Читать книгу Eating Up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa - Matthew Fort - Страница 11

PIANAPOLI – CASTROVILLARI – DIAMANTE – SCALEA – MARATEA – SAPRI – SALA CONSILINA – NAPLES

Federico guided me to the right road for Cosenza from Pianapoli and sped me on my way. Up and up Ginger and I climbed, heading north-east from Feroleto Antico, and passing by way of the straggling villages of Serrastretta, Soveria Mannelli and Rogliano towards the centre of the country. At some point I should have been able to see both the Ionian and Tyrrhenian Seas, but the cloud was low and thunderous, and I wasn’t of a mind to hang around for another drenching.

The Sila Piccola, which I had now entered, wasn’t as wild as the Aspromonte. The curves were gentler, the slopes not quite so fortress-like. The trees were much smaller, too, and only just coming into leaf. This area had been subjected to savage deforestation for several centuries, supplying wood for the shipping industries of many countries, including Britain. Now it was gradually returning in part to its former bosky glory under a process of planting begun under Mussolini, a little-sung legacy of Fascism. There were different wild flowers, too, yellow and red orchids, broom and gorse in flower, wild irises of a velvety, royal blue, rock rose, jonquils and campions. Jays and chaffinches looped along parallel to the road.

Then I felt as if I had suddenly come over the lip of a bowl and I swept down into new country of rolling, almost Alpine pastures, small squares of corn like mats and neat, gemütlich houses. I made good speed, and came within spitting distance of Cosenza, one of the provincial capitals of Calabria on the confluence of the Crati and Busento Rivers, by midday or so. Legend has it that Alaric the Visigoth was buried in the bed of the Busento, along with his treasure, but I hurried on, putting aside the urge for lunch in favour of the urge to make progress.

I surged on towards Castrovillari, up through the Albanian part of Calabria – old Albanian, not new, the Calabria of Spezzano Albanese and Santa Sofia d’Epiro. Albanians had been in these rolling hills since they fled Turkish persecution in the fifteenth century. In spite of five centuries of acclimatisation, they have kept their own customs, language and cooking. Albanians were now returning to Italy again, less welcomed than in previous centuries. European history has a habit of repeating itself.

I settled myself at a table at La Locanda de Alia in Castrovillari, and bit into a piece of bread. It was unusually good bread, rather chewy and full of bouncy, wheaty flavours.

While Italians don’t subscribe to the division between haute cuisine and bourgeois or domestic cooking with the same enthusiasm as the French, they have developed a sophisticated range of places of public rest and recreation – locanda, ristorante, trattoria, tavola calda, pizzeria, bar, caffè – each with its own quite precise set of functions. A locanda is the equivalent to the English inn, by tradition anyway, a restaurant with rooms. It is not as formal as a hotel, nor as cosy as a guesthouse, but the Alia version was rather civilised, not to say cultured.

A couple wandered in with a very small child, all dressed in holiday gear that was as garish as it was scanty. The child proceeded to make the most tremendous din, howling as if he had been kicked. No one seemed to mind, or to take any notice, other than to raise his or her voice to be heard above the hullabaloo. Such social tolerance is as normal in restaurants of all classes in Italy as it is abnormal in Britain. It reflects the social democracy of public eating in Italy. Everyone feels quite at home in a restaurant in a way that we do not.

Then something odd happened. Hello, I thought, what’s this? Carefully, and not wishing to attract too much attention, I eased what appeared to be a foreign body out into my hand. My eyes lit on half a tooth. The bloody baker had left a tooth in the bread, I thought. Disgusting. Then a second thought struck me. Gingerly I ran my tongue around my molars. I hadn’t detected anything amiss. But, oh my God, there at the back on the right it was as if a great section of the cliffs at Dover had fallen into the sea.

Before I had time to digest this shattering piece of news, the antipasto arrived: schiuma di zucchini con salsa di formaggi freschi. Silently I thanked the kitchen for the gentle and dentally unchallenging mousse of zucchini with a sauce made of molten ricotta.

The second course, panzerotti in salsa di semi di anice silano, was altogether more potent. Aniseed is native to the Levant, and was used quite extensively by both the Greeks and the Romans. On the other hand, it was also used to flavour cakes and sweets in north Africa and northern Spain, both regions intimately involved with southern Italy, so who is to know how it really came to take its place in the Calabrian kitchen?

I was relieved that the process of chewing and swallowing did not seem to have been unduly affected. Here I was, a thousand miles or so from my dentist’s surgery, in the middle of a trip which depended on the efficient functioning of my digestive processes, which begin with the teeth.

Carne ’ncatarata in salsa di miele e peperoncino followed, an idiosyncratic combination of honey and chilli with pork, which was, according to the maître d’, Albanian in origin. Hmm. I wasn’t convinced that chilli figured prominently in Albanian cooking, so perhaps this was a Balkan dish with an Italian accent. Heat and sweetness make for ruminative eating, but I decided that it was really rather wonderful, not least because the pork was so tender that I could have sliced it up with a sheet of paper. It was a thoroughly modern dish in appearance, albeit one firmly locked into local ingredients and traditions.

Such blurring of cultural boundaries was unusual. Calabrian cooking had been defined by an awareness of absolute locality that made a coherent understanding of its essence difficult. It wasn’t a pot-pourri, or a melting pot, because there was such a clear sense of identity tied up with each dish, product or ingredient. This fierce campanilismo was the result of the isolated nature of many communities, isolated by geography, politics and history. The homogeneity that rides on the back of integrated transport systems and the priorities of commerce that has affected so much of the rest of Europe has yet to make such headway in southern Italy.

I finished with the ficchi secchi con salsa di cioccolato bianco – dried figs with white chocolate sauce. It was difficult to know what to conclude from this weird confection. Decorated with a liberal dose of hundreds and thousands like tiny beads, it was as vulgar as some of the more lachrymose baroque Madonnas in roadside niches. To taste it was tooth-achingly succulent. All in all, the dish was a modern travesty of the classic ficchi al cioccolato, which unites the influences of Eastern spices, the Moors with their love of almonds and the Spanish, who financed the package tours to the Americas that led, in the final analysis, to Cadbury’s Dairy Milk.

Of course, Britain can legitimately claim to be the world leader in puddings. No other country can match the wealth and variety of our pudding tradition, from fools to roly-polies, tarts to trifles, syllabubs to creams and custards. By comparison, the Italians are limited in their pudding horizons. True, zabaglione, the velvety combination of beaten eggs, sugar and Marsala, is a great pudding; panna cotta, happily adopted by contemporary British restaurants, passes muster in its finest form; and ice creams reach a degree of perfection in Italy that we can only dream of. But for the rest? That ludicrous confection, tiramisu? The trifle of an impoverished imagination. Crostade? Tarts as heavy as manhole covers. Panettone? Better turned into bread-and-butter pudding.

It was time to hit the road again. I knew it was time because it had just started to rain for a change.

‘Peperoncino – chilli – is most important to the cooking around Cosenza,’ Silvia Cappello had told me in Reggio di Calabria. ‘I know you find it everywhere now, but really, Cosenza is the capital of chilli. We in Reggio’ – her voice indicated that there was an unbridgeable gulf between Reggio and Cosenza – ‘are more influenced by Sicilian cooking, and the Sicilians don’t use chilli so much.’

Enzo Monaco did not agree entirely with Silvia’s authoritative statement. Enzo was the Presidente dell’ Accademia del Peperoncino. He was a plausible, agreeable fellow, with thinning hair that crept like ground cover over the curve of his head, a long nose and, behind his glasses, sloping eyes that gave him a mournful look. He was a journalist and a fluent publicist for his cause. So fluent, indeed, that he had turned it into a minor industry, employing three or four people, organising festivals, colloquia, demonstrations, promotions and a newspaper from an office housed in a stump of low-rise flats in the dishevelled seaside town of Diamante.

Peperoncino, he said, fresh, dried, flaked or powdered, was the one essential of Calabrian cooking. It cropped up everywhere, in sauces, sausages and soups, in antipasti, primi piatti and secondi piatti. It lent light and shade to fish, meat and vegetables, to pastries, pasta and even puddings. Indeed, he assured me that there was peperoncino ice cream and peperoncino cake, and proudly showed me some peperoncino biscuits that were about to come on the market thanks to his efforts.

The chilli, or capsicum, arrived in Europe from Mexico in 1492, along with potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, tobacco, corn, turkey and sundry other delights. What on earth did the world eat before the treasure store of the Americas was opened up? The capsicum made its way to India and South East Asia by 1525, by way of Spanish and Portuguese merchant ships. The Italians gave chilli (the name is a corruption of the Central American nahuatl) a warm welcome in 1526, a passion for its qualities taking particular root in southern Italy, which at that time was yoked to the Americas by the compass of the Spanish Empire.

According to Signor Monaco, the spice was taken up by the poor to start with, to put a spring into the step of their otherwise boring and monotonous fare of pulses and vegetables. Before peperoncino there had been other spices, principally vine pepper, but vine pepper had its limitations, notably price – it had been far too expensive for any but the better-off to afford.

Peperoncini, on the other hand, were easy to grow in the Calabrian climate, with plenty of sun and plenty of water. Not only did peperoncino make the local diet look lively; it also added a store cupboard of vitamins and minerals to the mix. In Enzo’s masterwork, Sua Maestà Il Peperoncino (which translated, I think, means His Majesty the Peperoncino), he claims it’s great for acne, dull hair, cellulite, heart problems, massage. Oh, and sex, naturally. No wonder peperoncino was known as ‘la droga dei poveri’, the poor man’s drug.

But what, exactly, I longed to know, was this peperoncino or that? Was it habanero or jalapenõ or Scotch bonnet, or one of the 2,000 other members of the pepper family? Was it better fresh or dried? Were certain dishes made with one or the other? Did you find one variety being used in one place and another elsewhere? And why did it come to have such a hold over the Calabrese kitchen (not to mention the kitchens of Basilicata, Campania and the Abruzzo)?

Signor Monaco was charming, he was voluble, he was a mine of arcane information about the history, the uses and the benefits of chillies, but when it came to identifying specific varieties and their uses, ‘È peperoncino’ was about the best I could get.

Close study of his hagiography of the chilli proved slightly more revealing. He identified six significant sorts of Capsicum annuum: abbreviatum, which is small – not exceeding 5 centimetres, and conical; acuminatum, fasciculaatum, cerasferum, bicolor and the distinctly non-Linnaeic ‘Christmas Candle’. The smallest, hottest chillies are known as diavolilli, and are a speciality of the Abruzzo. Then there is a long fat chilli, known as the sigaretta; a small, pointed chilli that is dried and ground to make pepe d’India or pepe di Caienna; and capsico, a round chilli shaped like a cherry. On the subject of which chilli is used for which dish, it is impossible to provide a definitive answer because I rarely got the same answer from two different cooks.

I had other problems on my mind, too. Over lunch I told Enzo about my failure to find La Golosa, a pasta manufacturer where, I had been told, certain types of pasta were still made by hand. He smiled.

‘La Golosa. No problem. I am working with them to develop some pasta with peperoncino in it. We’ll go there now.’

It wasn’t entirely surprising that I hadn’t been able to find the factory. It was heavily disguised as a block of flats in Scalea, a Calabrian coastal Longridge or Basildon. In fact, it took up the whole of the substantial ground floor, deliveries being made on one side and the finished product being shipped out on the other. But there was no sign, name or indication of any kind that there was anything going on. As the lively and forceful Signora Golosa explained, what with the bureaucracy of a complexity and insanity that Kafka would have had trouble describing, complete with multiple sets of tax authorities, hygiene inspectors, planning offices, etc., they were not too keen on drawing attention to themselves. Hence, no signs outside.

Golosa was the family name, and the business involved husband, wife, son and the son’s girlfriend, who shared the marketing, product development and administrative duties between them. There were four ladies doing the hands-on work, all properly dressed in white coats and regulation hats. Like many small-scale Italian producers, they managed to maintain a careful balance between preserving the essence of artisanal production while also making use of the most up-to-date technology. The production area comprised a couple of large, high-ceilinged rooms with white walls and marble-tiled flooring. It was well lit, with windows back and front, and cool, and so suitable for handling pasta. Odd bits of machinery – mixing machines for working the dough, rollers, cutters, vacuum-packing machines, drying frames – were scattered around the wide open spaces.

Not all the production was strictly artisanal, but the ladies were rolling a local pasta called fusilli (with the accent on the first ‘i’) round a short, metal spike called a ferro, or firriettu in dialect, literally by hand. These fusilli were not at all like the compressed corkscrews I was used to in England. More confusingly still, I had already come across them as maccheroni and fileja. Not that it was like what we think of maccheroni, either. And piling mystery on confusion, different parts of Calabria cut their fusilli, fileji or maccheroni to different lengths. Just to complicate the issue further, according to Signora Golosa, the metal spike was sometimes squared off, and the pasta called something else, and, that, naturally, needed an entirely different sauce. Sometimes I suspect Italians of inventing subtle variations in pasta, and insisting that each is better suited to this sauce or that, in much the same way that theologians squabble over minute differences in the interpretation of some text or other. Take that class of stuffed pasta known generally as ravioli, or agnolotti to the Piedmontese, which becomes tordelli to a Tuscan or culingiones to a Sardinian or tortelli to an Emiliani. That is before we get to tortellini and tortelloni and other sub-classes. Each is favoured by a particular part of Italy, stuffed and sauced differently, and each claimed as superior by the natives of whatever particular region it comes from.

These fusilli were made by taking strips of pasta made of just grano di semola (ground durum wheat) and water about as long as a school ruler and as wide as a thumb, and with a light rolling motion of the hands, wrapping them round a long metal spike about the circumference of a knitting needle. The slightly irregular length of fusilli was then stripped off the spike and flipped on to a pile of those already finished.

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 to order there was no menu and precious little choice.

‘Antipastipastacarneopesce?’ said the young man briskly.

‘Eh?’ I said.

‘Antipastopastacarneopesce?’ he repeated.

‘Oh, sì,’ I said.

‘Carne o pesce?’ he said with a touch of asperity.

‘Oh, carne. Definitely carne,’ I said.

‘Vino?’

‘Sì, sì.’

He whisked away.

Hardly had I had time to blink when plonk came the wine, plonk came the bread, plonk came the antipasti. Hey ho, I thought, and tucked in with a will: a couple of slices of mozzarella squeaking between the teeth; a thimble of ricotta like a breath of fresh herbs; a slice of cured ham, cut thick and tasty and sweet and salty; a coil or two of oily grilled peppers; a battered zucchini flower, fried and served cold and, to be honest, not terribly nice. And a substantial quantity of rough-hewn bread, all washed away with no-name, no-pack-drill wine.

The plate of ex-antipasti disappeared. Plonk, down came a plate of pasta. ‘Er, what are these?’

‘Cavatelli.’

‘Oh, thanks.’ They were short, fat cylinders, like gnocchi. I knew that, in theory, cavatelli was native to this corner of the Basilicata/Campania border. The trouble was, being something of an expert by now, I could have sworn they were cecatelli. The naming of dishes was becoming something of a problem. Just as I thought that I had got one safely identified, authenticated and located in one area, something remarkably like it to the untutored eye turned up somewhere else under a quite different name. For instance, Enzo Monaco had referred to a condiment of neonati, tiny fish pickled in chilli and herbs, as rosamarino, when I knew it as mustica or sardella. There appeared to be as many authentic recipes in Campania as there were cooks and eaters, and whoever I spoke to on the subject would swear that this dish had nothing to do with the other dish at all, and they would name some ingredient or stage in the cooking process which made it altogether different, and markedly inferior, naturally.

Never mind, there and then, it was cavatelli with a heavy-duty tomato sauce made smoky with provola affumicata (a smoked cow’s cheese) and with that ubiquitous condiment, of olive oil, garlic and chilli served on the side.

‘Thank you very much.’

Plonk. A second pasta dish arrived, a single raviolo, fat as a down pillow, stuffed with ricotta, lolling in a bright, fresh tomato sauce, brightened still further with clumps of fresh basil. Very nice it was, too.

There is a pleasure to eating on your own, allowing the wine to gently neutralise any natural inhibitions about watching your fellow diners too obviously, and so covertly observe dramas and relationships unfolding at other tables. There was a father entertaining a rather fussy grown-up daughter; a table of five men who looked like business colleagues; a brace of couples feeding and laughing. Everyone was eating with the minimum of fuss, without unnecessary reference or deference. Food was conveyed to the mouth with elegant economy, tasted, assessed, commented on. Eating, talking, socialising formed a single, seamless and indivisible continuum.

Plonk!

‘What’s this?’

‘Orecchiette con broccoli.’

‘Another pasta?’

‘Sì, signore.’

I was beginning to sweat slightly. I wished that I hadn’t gone at the bread with such vigour. Still, it was yet another potent dish. Orechiette are supposed to be the classic pasta of Puglia, next door to Basilicata, but what the hell. I had to take things as they came, and they seemed to be coming fast and hard just at that moment.

I was feeling rather smug about having managed that third pasta course when a fourth arrived, tagliatelle con gamberi – tagliatelle in a sauce of prawn stock and tomato. Even by the normal generous Italian standards, this was stretching things a bit. Although I was beginning to wonder if the walls of my stomach would stretch enough to accommodate it, my fellow lunchers didn’t seem to notice anything unusual going on, and were motoring smoothly through the same dish.

I wondered where the standard four-course structure – antipasto/primo piatto/secondo piatto/formaggio–frutta–dolce – had come from. Extensive research had turned up no clue. However, no one seemed to treat this model as inviolable. A meal was bent to the needs, mood or pleasure of the eater. A chap at another table had a bowl of soup followed by a salad followed by fried fish, while his daughter had the antipasto followed by grilled prawns. Not for them the pasta marathon.

Mum popped out of her kitchen to see how I was getting on. I goggled at her, and remembered the meat still to come.

And meat it was, just meat; no sauce, no veg, no sprig of chervil, no dab of this or blob of that, simply a piece of chicken, a chunk of pork, a slab of veal, all grey and inert, and just about as unappetising as it is possible for meat to look. Ah, but to taste, that was another matter. The chicken was redolent of the farmyard, the lamb robust with free ranging and the pork subtle and unctuous as an undertaker. It was like being taken back to childhood and the novelty of flavours experienced then. No matter that getting each morsel down inside me was like stuffing the last presents into an over-filled Christmas stocking.

It was food that had its roots in the rural working class, not the educated middle class, as is the case with many dishes in France or Britain. In Italy there had once been a tradition of fancy cooking for the aristocratic houses – there is a memorable description of a dinner of immense elaboration and elaborate immensity in The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa – but that has largely disappeared. By some mysterious, radical process, the cooking of the contadini invaded the kitchens of their social superiors, perhaps riding on the coat tails of the ubiquitous peperoncini.

The final dish of early strawberries was unusually refreshing. They had been macerated in lemon juice and sugar for a few hours before serving. It caused the fruits to sweat a little of their juices, and sharpened the flavours.

I didn’t exactly leap into the saddle after that. I took the first small back road that I could find, stopped and was asleep on the verge in an instant.

I turned away from the sea and hit the hill roads again, heading up through the Vallo di Diano, which, while it lacked the obvious drama of the Aspromonte or the Sila, had the charm of intimate grandeur – rushing streams, a lot of oak and chestnut, as well as pine, ilex and laurel, although, oddly, very few olive trees. There was the occasional open bit of country given over to mixed cultivation and extraordinary small fields of wheat. What were they for? They couldn’t be economic or produce that much flour. And how were they harvested? Everything gave a little charge to the solitary brain, shut away inside the helmet.

I stopped to chat with a grizzled, recumbent shepherd – very Norman Douglas – dozing away the afternoon on the verge while his goats shredded the greenery on the other side of the road; and for a second time to interrogate a lady picking cicorie selvatiche (wild salad leaves), dente di leone (dandelion), portulaca (purslane), and valerianella (valerian). The Italian taste for these pungent weeds with their varying degrees of bitterness is alien to sweeter-toothed northern Europeans.

The hills calmed down to a substantial, fertile, flat plain around the rather grubby small town of Sala Consilina. According to the guides, the Hotel La Pergola seemed to be the only reasonable hotel in the area, and, true, it was clean and perfectly respectable. But, gloomy, echoing and kitted out in cheap marble, it reminded me of the most melancholy kind of overnight stop for commercial travellers. It was run by a husband-and-wife team, and a skeleton crew of helpers, masterminded by the wife in a voice pitched permanently on penetrating. The husband seemed to be something of a dreamer, providing the waiting services at dinner in a crumpled white waiter’s jacket with the top two buttons undone, forgetful of the bread, the water, the salad.

The dining room never had more than a sprinkling of other people. The giant television permanently on in the corner made thought, let alone speech, an impossibility. One dinner was accompanied by a programme about intimate aspects of women’s bodies; another by one of the endless and mindless semi-quiz games that Italian television specialises in churning out. None of my fellow guests seemed much in the mood for merry banter.

The food was curious at best – a memorably vile pasta dish swimming in water with a revolting low-rent Bolognese sauce followed by a cheese dish of cold mozzarella and melted caciocavallo cheeses, pizza casereccia, bits of pizza base unadorned by anything, and salad, all at the same time, followed by a wretched fruit salad. Another night’s feast was equally bizarre: orecchiette with a good tomato sauce pepped up with chilli; a huge round of something unidentifiable, which reminded me of the watery, claggy scrambled egg we had had at school; bits of roast chicken; and then a plate of burnt peppers swimming for their lives in oil.

It was all the more memorable for being a rare experience. It was almost reassuring to discover that even Italians produce food quite as disgusting as anything in Britain. The difference was, of course, that in Britain such experiences are still the rule. So far in Italy they were the exception.

I left La Pergola with few misgivings, and crossed the floor of the valley, climbing the steep road to the pretty hill town of Teggiano in warm sunshine. I stripped down to my T-shirt and looked rather Marlon Brandoish, I thought. Well, perhaps later Brando in terms of girth, but certainly early Brando in terms of dash.

The road ran from Teggiano to Sacco and Piaggino, climbing between two ramparts of grey rock, surrounded by buttercups and daisies, orchids, carpets of wild thyme, and a host of other brilliantly coloured flowers whose names I didn’t know. I stopped for a while. The only sounds were those of birds, including a most persistent cuckoo, bees and the clonking of cow bells from a small herd grazing serenely just below the bare rock line on the far side of the pass. I could not help thinking that those people who only experience the Italian coast, or the artlessly domesticated countryside of Tuscany and Umbria, have little idea of the astounding beauty of the hill and mountain areas which make up most of the south. With a sigh, I headed for Paestum, and Naples beyond.

Crossing the fertile, intensively cultivated flat plain between Paestum and Salerno was not too much of a challenge. Things got a bit tricky going into Salerno, and decidedly trickier getting out of it. All the obvious roads turned into autostradas on which scooters of Ginger’s humble power were not allowed. More by luck than good judgement, I finally found myself on the road to Naples.