Extra Virgin

by Annie Hawes

  When I’ve finally got myself and Antonietta and both our May Day bouquets – couldn’t resist it, I’m afraid – back down to camp without being challenged by any plain-clothes Forest Guards or eco-warriors, I look back up at the hillside. There must be a good 150 people up there wandering to and fro amongst the broom and the juniper, all trying to look nonchalantly as if they’re doing something not in the least connected with gathering narcissi.

  Time for Ciccio to mastermind a banquet over a pair of bonfires. This is a highly competitive mass-eating event, and he is on his mettle. He has amalgamated everyone’s provisions, and now has us all rushing around following his instructions. By the time we sit down for our extremely glamorous lunch, I am sure half the hillside must be looking on with envy. A selection of antipasti; home-made pasta, bright green with nettle-tips (a bit of a cheat, this one, he made it earlier in his restaurant) with a sauce of four melted cheeses; about fifteen varieties of grilled and marinaded meats for the second plate, and something fabulous and creamy which turns out, surprisingly, to be made of chicken gizzards. My feeble-hearted sister, deeply disturbed to discover she’s eaten rather a lot of gizzards before anyone told her what they were, can’t handle another course: but I’m on such good form that I can even handle Nutella pancakes next. Made by Bruno and Patrizia: Ciccio despises desserts.

  One member of the party, Testone, Big-Head, also known as Nello, who has eaten hardly anything, keeps disappearing off behind the nearest clump of juniper bushes and throwing up loudly. His friends, mysteriously, seem more disapproving than supportive in this digestive crisis: they mutter angrily among themselves at each vomiting session, take it in turns to go and sit by him, speaking to him in a hectoring undertone, while he lies about in a heap with drooping eyelids, horribly pale, scratching. Monica, his girlfriend, goes and sits alone behind the shelter and cries.

  Eventually Mimmo lets us into the secret. Heroin. Testone has let his friends down. The older ones, Mimmo himself, Paletta, Ciccio have mounted a major effort to help him get off the stuff: lots of people messed about with it, says Mimmo, when they were teenagers and knew no better. They lost a good few friends to the habit; dead from overdoses or transformed into whingeing wrecks of their former selves. That is why everyone is being so stern with Testone. Last night, after a month of good behaviour, he escaped the surveillance of his elders and betters and disappeared for five hours. He is suspected of having driven hell-for-leather down the motorway to Genoa or Nice and bought himself a load of roba. He denies this hotly, but the symptoms speak for themselves.

  At last: one of the famous drogati. But Testone is utterly unlike our image of a junkie; he is neat and tidy, looks well-fed and groomed… no wonder we haven’t spotted any of the much-advertised heroin addicts who roam the countryside so far. Now we see the explanation: of course, living at home like everyone else here, with a mother to feed and clothe and launder you, a family to cover up for you and finance you whenever crisis threatens, how would you get yourself into the sort of filthy spotty gutter-draping state we are used to seeing in the Independent British Junkie? Poor Italian parents.

  By mid-afternoon the place is beginning to look like some multi-generational music festival without the bands. Gay Pride without the outfits. A Hyde Park rally without the politics. But our focus is not a stage or a platform: it is a dense blue nothingness. Sitting on the grass, with the valleys foreshortened by height, there seems to be nothing at all beyond the green rim of the meadow but endless blue sky and immense blue sea.

  I wander over to Domenico, standing right on the edge of the meadow deep in conference with Pompeo, Giacò and two other unknown men; one is another old Partisan crony of theirs called, improbably, Bue: Ox. The other, Epifanio, shakes my hand and tells me he spent four years in England, from 1942 to 1946; he was taken prisoner by the British in the North African desert.

  You must have eaten a lot of potatoes, then, I say, bracing myself for an outpouring about the horrors of life with no pasta asciutta. But no. Luckiest thing that ever happened to him, he says. In those days hunger in Italy was such that regular food in sufficient quantities was all anyone would ask. He loved it. And he was proud, once Italy had changed sides, to be requested to do some important work for the British Army.

  Intelligence work? Liaising with his mates in the Ligurian Partisans? Pinpointing motorbike drops in the olive groves?

  No, says Epifanio. Cooking.

  Did I say no politics? I was wrong. Standing here on the edge of the prato, you can see below, not more than a mile away, the onion dome of Deglio Faraldi’s church. Between us and Deglio, on another, lower set of meadows separated from us by a steep wilderness of juniper shrub, another huge crowd of people are junketing around another lot of bonfires: the Faraldi valley’s May Day event. Our grey-headed gang, silhouetted against the endless blueness, are busy discussing Faraldi’s inadequacies. No football pitch, Giacò is saying, not anywhere in the whole valley.

  Pompeo shakes his head sadly. In all the fifteen years of its existence, he tells us, no team from that valley of Christian Democrat cretins has ever won the Diano San Pietro Football Trophy.

  They have nowhere to practise, says Giacò.

  Exactly! agrees Pompeo, perversely.

  (Perhaps I have not mentioned the Diano San Pietro Football Trophy? It is held on the football pitch down beyond the cemetery, between the bar and the olive mill. In a year or two it will get itself a set of eyeball-rending Communist floodlights, and its own proper bar: and will be transformed into the Diano San Pietro Nocturnal Football Trophy, inaugurated with much pomp and splendour, to the great mortification, no doubt, of all Christian Democrats.)

  An outbreak of gesticulating and Mah! ing from the Ox, who has been glaring downhill for some time. What is so Mah!-worthy now? A priest has appeared to officiate at the Faraldi event. Red rag to a bull. Christian Democrats! says Pompeo with deep scorn. Do we know that there are still people ploughing with oxen in that valley? A thing that hasn’t been seen for a good twenty years in progressive Diano San Pietro! Poor saps!

  Only a moment ago I was wondering why, what with how close we all are to one another, the May Day events of both valleys had not been amalgamated. Now I see that there is no point in asking. But in the interests of anthropological research, I do ask why everyone in the Diano valley is so committed to coming all the way up here on May Day, at such cost to their transport.

  Because it’s International Workers Day, of course, says Giacò.

  Yes, I say, but why up here at the top of the mountain, up this awful road, particularly?

  People have always come up here, says Pompeo.

  Since before the Christian Church even existed, says Giacò, with another glare at the priestly interference down below. I suspect he’s right. Surely Bormano himself once had a finger in this pie. As if to confirm the rite-of-spring theory, as the afternoon wears on to dusk and the elders, relaxed by food, wine and altitude, become less vigilant, the youth of both valleys begins sneakily commingling on the prickly slopes between Communism and Christian Democracy.

  Margaret Mead would have been interested: the young of the two tribes getting to know one another, with (as she might have seen it) a view both to genetic variety and to forging new and useful social links between communities. Though it seems unlikely that Pompeo’s lot would agree that any link, marital or otherwise, with the brain-dead Christian Democrats next door could be of any use whatsoever.

  Still, as darkness falls and faces are no longer identifiable by the eagle-eyed relatives, the amount of canoodling going down on the slopes of no man’s land suggests that the young folks have their own ideas. This will be the millennia-old equivalent of a night in the English pub. In the good old days you only got to do it once a year.

  Down those twelve only-too-familiar hairpin bends we buzz, and back up another less familiar five on the other side of the valley; mounted on our trusty motorini, we have come to track down that nettle pasta to its source.<
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  Outside Ciccio’s restaurant, at the far end of a cobbled terrace, a pair of old men are (naturally) playing cards under a shady vine. At the near end a couple of youths watch the football on a large TV perched high under a patio roof. And in the no man’s land between Youth and Age, a pair of holiday-making German couples sit foreignly in full sun, a carafe of wine on their table, waiting for their lunch. The sister and I, fence-sitters, make for a table in the dappled shade by the riverbank.

  But no! no! We are guests of the house. We must come and eat indoors with Ciccio and gang, join the staff lunch. Sun-dappled terraces being a lot more to our taste than dim, echoing halls, we are not overjoyed. Still, there it is. Offwe go, along with the football watchers, into the reverberating gloom where a good dozen people are already seated, talking at the top of their voices. All at once, as usual.

  Considering that the four Germans outside are now the only lunch guests actually paying for the privilege, Ciccio’s attitude to them is oddly hostile. He mutters under his breath whenever he has to abandon his plate to see to their needs: he sulks and glowers when they want more wine or Parmesan.

  I am getting sick of all the nonsensical chauvinism in these hills. Surely Ciccio’s own sufferings as a (notional) Calabrese should have alerted him to the idiocy of such stuff? What, I ask, have these poor Germans done to deserve such grumpiness?

  What have they done? Is it not obvious? No Italian would dream of turning up at a restaurant at two-thirty! By now the lunch service ought to be over, the staff sitting down to their own meal in peace. Only Germans would turn up at such an ungodly hour, and not even bother to apologize!

  Phew. Luckily for us, everyone has assumed that we came at this late hour specially to join the lunch for staff and friends. Should we admit the truth? No. We’re too cowardly.

  How horribly similar is the behaviour of Germans, now dissected in great detail by our Italian friends, to the behaviour of the English. English who have not been forewarned, that is. Firstly, they never eat a proper decent meal. Is this because they don’t like spending money? Or because they don’t like eating? Opinion is divided. Look how skinny they all are! Probably both, says Ciccio, certainly a fine figure of a man himself. This lot have been coming for a meal at least once a day, sometimes twice, for over a week now, and they’re as tight-fisted as any Ligurian. Either just a plate of pasta, or just a secondo. When they have the pasta, they eat so much Parmesan with it that it costs the restaurant as much as if they’d had a main course anyway. Twice they’ve had the antipasti, the most troublesome course to make, a thing no Italian would dream of asking for unless they were planning to pay for a full-blown dinner – and then said they weren’t hungry any more!

  Here I feel there is nothing for it but to break with hypocrisy and stand up for the poor Germans – didn’t we ourselves never get beyond the antipasto course for a good week? Pointless. How could anyone not understand? You can see at a glance how much work has gone into preparing all those separate titbits.

  Bravely, I continue my attempt to explain the bizarre ways of ignorant foreigners. Have they considered that Germans, like my own race, might not realize that in Italy the pasta course is considered a mere preparation for the main course? In England, I say, bracing myself for the scorn I know is about to be heaped upon me, we eat pasta as a main dish – a secondo piatto. We put lots more sauce and meat and stuff on it than you do, that’ll be why the Germans use so much cheese, not necessarily because it’s free.

  I get some confirmation from Ciccio here; a frequent feature of Germans’ vile behaviour is the way they ask for salads with their pasta. Sometimes even cooked vegetables. A groan of horror rises from the throats of the assembled friends and relations.

  Wasted breath. This generation may have broken with tradition in all sorts of ways, be stern critics of small-town hypocrisy, of mindless clinging to tradition in matters like divorce, abortion, leaving home before marriage, drug-use, and practically everything else, but notions of Proper Eating are graven in stone. The thought of people eating pasta all mixed up with stuff rightly belonging to later courses is shocking and appalling.

  Now, as the hapless customers in the garden order another dose of house wine, we move on to Foreigners and Drink. Germans, says Ciccio, returning from delivering their third carafe, may not know how to eat, but they certainly have no trouble drinking. They pour wine down their necks like there is no tomorrow. Everyone joins in on this one with gusto. Germans seen getting through glass after glass of wine at seafront bars in the afternoon! Germans on the beach swigging at it from the bottle! Germans who finish eating and then sit till the small hours in restaurants drinking wine till they’re legless!

  Poor Germans! Here they are thinking that they’re in a country where wine-drinking is practically de rigueur, where free and easiness prevails – while behind their backs all this horrified muttering is going on. Most perplexing. We are entirely certain that we’ve seen each and every one of our fellow eaters well over the limit on alcoholic beverages, and more than once; why are they suddenly talking like evangelizing teetotallers?

  Well, say I hopefully, might it not be a natural reaction to being on holiday, and in a land famous for its wine?

  Maybe, concedes Ciccio reluctantly, taking a long, thoughtful swig at his own (third? fourth?) glass…

  At our own table, we have got through two bottles of Pinot de Pinot, delicious champagne-like dry fizzy stuff, as our aperitivo, and are now on a great fat bottle of red, into which everyone is tucking heartily as they munch. Still, though it may escape us entirely, there is obviously some vital qualitative difference between the drinking at our table, and the drinking being done by the Germans.

  The solution to the mystery, fruit of years of diligent ethnological research, is as follows. In this part of the world civilized behaviour requires that you follow a set of very precise rules on your route to drunkenness. First and most important of them is that you regard everything you drink as, in a sense, medicinal. Before dinner (or, for that matter, lunch) you will drink an aperitivo – not, as you may think, a metaphorical opening to the meal, but, literally, a drink to open your stomach, to prime it for the dose of food it is about to receive (hence the terror provoked by our coffee-before-the-meal behaviour down in San Pietro). For an hour or two after six-thirty or so in the evening, or in the pre-lunch hour, it is perfectly fine to drink a glass of wine, or even two, in a bar. You are getting your stomach into starting position for the tidal wave of food that’s about to hit it. Red wine is acceptable if you are an aged olive farmer, or if it’s a vintage wine, but a fizzy white is best. Otherwise any of the proprietary Martini or Cinzano-type aperitifs. Or Campari. Or alcohol-free Aperol. Or there is Cynar, whose health-giving qualities are advertised on the radio by angelic voices singing the catchy little jingle ‘Cynar! A base di carciofo!’ – ‘It’s based on articho-okes’. At these stomach-opening times of day, bars always dole out a small portion of olives or peanuts or salty biscuits with your drink to protect your delicate digestive mechanisms. You may, if your stomach is particularly firmly closed, drink not one but two aperitivi: your waiter will begin to look askance if you order a third glass. Best just to go to another bar if you really want one. The lunchtime aperitivo dispensation lasts until one-thirty-ish, the evening one till around half-past eight, when you are presumed to have eaten already. Then the snacks are withdrawn: wine ordering becomes odd and stare-worthy again.

  Now you may begin your meal without fear of blockage or paralysis; and depending on the state of your digestion you may drink any amount of wine to help it along. Getting drunk is merely a by-product, fortunate or unfortunate, of the stomach’s need for wine, without which it will be unable to perform its digestive functions successfully. Once you’ve finished eating, you will also stop drinking wine. To finish off a bottle of wine just because it’s there, as do the dreadful Germans – fortunately the English are so under-represented round here that no one has any idea how disgusting ou
r own nation’s habits may be – is another indicator, along with the deceitful ordering of antipasti when you’re not planning to eat another two courses, of serious lowlifery. And as for another bottle once you’ve finished eating… outlandish. In every sense of the word.

  Food over, you should be drinking, along with your coffee, a lethally alcoholic digestivo, usually an amaro distilled from bitter herbs and exotic medicinal plants such as rababaro – rhubarb – preferably brewed by some obscure order of monks up some distant and inaccessible mountain. Perhaps you still have that not-quite-digested feeling? Not to worry – have a grappa. Country restaurants will leave the grappa bottle on your table so you can help yourself to as many as you need to keep those peristaltic waves flowing while you wait for the bill. (It won’t be long till one of our own guests is led badly astray by this grappa on the table business: What, so we could drink all of it if we wanted? Well, yes, I suppose we could. Martin does his best, but can’t quite manage to fit it all in. Now he goes one better than mere ill-mannered finishing of the wine: as we leave the restaurant we spot something clutched under his arm. The bottle of grappa. Extracting it from his vice-like grip we replace it firmly on the table. He is disgusted. Why can’t he take it? They’ve given it to us, haven’t they?)

  There are, of course, exceptions to these rules. Aged peasants are allowed to tipple wine all afternoon; extremely aged peasants may even drink it for breakfast, too. But they are a completely different category of person, and this kind of behaviour is viewed with tolerance as the natural reward for, and perhaps consequence of, a life of hard toil on the land. Understandably, given that most holidaying Germans (or indeed English) are evidently not aged peasants, the structurelessness of their wine-drinking is inexplicable and offensive.