Each time I return to Italy, I am struck, on the one hand, by how chaotic much of daily life can feel, especially when it comes to city driving, and, on the other hand, the keen sense of ritual and mindfulness that exists around food. This contrasts so sharply with how I’ve been raised as a North American, where food is often wedged in between fixed time commitments and planned activities. In southern Italy in particular, even daily activities are generally specified not so much around fixed clock time, but around their relationship to a mealtime, and nowhere in southern Italy is this sense of ritual more distinct than around the daily noontime meal known as “pranzo.”
Yesterday, we drove to the village of San Paolo Albanese, a community tucked in the “instep” of southern Italy’s boot in the region known as Basilicata, surrounded by the largest national park in Italy, Il Parco Nazionale di Pollino. This is the smallest village in the region (population 328), and it was founded in 1534 as a village of ethnic Albanians who fled here following the incursion of the Ottoman Empire in Albania and Greece. Village residents speak both Italian and Albanian: the version of Albanian they speak is called Arbëresh, and is essentially a sixteenth century version of Albanian, crystallized in time, transmitted orally for almost five centuries in this village. After visiting a hat shop and a museum, we were escorted to the kitchen of Nicoletta Sas for pranzo.
We were served southern Italian staples such as fresh pecorino cheese, prosciutto, and large chunks of tender semolina bread for the “aperitivo,” grilled salted eggplant under olive oil and garlic for our side (“contorni”), and a red house wine in a decanter to wash it down. But our main dish, a “pepperonata” with red and green peppers, sweet Italian sausage, garlic and onion and then coated in egg yolk, and the skinned, salted zucchini in spaghetti-like strands that we had for a side dish were, according to our chef Nicoletta, “puro Albanese” (pure Albanian). In fact, after our appetizer and side dishes, there was so much food, we “skipped” both the first course (pasta) and second course (meat), and jumped straight to desert (fresh apricots) and coffee.
After the meal, Nicoletta’s song offered us a house made “grappa” (a type of distilled wine or vernaccia) on the house, and we shared stories. Tall, slender, with pale skin and jet black hair, he is also, it turns out, a politician, a lawyer, and a former coordinator of study abroad programs for students at Italian universities traveling to Albania, Turkey, and surrounding countries. After twenty years in Rome, he decided to return to live in San Paolo, now commuting twice a week back and forth to Rome to work, a drive of some 4 ½ hours, each way. As he described this choice: “In Rome, you’re just a number. In San Paolo, you’re a person.”
We then switched to discussing food, and the significance of not just eating as a mechanical function of caloric intake, but of really eating. “Once a day,” he said, “we eat.” Once a day, he went on to explain, the onlything we are expected to do is eat, in ritualized fashion, and in community with others. It relaxes you, it’s the fixed point in your day, and everything else is arranged around that fixed point, symbolically and logistically. Returning to the topic of his decision to move back to San Paolo and begin the commuting live between country and city, he ended by saying three times, with a heightened expression of tenderness and joy on his face: “E qui, c’é la mamma chi cuoca” (and anyway, here, there’s the mother that cooks for you.)
Thank you to: Nicoletta Sas, the comune of San Paolo Albanese, and the restaurant, “Il Giardino delle Rose,” for their hospitality and for permission to share these photographs.