Pagan heaven in Puglia
Brendan O’Connor
ABOUT once a week I try to recreate the simple pasta dish that Rocco taught me. I know it will never be like his was — but each week it is a different approximation of it. So I’m circling around it.
But then I don’t have the sweet little Puglian tomatoes he had, the quality of fragrant fresh basil he had, and I don’t have time either, to hand make my orecchiette, the way we did that day.
What I do have is the oil. Until it ran out just before Christmas. I kept the few cans of oil I had smuggled home from Puglia specifically for that dish, so that every time we had it there was a little bit of that magical place in the food.
And it is magical. I actually felt from the moment we landed in Bari that this was the place. This was the Italy I had been searching for. No wonder they say all Pugliese come home eventually. Nowhere else could seem as nice. In ways it reminded me of Ireland in a bygone age but with sun.
Where we were, just down the coast a bit from Bari, which is a short enough and cheap Ryanair flight from Dublin, was largely agricultural land. But it was beautiful and dramatic. Rows of olive trees stretching into the flat distance, some of them are nearly 3,000 years old, and their gnarled, twisted crooked timber is like a visualisation of time itself.
I gather they used to send these trees around Italy to order. So if you were building a posh house in Milan, you would get one of these trees uprooted from where it had grown since before Christ was born, and you would plant it in your posh garden as a sort of living sculpture, to add a bit of texture and the patina of time to your decor. Now apparently they are protected, microchipped, and not allowed to move.
Another common sight over the old stone walls were groups of people out carefully planting seedlings by hand. It almost looked as if it was put on for the tourists.
And everywhere there were things growing, from cavolo nero to artichokes. It really was like travelling back in time. Straightaway you felt attuned to a different speed and a different way of living. The famous Trulli — the conical stone houses — in the fields added to the idyllic, otherworldy atmosphere.
It helped that our three nights would be spent in a most beautiful property. Borgo Egnazia is totally new but is built in the manner of an old Puglian village.
It was September, and while the weather was still like the best summer day ever in Ireland, it was harvest time, so the main building, which is largely for adults only, was full of displays of mother nature’s bounty.
As we walked through it, you got that first sense that while these people were ostensibly Catholic, they still had that pagan, pantheistic nature that we used to have in Ireland. It was earthy, and slightly unsettling.
It wasn’t until later in our stay that the whole thing would go full Wicker Man — but we’ll get to that.
As a family we were staying in one of the little houses in the village. While they were built and decorated to feel like old village houses, they had, cleverly built in, all the trappings of 21st Century tech and luxury. But all the time you felt surrounded by nature. If Puglia is heaven, this is the best address
‘It wasn’t until later that things would go full “Wicker Man”’
in heaven. Everything here works in sympathy with nature. There’s a private beach for example, where they will drive you in a golf buggy whenever you want to go — but it’s not a manicured sandy beach. Instead you lie on the grass next to a rocky cove with several sets of steps in and out.
You never feel the sterile grip of bland international hotel culture. You feel you are staying in a real place, with real texture to it, but they have grafted on everything you could need.
So after you bounce around in the sea, you can go and eat fresh seafood and drink cold wine in their largely open-air restaurant right next to the cove.
There’s a sandy beach with a playground too if that’s more your speed, and they’ll drive you down safari-style in an old Land Rover.
They encourage you to engage with nature and the local area as well. I’m not usually one for doing the excursions, but the drive on a golf cart up to a neighbouring farm to watch Omer making mozzarella and burrata before your eyes and then eating the very cheese he made, while sitting outside looking at the sheep and goats was a fantastic experience.
And while the farm was clearly a popular spot with tourists, it smelt like a real farm, and the locals who mooched in and out to buy their fresh cheese while we were there, were presumably real as well.
I think it’s down to the warmth of the people that you never feel like a tourist in Puglia, but that you are a guest who has been invited into their home.
The cookery class wouldn’t be something I’d always do either, but Rocco made it a jolly affair and there is a great satisfaction when you get the flick just right and make your first proper ‘little ear’ from dough you’ve kneaded yourself, and then the whole gang cooked together and ate together.
While we didn’t have a huge