[Idyllchat] article about Puglia, Italy

[Julie Phillips]

Just read this and thought I'd pass it along to any Italy Untourists --
+julie

By Giovanna Dell'Orto
Associated Press
POLIGNANO A MARE, Italy — Puglia has some of the brightest seas, most
diverse art and architecture, most mouthwatering peasant cuisine and kindest
people in all of Italy - including strangers who will go out of their way to
lead you to one after another stunning beach on impossibly lapis-lazuli
waters.
Puglia is the heel to Italy's boot, and after two weeks spent touring the
region, I felt grateful that charter airlines don't disgorge hordes of
tourists here. These are just some of the reasons:

BRILLIANT SEAS — "I said put it back, this is a natural park," a stern
father told his son. He was pointing to the octopus that sat with protruding
eyes on the boy's shoulders after being plucked from the crystalline waters
at Natural Maritime Reserve of Torre Guaceto, just north of Brindisi.
With more than 500 miles of coast on two seas, the Adriatic and the Ionian,
Puglia has all sorts of gorgeous beaches. For white limestone cliffs spotted
with the deep green of gnarled pine trees, try the southernmost tip of
Salento.
At opposite ends of this peninsula, I swam in the fingerlike cove of Porto
Badisco, where legend has it that Italy's mythological founder, Aeneas,
landed, and I dove even deeper into history at Portoselvaggio, where remains
of Neanderthal men were found.
A few miles north, it's all about sandy expanses, like Punta della Suina,
where the setting sun turns the transparent water pink.
But it's Torre Guaceto that gets my gold medal — for the baby-powder white
sand, the schools of silvery fish flitting from reef-like rock formations in
pools of turquoise water, and the scent of pine needles drifting from the
pristine forest that borders the beach.

LIVING HISTORY — No other image says Puglia better than the trullo, a rural
home that's essentially a whitewashed teepee of small limestone slabs
stacked without mortar, with a cone surmounted by pagan or religious
symbols. They are scattered among olive groves and huge prickly pear cacti
in the Valle d'Itria, inland in a triangle between Bari, Taranto and
Brindisi.
Of unknown origin and unique to Puglia, they date at least from the Middle
Ages. Most are still inhabited and more than 1,400 huddle in Alberobello.
The town might feel a bit too touristy for Puglia, with its souvenir shops
exhibiting plastic trulli, but it only takes a look at the clotheslines in a
trullo backyard to realize that real life goes on in this primitive
fairytale place.
Farther inland is the Murge, scorched highlands grooved by canyons where, in
the Middle Ages, people built cave dwellings as homes and churches when they
fled from pirates.
The most famous dwellings of all are the Sassi in Matera, which is just
across the state line in the Basilicata region. Below the modern town and
built on the side of a steep ravine, two whole neighborhoods of single-room
cave dwellings and rock-hewn, frescoed churches were inhabited first by
hermits and then by families until the 1960s. While some are now trendy
hotels and restaurants, they still look so authentically ancient that Mel
Gibson filmed scenes here for "The Passion of the Christ."

CITIES AS ART — Art is not a masterpiece in a museum but a whole downtown in
Valle d'Itria cities like Locorotondo, or, by the coast, in Bari, Ostuni and
Lecce.
Locorotondo is a round nest of a village where everything is white except
for the bright splashes of red flowers that overtake its wrought-iron
balconies. Ostuni is even more blinding, though a sea breeze caresses you as
you hike up and down its steep inclines and marvel at the sculpted baroque
portals on its whitewashed houses.
But you haven't seen Baroque in all its theatrical, indulgent, luxuriant
excess until you've spent an evening among the wreaths of fruit and the
pinup women sculpted on the golden limestone churches and palaces of Lecce.
By comparison, the medieval downtown of Bari is austere, centered on the
Basilica di San Nicola, built between the 10th and 12th centuries to honor
its patron saint (yes, it's the real St. Nicholas, "Santa Claus").
The busy port city is trying to overcome its dangerous reputation, but the
only person that chased us in the narrow alleys was a grocery store clerk
with a cold bottle of water, concerned that ours had become too warm as
friends and I waited for another clerk to make our sandwiches.

ART GEMS — Medieval masterpieces are everywhere on the eastern coast,
beginning with the inscrutable Castel del Monte. We know the octagonal
castle was built by Emperor Frederick II, one of the most powerful men in
the Middle Ages, in the early 13th century. But nobody quite knows why.
Isolated on a small hill, it lacks both the architecture and the location
for a military fort, and it's way too imposing to be a pleasure palace. The
most evocative hypothesis is that it was an intricate symbol, built around
the magic intersection of astronomy, mathematics and the Christian faith.
Traveling south, the Romanesque cathedrals at Trani and Otranto seem to rise
from the sea. The latter's floor is covered by a mosaic from 1165
representing the tree of life, a hopeful message in the site of a massacre —
a chapel houses the remains of the 800 citizens who were slaughtered in the
church where they had fled an assault by Islamic armies in 1481.
Puglia, like most of southern Italy, has been conquered over and over by
northern and Mediterranean armies since Greek colonizers established
flourishing city-states on its coasts. More than 2,500 years later, their
heirs still speak Griko, a dialect of archaic Greek, in the inland Grecia
Salentina.

OCTOPUS TO FIGS — I'll admit that the powerfully alcoholic red Salentine
wine played a role in my dancing the pizzica pizzica, the local version of
tarantella, one night in the streets of tiny Serrano.
But the food that went with it at the farmers' fair was just as worthy of
celebrating, including Puglia's staple, orecchiette (ear-shaped pasta), as
well as horse meat steaks, ciceri e tria (handmade tagliatelle with garbanzo
beans), fave e cicoria (pureed fava beans and chicory), cakes spilling over
with figs.
Meat, grilled or cured, reigns inland, nowhere more spectacularly than at
Cisternino in trulli land. At night, the absurdly numerous butchers of this
whitewashed village set up tiny tables on the sidewalks and cook to order
whatever you select from their marble counters, preceded by minuscule black
olives, homemade cheeses and salami.
Seafood, including delicacies like octopus and sea urchins, rule the coast
in hole-in-the-wall trattorie like Nonna Tetti in Lecce. I had a hard time
finishing pignata di polpo there, when the whole octopus was brought to me
in a clay pot — especially since I had already had mozzarella di bufala,
fried vegetables, and linguine with mussels.
I needed similar endurance when gratitude compelled me to start my last
dinner in Puglia with a humble pizza margherita. This must be the only
region in Italy where the tomato-and-mozzarella staple of generations of
students and workers still only costs about $2.50.
Puglia is Italy's top olive oil producer, so, for 660 miles. back to
northern Italy, I carried a three-gallon tank of thick olive oil in front of
my car seat, sheltering it from the sun that for two weeks hadn't stopped
blazing and that pervades every facet of life here.
I kept thinking about a verse from an Italian poem that was used on an old
tourism ad for southern Italy. Roughly translated, it was something like
this: "No earthly hope can give my heart peace as much as the certainty of
sun that overflows from your sky."
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.dca.net/pipermail/idyllchat/attachments/20070426/837fce45/attachment.htm