupies a central place in cultural iconography far removed from its peasant origins.
Yet, by an ironic quirk of nature, it is made in the depths of winter, between the end of October and the beginning of March. In May there wasn’t much for me to look at, except for the high drama of the olive blossom slowly turning into olives.
But olive oil production was not the only business at La Carolee. It was an azienda agriturismo, a farm or agricultural estate licensed to take in tourists or pilgrims like myself, or play host to vast family parties who came out for lunch and dinner on Saturday and Sunday. And lunch was not quite the modest affair that I was used to in England, and made me wonder