Savor Campania: ‘Food and Wine Guide’ serves up tour of rural Italy
Books on food make some of the best travel companions. One of my favorites is “The Food and Wine Guide to Naples and Campania,” filled with vivid descriptions and photos of Southern Italian towns and villages waiting to be discovered.
Many Italian-Americans trace their roots to this area, but guidebooks generally focus only on Naples, Pompeii and the Amalfi Coast, leaving travelers with the impression that a massive earthquake in 1980 left nothing much else to see.
Author Carla Capalbo, an American food writer who lives part time in a pocket-size village called Nusco, shows her readers what a difference 28 years make, not only in the towns themselves, many with beautifully restored medieval centers, but in the food and wine of a rich agricultural region surrounded by spectacular mountain scenery.
Tuscany without the tourists and high prices came to mind when my husband, Tom, and I rented a car in Rome and drove inland to spend a week exploring.
As it is in the next-door regions of Calabria and Molise, where our families have roots, big sites and important museums are few in rural Campania. The reward for a long drive along a winding road might be a Roman arch left standing in a field, or a country inn specializing in what Capalbo calls an “educated cucina povera,” a modern twist on the traditional peasant food familiar to many an Italian-American.
Consider the two-hour lunch we had at a farm restaurant outside Taurasi, a wine town about an hour’s drive from Naples.
We toured the cellars of Antonio Caggiano, 71, an architect who took up winemaking in 1990. While helping clear debris after the earthquake, he gathered up stone carvings and farm tools, and created an underground cantina where he decorated passageways with antique fountains and arranged bottles of wine in vaults like museum pieces.
After a tour and tasting that lasted more than an hour, he gave us directions to a friend’s farmhouse restaurant, where we sat around a table eating family-style with a group from Ireland. Platters of air-cured salami and ham, dishes of marinated peppers and bowls of zucchini, potatoes and white beans were followed by pasta, lamb chops and salads. When the waiter finally served a nougat dessert topped with crushed hazelnuts, it was nearly 5 p.m.
It sounds like a cliche to call this the “real Italy,” but if those words define a part of the country so far untouched by mass tourism, this is it.
In Sant’Agata dei Goti, an ancient town built on a rock cliff above a river in an area called the Sannio, we met Loredana Fusaro, a cook at a local restaurant and shiatsu massage therapist, and her photographer husband, Enrico Pofi.
They were our hosts at Sentieri Luminosi, the B&B they opened recently in the 19th century stone building they bought a few years ago after moving from Naples.
The family lives on the top floor and rents out a bottom-floor apartment to guests for about $70. From their garden planted with fig, orange and olive trees, we looked down on the new town - built after the earthquake - and the restored medieval old town built on the ruins of a Samnite city, all of it surrounded by mountains and terraced vineyards.
Fortified each morning by Loredana’s apple and raisin strudel, scrambled eggs, olives and fennel from her garden, we spent the next few days exploring little mountain towns known for their ceramics; cow- and sheep-milk cheeses; wine; and torrone, a nougat candy made with honey, nuts and egg whites.
We had no idea what to expect when we drove to our next stop, the hilltop hamlet of Calitri in the province of Avellino. An isolated mountain town bordering Basilicata, one of Italy’s poorest regions, Calitri has always been a town that people left. Thousands immigrated to other parts of Italy, South America and the United States in the 1900s in search of jobs, and again after 1980.
Now tourism is starting to spawn a small migration of foreigners interested in exploring their roots or buying a vacation home.
Thursdays are market days, when older women, dressed in black, shop the open-air stalls stocked with polka-dot bras, men’s suits and lemons the size of miniature footballs.
Our dollars stretched easily. We sampled one-euro cups of hot chocolate at a stand-up bar on the piazza, where the owner, Mario Andriaccio, has a collection of 4,000 postcards, including one of Seattle’s Space Needle. At a restaurant called Osteria Three Roses, we drank red wine from ceramic pitchers and sampled pasta cannazze, noodles shaped like hand-rolled cigarettes topped with tomato sauce and sheep- and cow-milk cheeses. Dinner for three was $50.
If you go
WHERE: Campania is the region south of Rome, with coastal cities facing the Tyrrhenian Sea and mountainous inland villages. The capital city is Naples. Trains and buses go to most towns, but a rental car is best for exploring.
LODGING: Agriturismo (farmhouse) inns are popular, and there are lots of choices. See the recommendations in Carla Capalbo’s book, “The Food and Wine Guide to Naples and Campania.” More listings are at agriturismo.it/campania and campaniaagriturismo.it.
MORE INFORMATION: Contact the Italian Government Tourist Board at 310-820-1898, or see italiantourism.com/campania.html. Barbara Goldfield and Federico Studer operate Savour the Sannio, a tour company that arranges sightseeing, wine and food tours and cooking classes throughout the area. Call 011-39-0823-953663, or see savourthesannio.com. There’s detailed info in English on Calitri at calitri.net.