On Wednesday, May 29th, we woke up refreshed and had a nice breakfast on the roof of the Hotel Esplanade. Then we drove three hours through little Molise and into big Puglia by way of Foggia, the ancestral home of Melissa's paternal grandmother as well as some of my high school friends from Milford (there's a Foggiano Club on the hill where two of my brothers live). Foggia suffered badly in the Second World War, and little remains of historical or artistic interest. It's in a plain just west of Monte Gargano, which forms the spur of the Italian boot. We took a look around and then, like so many others, we got out of Foggia.
Our real goal of the day was a deep dive into some of the important history, scenery, and food traditions of northern Puglia. On Thursday we would continue to the beautiful south, but there's much to experience in the hills of Murgia in northern Puglia area, with Bari as the major city.
This part of Puglia is the original home of burrata, the delicious product made of stracciatella and clotted cream enclosed in a ball of stretched cow's milk mozzarella. It was invented in the early 20th century in the town of Andria, and it is a PGI protected product in Italy, although now it is widely produced in America. Burrata is all about freshness; it must not age and get tangy. Originally it was all produced in Andria, and it would be be shipped with a long narrow leaf of local asphodel tied around the neck. This was a simple mechanism to ensure freshness - if the leaf was wilted, the burrata was not fresh! So I wanted to get the freshest, most authentic burrata of my life, at the Caseificio Montrone in Andria, one of the most well-regarded makers in Puglia.
When I first learned of burrata, it was from a work colleague who knew how to get it: in the 2000s it was not yet made here, indeed it was hardly known. The Salumeria Italiana, on Richmond Street in the North End, got a small shipment on Thursday mornings flown in from Naples. They took no names, it was first-come-first-served, but I was successful on a few attempts and so got to share it with some friends. Now I was at the source, the place where I could get the freshest of this icon of fresh dairy goodness! (Remember that I had turned down the waiter's proud offer of the burrata d'Andria on that first night in Venice, planning to get it in Andria.) We arrived just before closing time, and I asked them to pick out a good fresh one for me. Then I packed it in a cooler for lunch.
Lunch was a very special event! Since October I had been taking weekly Italian language and culture lessons from Federica Martino, a Puglia native who now lives in Quebec City. Lorna and I had met her in Quebec on our annual trip up there for Lorna's birthday. Federica's dad, Rocco, still lives in Puglia, and he took us to lunch at La Tradizione, in the pretty hillside town of Minervino della Murgia, 30 minutes from the caseificio. What an experience that was! Platter after platter of local specialties were brought out, with special attention to the vegetarian and pescatarian preferences of Melissa and Lorna.
The lunch was a two-and-a-half-hour feast: we enjoyed endless Puglian appetizers including mixed grilled veggies sott’olio (under oil) with fresh mozzarella for Lorna and Melissa and a similar plate for Rocco & me that added Puglian smoky soppressata and prosciutto, another plate with two more local cheeses (caciocavallo & fresh ricotta), plates of grilled asparagus with and without prosciutto, “meatballs” of fried cime di rapa (broccoli rabe), fava beans, and lampascione (the bulb of a local wild hyacinth) that I had read about and seen pickled in local markets, but these were fresh, braised and tender. Rocco and the server were astonished that I recognized them.
We continued with the main part of the meal: grilled peppers in terracotta with sausage for Rocco and me, and without sausage for Lorna and Melissa, then Troccoli (fat spaghetti) with eggplant, cherry tomatoes, ricotta salata and ceci neri. The ceci neri were new to me and it took a little while for Rocco, and then the server, another server, and finally the chef to explain to me that they're intensely flavored little black dried chickpeas used as a seasoning. You can see one pushed over to the right side of the pan in this photo. I plan to order some online for a Puglian dinner of my own.
We finished with assorted biscotti (in Italian, biscotti are all cookies and the ones that we call biscotti are amaretti) and lemon sorbet; these were accompanied by an aromatic and delicious local liquore di mandorle (a local pinkish almond liqueur) and housemade limoncello. It was a little funny to see the limoncello in such a dedicated locavore place. Limoncello is really a specialty of Sorrento, a few days in our travel future, but if you've been to Italy then you know the stuff is inescapable, and if you've just had a big (especially expensive) meal at a restaurant in Italy you might very well get little glasses of limoncello at the end of the meal, gratis. And this one was housemade, so it was a locavore version of that ubiquitous liqueur.
Finally, with some ceremony, they brought out that super-fresh burrata d'Andria from Caseificio Montrone that I had bought just before lunch. It did not disappoint! The outside was thin and tender and the inside was creamy two ways; the strands of stracciatella were very tender and the clotted cream was thick enough to make is almost homogeneous. The burrata that we get in American supermarkets are manufactured typically in Vermont or Wisconsin and travel hundreds of miles before we ever get them. Mozzarella House in Peabody makes an excellent burrata, but even with that fairly local product you have to check the date and it won't be "this afternoon"!
After lunch, Rocco ensured that we would not starve by gifting us some local taralli biscuits for the drive, and an excellent local wine to enjoy at a worthy hotel. We drove 30 minutes through miles of olive trees to the ancient battlefield of Cannae, but it was closed and chained. I had expected that anyway, it was past 5:00 and we still had ample daylight for exploring. So we continued 40 minutes to the awesome hexagonal Castel del Monte, built by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the 1240s and still in great condition, with fine views all around it.
I had hoped to get to Altamura, a town famous for bread baking, but by the time we got there the bakeries would be closed, so we headed into Bari.
Bari is the biggest city in Puglia and the second-biggest in southern Italy after Naples. It's ancient; it was an important port of Magna Grecia until the third-century BC when it became Roman. I had been here in 1995, but it was a very different experience as a poor student.
As is common in Italian cities, there's an old town within the old stone walls, and the modern city beyond the walls. You can only take a car into the old city for a short time to unload at your hotel, and the entrance to the hotel might be fairly distant from a legal parking space. We schlepped our luggage to the hotel and arrived just before the front desk was to close for the night at 8pm! That was the first of many frustrations with the Palazzo Calò and we won't return there. Then I parked the car at a garage in the new city and walked back to the hotel. The part for the new city that I walked through was full of shopping and dining, but there were many chains and name brands. It felt like a giant mall and I was happy to get back through the stone gate to the old city.
The old city is a charming maze of narrow alleys connecting busy piazzas with shopping and outdoor dining. Melissa was tired so Lorna and I went out exploring. Without Melissa we were free to dine at the fishiest places on offer, and Bari has many. We were amazed at the offerings at La Cantina dello Zio, and had fun selecting from the huge trays of fin-fish and shellfish on ice. Behind me, I heard a frustrated Englishman, one of a large party, asking hopefully if they had any main courses that were not seafood, but they did not. Nevertheless we enjoyed our dinner.
Passeggiata is an Italian tradition, an evening walk in a scenic area. The streets of Bari Vecchia certainly qualify and we walked a long time before returning to the hotel, exhausted.