Seasons in Basilicata (13 page)

“I think. We ask. Okay?”

“That's the one I want,” I said.

“Okay,” Giuliano said, chuckling again.

And very okay it turned out to be. Massimo was inside serving coffee to a couple of locals, and as soon as I saw his young, almost-cherubic round face and bright, genuine smile, and heard his pretty good attempt at an English welcome (“Please come in and have a coffee and very happy to meet.”), I knew I'd found the ideal place to settle down for a while.

And, yes, the room at the top with the huge terrace was free, and, yes, the vistas of the Montepiano and Parco Gallipoli forests and ranges all around, plus views over all the town and the main piazza, were magnificent, and, yes, the price was reasonable in the extreme, and, yes, the fine-looking restaurant offered truly authentic and delicious Basilicatan fare.

Once again, laissez-faire luck had worked its magic, and I was a very happy, if slightly weary, traveler.

The Market Fruit Seller

My brief sojourn in Accettura was characterized by a series of minor but memorable occurrences. The first was during one of my almost daily visits to the small covered market in the town.

Dawn, as they often say, tends to creep in. But that particular
morning it arrived in a sudden spectacular fanfare of light, as the ponderous black clouds of night lifted faster than a curtain at a first-night opening on Broadway to reveal a horizon ablaze with color. And there were frantic noises, too: the sound of the market stalls being assembled. In fifteen minutes I was up, showered, dressed, expressly espressoed by Massimo, and out into the piazza heading for my favorite saleslady.

Maria Montemurro seemed so fond of her homegrown fruits and vegetables, which she had displayed neatly in precise pyramids on her small trestle, that selling them, even to people she'd sold them to for decades, seemed to saturate her elderly, wizened face with deep sadness. Every time one of the villagers walked away with a paper bag containing a few of her golden apples or outrageously red tomatoes or one of her enormous, tight-as-a-punching-bag heads of lettuces, she watched them go with a look that a mother might give a beloved boy-child as he left for a new life in some distant land. You could see her almost silently beseeching each customer to return and relinquish their just-made purchases so she could place them lovingly again on her meticulously assembled pyramids.

This time, I told myself, I will be strong. I will not watch her eyes or pay any attention to her expressions of anxiety and sorrow. I will simply buy my apples, a few of those beautiful little, juice-laden tangerines, a cluster of the crispest celery imaginable, and a kilo of vine tomatoes that taste the way tomatoes used to taste when I was a child—sweet, sharp, peppery, and with just the slightest aftertaste of anise.

I was in the process of picking six sun-golden apples from one of her perfectly mounted displays when she started up: “These are all for you? That's too many.” I didn't look at her and continued to make my selection. “That one is bruised. See? Look! They're all bruised! Why do you want to buy my bruised apples?”

There were no bruises. Now, onto the tomatoes.

“Too ripe. Try next week. You like them harder.”

I wanted to say, “No, these are just fine. Thank you, Maria,” but
I was determined not to turn this into a debate or even a mild discussion. I knew what had to be done. The tomatoes were perfect. Now for the lettuce.

“You picked a different kind last time. Why pick this one? You won't like it. It's very bitter. Come again next week.”

Lettuce selected. And the celery and the tangerines and for good measure a half kilo of green grapes. I was winning. I could hear Maria's commentary. “Too sour. Too big. They have better ones across the piazza in the store.” But it all sounded halfhearted. Almost defeatist. Then she made one last effort, handing me a couple of grapes. “Try.” I tried and…unfortunately, she was right. They were too sour for my taste. But what to do? Should I be stubborn and insist that they were just fine or should I…

Mistake! I looked at her face, and if ever a face said, “Please, leave me something,” it was poor little Maria's. I could swear her eyes were watering. So, I surrendered.

“Okay, Maria, you're right. Too sour. I'll wait until next week.”

Transformation! Her face lit up like a young child's. She snatched the grapes from me and returned them enthusiastically to the table, almost caressing them in the euphoria of her little victory.

I handed her a twenty-euro note (then twenty dollars).

“Too big. I have no change. See if you have coins. Or you could come back later maybe. I'll look after your bag for you.”

It was very kind of her to offer, but I dreaded returning to find all my purchases returned to their respective displays. So, I dug deep into my pocket and pulled out a batch of coins. However, I had only a little over two euros.

“Not enough. You need another euro. Look, why don't you forget the tomatoes?” Maria began.

Not so fast, my tricky fruit-seller lady! There was another two-euro coin deep in my other pocket, and now I had more than enough to buy all my selections. So there.

Maria gave me my change slowly, packed everything into a bag, and said nothing. For a moment she held on to the bag, and then with a sigh she handed it to me across the table.

“Grazie, Maria,” I said, but she was already nervously watching her next customer.

Improvising at the Hotel SanGiuliano

A few days later I received one of those little uplifting boosts that made my Accettura interlude so memorable.

 

As hotels went, the SanGiuliano was not very large, or grandiose. And though its room heating did not always work effectively, that didn't pose a problem; even though it was early March, the daytime temperature was already in the mid-sixties.

 

I
THINK
I was the happiest person in this compact little hill town on the edge of the verdant and mountainous oak forests of the Bosco Montepiano. Certainly I felt a lot happier than those sinister-looking village black widows appeared, wrapped defensively and identically in enormous black shawls and scurrying like beetles across the piazza in their black dresses, black stockings, and black shoes…black everything, in fact, including their perpetual shrouds of doom and gloom and the dark looks on their faces. When I or anybody else approached them, they would tighten their shawls around their mouths and chins, Islamic fashion, and glower through suspicious, coal-black eyes. I saw them as black volcanoes—little fiery Etnas—ready to blow at the slightest tectonic nudge of trouble. I had thought that this kind of thing had died out in Italy—this mourning for a spouse that can last for decades and all those deeply entrenched superstitions and
pagani
beliefs, including, around this part of Basilicata, the rumored shape-shifting and other mysterious protean abilities of elderly “sorcerer” women. But, as I was to learn later, ancient traditions had tentacles there, and strangenesses indeed remained.

Fortunately most of the other locals were a sociable lot, always ready for a little gossip 'n' chat over glasses of grappa at the piazza coffee bars. I also happened to make friends with the hotel staff,
particularly the burly chef, Bruno Mastronadi, who bore an uncanny resemblance to America's portly Cajun-cooking celebrity, Paul Prudhome. It became a habit of mine to drop into Bruno's kitchen after the siesta to see what delights he was concocting for that evening's dinner, and inevitably after discussing recipes and unusual local ingredients and the like, we became bosom buddies of the stove.

It was Friday night. Fish night (of course) at the hotel, and Bruno always tried to serve something different along with his more traditional, time-honed recipes. That night he'd managed to acquire an enormous salmon, and he was planning to prepare a rather interesting
misto
of fish, stuffed calamari, octopus, and prawns, served with potato-and-oregano gnocchi. I was particularly impressed by his pile of prawns.

“Too many,” he said. “Good price, so I bought too much.” He laughed and his big belly shook like Jell-O. And without thinking, I said, “Well, give me half, and I'll cook something up.”

He stopped his meticulous filleting of the salmon, looked at me curiously for a moment, laughed, and then, without asking what my intentions were (I didn't know myself), he pointed to the stove, chopping block, and vast array of herbs, spices, vinegars, wines, oils, and liqueurs, and said, “
Va bene.
Help yourself.”

And that's precisely what I did. As he continued refining his delectable
misto,
I began to make a reduction of white wine, butter, tarragon, lemon, and garlic. Then I added…Well, I won't bother with the details of the recipe because I was improvising like I normally do and can't really remember. I had a flavor in my head that blended the briny freshness of the ocean with the deep flavor of the wine-herb reduction, the sparkle of fresh lemon and local
limonce
liqueur (a splendidly thick, golden, sweet-tart concoction), the slight sweetness from some anise to reinforce the tarragon, the thwack of local Basilicatan hot pepper
(peperoncini)
sauce—which seemed to accompany everything in those parts—and then something not too bold but comforting to act as the “bed” for the purity of the prawns themselves. And since it was still
porcini
season, what better than wafer-thin slivers of
those delectable mushrooms, glazed in their own “sweat” for a few seconds in a searing-hot dry pan, and then added along with a little cream to the sauce, which had been quietly simmering down to a rich consistency and texture.

Bruno and I tested each other's creations, savoring the subtleties we'd both tried to achieve. And then—surprise, surprise—he gave me a palm-tingling high five, and we proceeded to hug each other and slap each other's backs and tell each other that tonight would indeed be a special night for the patrons of the Hotel SanGiuliano.

Modesty should creep in at this point, but, no, let honesty win out. I've had many nights when my “improvising” at home has led to the need for hasty, last-minute culinary overhauls. I was even telling myself as I prepared my impromptu dish that day that if my prawn concoction didn't work out the way I'd hoped, I'd throw in a lot more garlic and cream and tomato paste and call it “Provençale” or something that sounded foreign and mysterious, and hope for the best.

But I'm happy to say that my “Prawns Improv” was happily devoured along with Bruno's splendid salmon-and-seafood misto, and the enthusiastic restaurant crowd even stood and gave us both the honor of a toast, apparently a rather rare occurrence in those parts.

It was one of those nights I shall remember for a long time, along with the next of my Accetturan adventures.

Bricks, Pantiles, and Other Creations

“So, tomorrow then,” Massimo told me as I sat drinking my second cappuccino of the morning at his hotel. “Tomorrow morning. Before breakfast. He wants to take us to his kiln and show us how to make pantiles and bricks. Is okay?”

I'd almost forgotten that floating invitation to go and watch the ancient pre-Roman craft of brick-and pantile-making by the only man in the whole of Basilicata who still remembered and used these time-honored and once-revered processes. Giuliano Mingalone.

“Great!” I said. “But why before breakfast?”

“Because Giuliano says he has special breakfast he wants to
cook for us. At his kiln. Not far out of town. Just a little way down in the valley.”

 

A “
LITTLE WAY
” turned out to be a mile-long hike, and “down” was an almost head-over-heels scramble down the near-vertical sides of a canyon on the outskirts of Accettura, following a
mulattiera
(mule track) that even a mule would have had problems negotiating.

A
CCETTURA'S
M
AGGIO
F
ESTIVAL

“Bit too steep for jeep, with all three of us in it,” Giuliano said happily as we all met around eight o'clock on a brisk, blue-sky morning and began the tortuous descent.

“You have to walk up and down this track every day?” I asked Giuliano, whose stumpy legs seemed almost to float over the rough stone-and-pothole surface, while I skidded and jarred my way down. Massimo wisely remained in the rear, carefully and adeptly learning from my disconcertingly amateurish performance.

“
Si, si.
No problem. Unless raining. Then is like river here. You gotta go careful then.”

I nodded. I've gotta go careful now, I thought, and it hasn't been raining for days. My challenge was to avoid the pockets of dust and loose pebbles that kept trying to trip and pitchfork me headlong into the sinister, shadowy depths of the canyon far below.

Somehow we all arrived at Giuliano's hideaway without traumatic incident, except maybe a little punctured pride in my case. We left the track to continue its tortuous descent and emerged onto a level shelf of pleasant, grassy land bathed in warm early sunshine.