SOUTHERN BEAUTY
In Puglia, the heel of Italy’s boot, HANNAH-ROSE YEE discovers a land of vineyards, ancient olive groves, and dream-like vistas.
In Puglia, Hannah-Rose Yee discovers vineyards, ancient olive groves, and dream-like vistas.
Here he is, Giorgio the cheesemaker, come to rescue my burrata.
To make the Pugliese specialty you need a pair of strong but nimble hands and a certain deftness in your wrist. I am equipped with neither. Giorgio watches as I take the milk, thickened with heat and acid whey, stretching it in my hands before peeling off a chunk to fill with a spoonful of stracciatella – those creamy, torn-up pieces of mozzarella that ooze lasciviously as soon as you pierce them. My big, clumsy fingers fumble with the opening of the burrata, struggling to twist it closed. This is when the cheesemaker takes my hands in his and, like some kind of Italian Patrick Swayze in Ghost, guides me through each movement. Stretch, pull, dollop, twist. He takes my burrata and plonks it into a bowl of water to cool. That’s lunch, everybody.
This small, family-run dairy farm just a short drive from Alberobello, a town in the middle of Puglia famous for its conicalshaped cottages, is fairly indicative of the culinary stylings of the region. The farm is run by just a handful of staff who make the cheese – big fat balls of burrata, the salty-sweet caciocavallo – for sale periodically throughout the week. If you’re having a party, call the cheesemaker and give him advance notice. He’ll prepare your burrata that afternoon, swiftly and with a great deal more skill than me, so that it’s ready for your table in the evening. You might serve it with a brace of tomatoes bursting with flavour and a dish of fava beans, mashed into a silky pulp, or maybe a bowl of salted chickpeas, sizzled until golden and crisp.
This is cucina povera, or peasant food. The Pugliese have been eating like this for centuries, favouring simple vegetable and pasta dishes supplemented with the occasional bit of local seafood or meat. It’s honest, hearty food that, courtesy of tourism interest overlapping with the boom in farm-to-table cooking, has made Puglia such a popular travel destination.
Italy has been a holiday hotspot for as long as there have been people taking vacations. What Puglia offers, courtesy of its spread of towns dotted across the heel of the country’s boot, is a little taste of everything that makes an Italian trip so sweet. You can swim at Polignano a Mare beach, sip natural wine at vineyards outside Lecce and taste olive oil harvested from 3000-year-old trees planted by the Romans. Sure, you could book your next holiday to Tuscany, but just think of the crowds. And Amalfi? You might as well set fire to a pile of money right now. Puglia has sun, sand and susumaniello, a variety of grape that makes for a very drinkable rosé. What more do you need?
“You go to different regions in Italy and they specialise in one thing or another,” says Max, our guide on my Luxury Escapes tour of the region. “Here, they have everything.” He means it: Puglia produces around 80 per cent of Europe’s pasta and 40 per cent of Italy’s olive oil. “Italians think they have the best food in the world, and all Italians when they’re on holiday go to the south of Italy. So you could argue that the south of Italy has the best food in Italy and, therefore, the best food in the world.”
My Luxury Escapes tour starts in Lecce, a city famous for its intricate baroque architecture and a delicious morning coffee ritual involving an icy shot of espresso sticky with almond syrup. The light in Lecce is creamy and fresh, bouncing off the limestone like a ping-pong ball. A few beads of sweat form on my forehead as Max and I hustle through Lecce’s cobblestoned streets after Gianna, Lecce’s chicest chef. Destination: the market.
Gianna leans her head forward, inspecting the morning’s produce. There’s an abundance of seasonal fruit and vegetables: the first artichokes of the year, waxy persimmons and quinces. “Ah,” she says, grinning, pointing at a bushel of red fruit strung up from the rafters. These, she explains, are winter tomatoes, a Puglia-specific variety with a firm skin, meaning they can stay ripe for a whole year when hung just so. She grabs a handful, along with some basil and garlic, and we’re off again in the direction of her kitchen. We’re going to make pasta.
The sauce is simple she explains, splashing some olive oil into a heavy pan. In go the wedges of garlic and the winter tomatoes, sliced in half. “That’s it,” she says, turning the heat as low as possible. She counsels me to ignore the pavlovian temptation to stir and let the heat and fat work their magic on the tomatoes. As they begin to sigh open in the pan, Gianna starts measuring out flour and water, the two ingredients needed to make pasta.
There’s a soothing, sensual rhythm to working pasta dough, not dissimilar to the pull-and-twist involved in preparing burrata. You pinch, knead and roll, rinsing and repeating until you have a firm, yellow dough. To make orecchiette, a curved, dish-like pasta shape from Puglia named after its similarity in appearance to an ear, you take a small cube of dough, press down with the
You can swim at Polignano a Mare, sip natural wine at vineyards outside Lecce and taste olive oil harvested from 3000-year-old trees planted by the Romans.
bottom of your knife, roll it out and then invert the shape by pushing it down onto your thumb. The deep ridges of orecchiette are perfect for retaining sauce, making it the kind of pasta you want to drench in glossy, salty, tomato juices.
I am as bad at making orecchiette as I am at making burrata. (Both require hand-eye coordination, of which I have none.) Marco, Gianna’s sous chef, surveys my misshapen orecchiette – less ear-shaped and more like sad, deflated balloons – grimly. Before long, he quite literally takes matters into his own hands and steps in to help me. “If you are struggling, I recommend to drink more wine,” Gianna says encouragingly, topping up my glass.
Now this, I am good at. Puglia is Italy’s largest winemaking region, producing 17 per cent of the country’s total vino output. In the past, this wine was produced in bulk and happily drunk by locals, rarely exported. But today, the Pugliese method of production – simple, using native grapes and biodynamic methods – is in demand across the world. There are four grapes worth noting: negroamaro, a red variety grown on the Salento coast; primitivo, a rich and spicy red; susumaniello, one for all the rosé lovers and grown mostly in the vineyards outside Lecce; and verdeca, light and chic, the kind of white wine the heroine of a Nancy Meyers film would drink by the bottle.
Puglia has always been sun-drenched and fertile, which is why it’s a particularly good place to make wine. But these are also particularly good conditions to make olive oil. It was the Romans who first realised that when they started planting trees up and down the Appian Way, the ancient road that connected Naples with Brindisi, 300 kilometres to the east. Their goal was fuel: olive oil powered light sources and tools, giving them the wherewithal to march down the world’s first super highway and set off, at Brindisi port, for destinations as far flung as the Balkans and Asia. Today, there are about 60 million gnarly and twisted olive trees in the region, all of which are protected by airtight laws. If you want to build a house on a piece of land bearing Roman olive trees, you better be prepared to build it in the shade of the grove. According to Pugliese law, no olive tree can be uprooted.
There are plenty of modern highways in Puglia today. But if you happen to be driving town to town, between the white-washed corners of Ostuni and the hills of Cisternino, say, you may find the quickest route is on the same 2300-yearold road that those Roman soldiers once marched down. As we speed along the Appian Way one morning, past fields of fennel and cime di rapa – that curly-leafed, bitter broccoli that goes so
“If you are struggling, I recommend to drink more wine,” Gianna says encouragingly, topping up my glass.
well with a plate of orecchiette – Max draws attention to certain trees that look withered and dry, their branches bearing no fruit.
These trees have been infected with Xylella, a deadly bacteria spread by insects that sucks out the liquid from olive trees, drying them to a husk. Once that happens, the plant will most likely never produce olives again. According to reports, more than 5000 square kilometres of Puglian land has been infected since 2013, with some 11 million trees believed to be at risk. There is no known cure.
The worst affected areas are down near Lecce, where scientists are on regular patrol, inspecting plantations for any hint of infection. Further north, in the dusty valleys outside Ostuni, the trees are healthier. So healthy, in fact, that when we visit one family-owned farm, workers are busy scooping purple-green fruits into baskets to be pressed. This masseria is the site of one of the region’s oldest olive trees, a wizened old crone of a bush propped up with bricks as it bends towards the sun. The whitewashed masseria building is home to a fascinating history of olive-oil production, with tools dating back to the Roman era. Today, the owner is a seventh-generation oil man, whose family has lived and worked on the property for more than 200 years.
In Puglia, they call olive oil liquid gold, but it’s actually kind of thick and green. Pour out a nip of highquality stuff – something in a heavy, dark glass bottle that bears the label extra-virgin – and you’ll see what I mean. Made from just-ripened fruit with only the faintest hint of purple blush, it should be smooth, yes, but also a little spicy and bitter, too. It should be complicated and evolve in your throat. It should be the kind of thing you want to douse a hunk of crusty bread in.
Back in Roman times, olive oil was the fuel of the region. Even today, the oil is still the thing, an agricultural endeavour pursued with a near-religious fervour. There are 240,000 olive farms in the area and olive trees outnumber people 15 to one. There’s a carafe of olive oil on practically every table, an olive tree in almost every backyard. In this, a region with more olive trees than square kilometres, you can’t look out a window and not see at least one, all sun-bleached trunk and sage-green leaves.
The bacteria hasn’t made it to Masseria Montenapoleone yet, a farmhouse hotel outside of Fasano, either. The trees here stretch as far as the eye can see and further still, feathered green leaves reaching out to touch the horizon. Owner Giuliano takes me on a walk through the property at dusk, when the air is still and heavy with the scent of lemon and rosemary, and the sun is gallantly protesting its bedtime like a raucous toddler. Finally, it bids farewell in a tantrum of orange and pink and blue. (Italy! Even the sunsets are dramatic.)
There’s a crisp kick to the breeze as we walk through Giuliano’s olive groves. He is explaining the importance of conservation. That, when it comes to the olive trees, Giuliano believes it is Masseria Montenapoleone’s vocation to nurture them for the next millennium and the one after that, just as the Romans did.
“We could talk about olive oil for another hour,” he jokes. “Olive oil and humans have been together for so long. Humans have to take care of the trees. That’s why we have trees that have been here for thousands of years.” He walks ahead of me on the path and for a second, as the horizon darkens, I lose sight of him amidst the tangle of olive trees, swaying in the wind.