Boom! Boom! Gunshots shatter the early morning calm. It’s not yet 8 a.m. when two rifle blasts echo through the countryside. Most of the village of Bernalda is already awake. I’m halfway through a bicycle ride when the gunfire reverberates through the valley that surrounds this sleepy Italian village. Birds scatter. Dogs bark in the distance.
I lurch my bicycle to a stop and peer over the centuries-old wall that encircles the town. I scan the terrain below. Bernalda crowns the tip of a pointy mountain in Basilicata’s remote Matera Province. Dew glistens on the grass. The invisible aromas of freshly baked bread and of olive-wood burning in a furnace somewhere nearby fill the air. I strain to identify where the shots came from, or what they were about.
Two men with thinning gray hair and substantial bellies are leaning against the old rock wall, chatting, unfazed. They notice the curiosity in my face and chuckle.
“Lepre. Rabbit,” says one of the men, smiling, pointing to a wooded area in the distance below, where I now see a small red farmhouse at the edge of a chestnut grove. But as soon as the one man has suggested rabbit, the other interjects: “O cinghiale.” Or wild boar, he says. The gunshots are merely a local resident shooting something to eat for lunch, or maybe he’ll sell it to a restaurant. Nothing out of the ordinary.
This is a story about wild boar. And wine. And the best bread in Italy. About a place to which few people travel, a land that has gone from being the shame of Italy to one of the country’s greatest hidden treasures – especially for anyone who likes to eat.
Basilicata has never been a wealthy region, like Tuscany, Campania or Emilia Romania. Instead, this sparsely populated state has always been one of the poorest. Visualizing Italy as a boot, this is where the instep meets the heel – an arid, mountainous, dusty, no-man’s land between the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Gulf of Taranto.
There are no major airports or train stations in Basilicata. You don’t pass through here on your way to somewhere else more important. You really must choose to come. To do so, you travel first to neighboring Puglia, then rent a car and drive past the hookers who solicit truckers on the roadside on the outskirts of Bari. This is one of the last places in Italy to get a modern highway, and parts of it are still under construction – not yet recognized by GPS devices – which becomes a great source of consternation at a roundabout in the middle of nowhere when the computerized map on the dashboard of my rented Fiat is convinced that I’ve wandered deep into a pasture and is desperately trying to re-plot my route as I go round and round. “Look kids, Big Ben!”
In his memoir “Christ Stopped at Eboli,” Italian artist and antifascist activist Carlo Levi told the story of his capture and imprisonment by Mussolini’s government during the lead-up to World War II. Rather than being locked behind bars, Levi was exiled to the Province of Matera, in Basilicata, where he was permitted to live and roam freely but wasn’t allowed to leave. The region then was so impoverished and cut off from the rest of Italy that having to live here was considered a far worse punishment than prison.
Levi reserved his grimmest description for the remote mountaintop town of Matera itself, which was caught in a horrific downward spiral several hundred years in the making. There, in a neighborhood known as the Sassi, was a slum where thousands of people lived in squalor in a labyrinth of crudely chiseled sandstone caves, sleeping head to hoof with the few goats and chickens they owned, with no education, no plumbing, no electricity, and no hope. The nicer part of town wasn’t all that much better. Most people here had never seen a car. They traveled by foot or borrowed a frail donkey. But after the 1945 publication of Levi’s memoir, the Sassi, which means “stones” in Italian, became a great shame for Italy’s new government, and in 1952 every single resident was evacuated and relocated, leaving behind a ghost town whose haunting beauty wouldn’t be fully appreciated for decades.
The government repeatedly devised plans to demolish the Sassi, to erase the cruel memories, but they never found the money to follow through. Then in 1993 the United Nations stepped in and designated the Sassi di Matera as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, thus forever preserving the remarkable architecture and landscape. Slowly, outsiders began to appreciate the beauty of the Sassi. One by one, the caves are being transformed into quaint B&Bs, farm-to-table restaurants and clothing boutiques. Although still only partially restored, the Sassi will absolutely take your breath away.
A winding, country road connects the towns of Matera and Bernalda, about 40 minutes apart by car. Thousands of years younger than its neighbor, Bernalda never suffered like Matera. Equally cut off from the rest of Italy, though, Bernalda has more or less kept to itself, a simple town with simple needs. The streets are narrow and mostly paved with stones. Faded work shirts and granny panties flutter on clotheslines strung between second-floor balconies. Farm tractors share the road with bicycles – almost everyone rides a bike, and absolutely no one owns a lock. Why would they?
Despite the stark differences between Matera and Bernalda, the entire province has always shared a strong common bond: a deeply ingrained pride in the local regional cuisine, known as Lucanian. Although the name changed from Lucania to Basilicata in the mid-sixth century, the people here have always referred to themselves and their agriculture as Lucanian.
Pig farming – mostly wild boar – plays a crucial role. The boar are often left to roam alongside sheep in open pastures. Hillsides shimmer with the silvery leaves of centuries-old olive groves. Gnarled grapevines produce the same primitivo and aglianico grapes that farmers have been growing here since the Greeks arrived thousands of years prior.
Although it’s not uncommon to see restaurants advertising “alta cucina,” true haute cuisine has never made it this far, at least not the way we think of fine Italian cuisine elsewhere. You won’t eat extravagantly in Basilicata. But you will eat very, very well.
Here are six uniquely Lucanian things you’ll want to savor. They won’t be hard to find:
The bread
After the first of several visits to this region, I traveled afterward to Rome, where I met a famous Roman chef. He asked where else in Italy I had been on that trip, and I told him Matera. He clasped his hands against his heart and shook his head. “Ahhh, Matera,” he sighed. “They make the best bread in all of Italy, and hardly anyone knows it.”
Walk the streets of Matera or Bernalda early in the morning, and the sweet, tangy scent of sourdough hangs heavily in the air as bakeries on nearly every block pull heavy durum-wheat loaves from their ovens. The signature loaf of Matera looks like a giant croissant, nearly 2 feet long, weighing as much as 10 pounds. The loaf of Bernalda is perfectly round but comparable in width and weight. Otherwise, it’s the same bread, a style of baking that dates to the Kingdom of Naples. The crust is dense and dark, much more so than anywhere else in Italy. Sit down at any restaurant, and this is always the first thing presented. Underneath that heavy, crunchy, chewy crust lies a pillowy, yellowish interior with the mildly sweet crumb of ancient yeast.
Olive oil
Olive trees blanket the valleys around Bernalda. Almost everyone owns an olive tree, or has a cousin or sister with a grove. And come November, the entire town descends upon the communal olive press with their family’s harvest, waiting their turn to fill their well-worn jugs with cold-pressed oil the same way they’ve done for generations. The region’s volcanic soil gives the local olives a mineral-laced earthiness that produces an extra-virgin oil of very low acidity.
Artisan salumi
Sausages and hams are the cornerstone of Lucanian cuisine. Cappocollo di cinghiale Lucano is a cured ham made from the neck of local wild boar – dark red, almost purple, and intensely flavored. Soppressata di cinghiale Lucano is a milder boar ham with a softer, floral quality to it. Salsiccia di cinghiale is a spicy wild boar sausage infused with local red chilies and wild fennel. Imagine a Spanish chorizo but with 10 times the heat. And the most prized of all is the prosciutto di maiale Lucano, a ham made from the hoofed hind leg of wild boar, aged for nearly a year.
Lucanian cheese
High in the mountains of Matera, every afternoon the valley beneath the Sassi swells with a surreal chorus of bells that sound like an ancient meditation ritual. The volume ebbs and flows as the strange music fills the valley like a perfectly calibrated amphitheater. The orchestra is entirely bovine. A herd of horned Podolico cattle makes its daily pilgrimage from the opposite mountaintop, around the edge of the gorge, along a narrow trail that winds into the bottom of the ravine, where the cows drink water from a burbling creek. Along the way, the herd feasts on wild nettles, rose hips, cherries and hawthorn blossoms.
The milk of these cows is collected only in May and June and spun into a semi-hard cheese called caciocavallo Podolico. Come July or August, the cheese starts showing up in local markets, dangling in mesh nets, looking like smooth-skinned coconuts. Crack open the cheese, and its interior is tender and delicate, slightly sweet and reminiscent of the blossoms and herbs on which the cattle graze. Taste this same caciocavallo in February or March, and the outer shells have hardened like the coconuts they appear to be, and the cheese inside tastes potently musky.
Another unique Lucanian cheese to seek out is the manteca, which is as white as snow and shaped like an avocado. Slice it open, and the cross section looks like a hard-boiled egg, with a “yolk” of creamy Lucanian butter hidden inside.
Wine
The best wines of Basilicata come from the aglianico vineyards of Rionero in Vulture, another mountain town an hour and a half northwest of Matera. One of the region’s oldest wineries, Cantine Del Notaio, was the first to switch from using local chestnut barrels to French oak, which changed aglianico’s future. That was in the 1990s, and the grape is only starting to gain the international recognition it deserves. Vineyards closer to Matera and Bernalda are just as likely to grow primitivo as aglianico, and many of the best wines never travel beyond the Basilicata border.
Pasta
For the most part, Lucanians eat only three shapes of pasta: orecchiette, trofie (often referred to simply as maccheroni) and a sort of tagliatelle that is much thicker, more rustic than anything labeled as such in the United States. All are made from dough that is rolled by hand with nothing more than a rolling pin that’s been passed down for generations. Orecchiette is by far the most popular, tossed with either a vivid green pesto made from rapini or else a deliciously simple tomato sauce that is more orange than red.
At Giardino Giamperduto, a former goat farm and creamery turned agriturismo hotel in Bernalda, chef Giuseppe offers a cooking class where he teaches guests to make all three of these pastas using locally milled flour and chicken eggs gathered that morning. At Ristorante Francesca in Matera, waiters rush hot skillets from the kitchen to the table, where they ladle steaming spoonfuls of hand-rolled trofie cloaked in a wild boar ragu along with whole, crunchy Lucanian chilies. “Where does the boar come from?” I ask.
The waiter looks at me as if that’s the dumbest question he’s ever heard. “Nearby,” he says, “from a farm, just outside of town.”
MATERA
Where to stay:
Sextantio Le Grotte Della Civita: The most authentic cave restoration in the Sassi. Luxury turned upside-down. Eighteen mind-blowing rooms. Rates from $325. sextantio.it/grotte-civita
Corte San Pietro: Intimate cave hotel with only 11 rooms. Personalized service. Rates from $275. cortesanpietro.it
Hotel Sant’Angelo: Contemporary comfort in the Sassi caves, with 23 rooms. Rooftop restaurant. Rates from $285. hotelsantangelosassi.it
Where to eat:
Ristorante Francesca: Via Bruno Buozzi 9. Hand-rolled trofie with Lucanian chillies and boar. Mixed grill of lamb. Podolico T-bone for two.
Morgan Ristorante: Via Bruno Buozzi 2. Lucanian prosciutto and salumi. Handmade pastas.
Latteria Emanuele Rizzi: Via Duni Emanuele 2. Salumi and wine shop with a secret dining room in the back, serving local cheese, cured meats and wine.
Pizzeria Sant’Agostino: Via D’Addozio 6/8. Best pizza in town.
Il Cantuccio: Via delle Beccherie 33. Tiny, ultra-cramped trattoria in the heart of the former noble section. Reserve several days in advance. Braised rabbit. Prosciutto-wrapped pork belly.
Baccanti: Via Sant’Angelo 58/61. Deepest wine cellar in Matera, occupying an entire cave of its own. Foie gras with wild raspberry mostarda. Salt-crusted branzino.
Groove: Via Roma 10. Craft beer bar with DJs and live jazz. Italian microbrews. Salumi. Panzanella. Pasta.
BERNALDA
Where to stay:
Giardino Giamperduto: A former dairy turned 11-room agriturismo hotel. Charming and quiet. Pool. Cooking classes. Rates from $115. giamperduto.com/hotel.php?lang=en
Palazzo Margherita: Francis Ford Coppola’s private family residence turned 12-room hotel. Extraordinary concierge. Exquisite. Rates from $725. coppolaresorts.com
Where to eat:
Al Vecchio Frantoio: Via Corso Umberto 70. Wood-fired pizza. Grilled lamb.
Osteria La Locandiera: Via Corso Umberto 194. Stuffed squash blossoms. Veal meatballs. Whole pork shank.
Cinecitta Bar Bistrot: Via Corso Umberto 62. Grilled wild boar. Wood-fired pizza. Limoncello.
FIVE BASILICATA WINES TO TRY
• Rocca del Dragone, Aglianico: Bold yet amazingly elegant, with aromas and flavors of black cherry, coffee and minerals.
• Cantine del Notaio, Il Sigillo: Quintessential aglianico, with notes of volcanic earth and dark forest fruit.
• Cantine Terra Dei Re, Nocte: Biodynamic aglianico made from grapes picked exclusively in the dark of night.
• Paternoster, Synthesi, Aglianico del Vulture: Blood-red with notes of menthol and chocolate with well-rounded tannins.
• Masseria Cardillo, Titta Rosso: Elegant blend of aglianico and primitivo, with hints of roasted almond and licorice.
Contact the writer: bajohnson@ocregister.com
