Summer in the Islands: An Italian Odyssey

by Matthew Fort

This is why we come to Italy, I think. It’s for food like this, from just here, potent, unaffected, direct, everyday, in an everyday trattoria in an out-of-the-way village, where they just serve the dishes of this place and this season, mostly to people who know what the food of this place and this season should, and will, be. I admire chefs like Davide Scabin in Turin and Massimo Bottura in Modena, the high priests of Italian high cooking, but I love the food of places like Le Sorgenti, with their simplicity, assurance of long practice, directness, purity, balance and lack of affectation.

  ‘Making the cheese is the easy part,’ says Peppino Sanna. Peppino is one of the last cheesemakers to make Casilozu in the same way that his mother made it before him, from the milk of fifty or so dove-grey, suede-hide Sarda cattle, descendants of Modicana cattle brought over from Sicily 300 years ago. Silvery hair and beard frames a broad forehead and smiling eyes. He’s dressed in faded jeans, a polo shirt and green wellies; sensible, practical, working clothes rather than the antiseptic white coat and gauzy hairnet of most modern dairies.

  ‘When I am making cheese I am tranquil,’ he goes on. ‘It’s filling in all the forms that makes life difficult.’

  Peppino’s dairy is down a dusty track, about a kilometre from Paulilatino. Two loose-limbed, brindled dogs sleep in the sun in the yard outside. Beyond them is a vegetable patch with neat rows of tomato plants, frothy lettuces, stumpy beans. The dairy doesn’t look much from the outside, but the inside is a clean, shiny working space, with a tiled floor slick with water, stainless steel vats and coils of hose snaking across the floor.

  ‘I don’t make many cheeses at this time of year,’ he says. ‘There isn’t much grass for the cattle to eat.’

  The milk isn’t pasteurised, he explains as he slices yesterday’s compacted curd into thick strips. He dumps the slices into a large, blackened pot half filled with milk that’s heating over a gas ring. He stirs the cauldron with a wooden paddle until the strips suddenly coalesce into a white, molten mass.

  Swiftly Peppino transfers the mass to a terracotta bowl. As it cools, he begins to shape the top, crimping a bit to create a neck, and then allowing the mass of the cheese to drop slightly under its own weight, forming a giant white fruit. He tears off the top of the neck and tosses it into the pot with the hot milk. He moves the Casilozu to a bowl of cold water, makes a slip knot from a plastic tie, and slips it over the remaining neck of the cheese with deft fingers. He moves the fat, pear-shaped cheese to another tub containing salted water and hangs it from a stick resting just above the water, so that the cheese is completely immersed.

  It’ll stay there for several hours until it’s ready to be dropped into a smart red net bag and hung to age ‘for as long as you like. Some people like them fresh, after twenty days or so. Others like them aged for seven or eight months. The oldest I’ve tried was three years old. Very strong and spicy – piccante. The cheese varies through the year, depending on what the cows are eating. The best milk is between November and January, when the grass is richest.’

  To begin with it tastes quite mild, but I notice it has an elegant persistence, with shades of fresh grass, eucalyptus and almonds that deepen and harmonise as the cheese ages. Its character moves from initial understatement to subtle definition to rich satisfaction.

  Peppino also makes treccia, the fresh cheese I ate at breakfast; and fresa, a true raw milk cheese, flat and round as a curling stone. He sells his cheeses all over Italy, but times are hard. There’s La Crisi. And there are those damn regulations that interfere with the natural order of things.

  ‘You can only make good cheese by working with nature,’ Peppino says, twisting the next casilozu over the wooden paddle. ‘The bureaucrats work with paper, not nature.’

  Casilozu is an endangered species, even with the support of Slow Food. Like many artisanal food products, its producers are squeezed by the effort and hours required to make the cheese, the meagre financial rewards for doing so and bureaucratic interference. Unless we recognise the work, craft and passion that goes into cheeses like Casilozu and other products, and are prepared to pay for them, they and their makers will soon disappear.

  Giovani Ruffa pushes una birretta into my hand. Cold beer. The outside of the glass is misted with condensation. The beer evaporates in my throat. Pure bliss.

  The ride from Paulilatino had been gruelling. I left the village and the hospitable Sannas early in the morning, taking the pass that led over the Monte Ferru once more. I crossed the rice-growing flat lands around Oristano, passing within hailing distance of Cagliari, before looping southwest through the rugged hills of the Monti di Sulcis and the Monte Linas, where abandoned farmhouses carried graffiti, more polite than menacing, declaring ‘Attention Tourist: Sardinia is NOT Italy’. The road finally delivered me to Is Xianas, a tiny speckling of cottages outside Santadi in the bottom left-hand corner of Sardinia, among rolling, golden labrador-coloured, stubble-covered hills. It had been demanding, but full of curiosity and interest and seductive beauty. Several times I’d been tempted to linger along the way, but I promised that I’d be at Is Xianas for lunch and so at Is Xianas for lunch I am.

  I have three hosts, Giovanni Ruffa, Bruno Bego and Marco Bianchi, who are known to each other and to the outside world by their surnames, or in the case of Bruno by his nickname, Kibbutz. They all come from Asti in Piedmont, but have fallen in love with this obscure corner of the province of Carbonia-Iglesias, and have each bought a small holiday cottage here, which, little by little, they’re restoring between lunches and dinners and trips to the bar in nearby Santadi. They’re men of the left, or liberal at the very least, politically engaged, professional, and, while married or with long-term partners, are without their life’s companions in Is Xianis.

  More guests start arriving at 12.30 or so. Domenico, the baker, is the first to arrive. He’s a chap of commanding ebullience, as wide as he is tall and as thick through the chest as he is wide and tall. The porceddu, roast suckling pig, for lunch has been cooked in his wood-fired oven. Shortly after, Alberto Balia, the owlish newsagent in Santadi, arrives with his wife Sabrina, son Andrea and daughter Gloria, carrying guitars, and a friend, Daniel, from Argentina, with his wife.

  We begin with little jars of vegetables sott’olio – tiny broad beans; chanterelles and porcini mushrooms; artichoke hearts; olives; and, finest of all, wild asparagus – in oil, all made by Terre Shardana, a local producer. The jars are passed round and round, along with a board stacked with slices of cured pig fillet and bread for mopping up the oil. We eat the porceddu, which has been resting quietly beneath a mantle of myrtle leaves, the skin crunching like the thin caramel topping of crème brulée, the flesh fibrous, sweet, caressingly porky and gloriously greasy and carrying a ghost of astringent myrtle. Finally come cheeses of various levels of pungency and potency, the most gutsy being a sheeps’ cheese matured in the stomach of a lamb, like a lactic haggis. Everything eases along on a tide of wines from the co-op at Santadi. It’s one of those lunches, fluid in time and personnel. Conversation and laughter rise and fall like waves on the shore. I’ve only met Ruffa before, but it’s easy to sink down onto the billowing hospitality and easygoing warmth, to feel as if I’ve known these people for years.

  Domenico starts making animal and bird imitations – a raven, a crow, a fox – with unnerving accuracy. This leads to a song ‘B-B-B-B-Bicorni’ that we all end up chanting. God knows what it’s about. Antonio’s daughter produces launeddas, Sardinian pan pipes made of three single reed pipes. They make a noise that reminds me of the drone and chanter on the Highland bagpipes. Scotland and Sardinia. How odd. Perhaps there are musical links between the two. At about 4 p.m. Alberto and his son, Andrea, begin duetting on their guitars. Sabrina, Alberto’s wife, sings cantu a chittera, Sardinian folk songs, mournful and powerful. Daniel borrows Bianchi’s guitar and introduces South American rhythms to the jazz riffs and inflections of the other two.

  At some point sheep in a field behind the house begin a circular progress
around their domain, adding light chimes from the bells around their necks to the fluid music of the guitars. And so it goes on, wine, music, song, more wine. Time slips away. Then I slip away and fall asleep.

  I wake up around 6 p.m. Alberto and Daniel are still playing, but the sheep have settled down. As it’s beginning to get dark the party dissolves rather than ends. Ruffa, Kibbutz, Bianchi and I sit drinking and talking as the night quietly settles around us.

  Ruffa and Kibbutz return to Asti and I go off to explore Santadi and the land around; an abstract canvas of cereals, olive groves and vineyards, with the sea to the west and shaggy hills to the north, south and east. As its name suggests, Carbonia-Iglesias had once been prosperous thanks to coal mining. Mining and prosperity ended some years ago and Carbonia-Iglesias is now poor and times are hard.

  Everyone I speak to mentions la crisi, the Crisis. The Crisis, Italy’s continuing economic depression, is responsible for markets drying up, restaurants closing, the lack of disposable income to spend on food or consumer products or investment, and so on and so on. Barter has become a means of exchange again. But, after wandering around Santadi, I wonder how many towns in the UK of the same size – about 3,000 people – would support five butchers, five greengrocers, six bakers and God knows how many bars. I lose count.

  The nearest point to the sea is Porto Botte, about a forty-minute ride across the close-cropped coastal plain, past a line of beehives painted sun-faded terracotta, umber, yellow and pale sky blue; past orange and olive groves and vineyards and wineries; past the random hulks of old factories, abandoned plant and machinery spiky and stark; past farmyards with old-fashioned bales of hay stacked in teetering towers on trailers; past golden fields shimmering with ripe wheat with ploughed-up strips along their edges, a firebreak against a fag butt tossed carelessly from a passing car; and past the odd flock of sheep sheltering in the shade, cream shadows on the golden-brown fields.

  Porto Botte isn’t really a port at all, more a cluster of dishevelled buildings with a miscellaneous selection of leisure and fishing boats anchored along the curve of the sandy bay scruffy with stacks of dried Neptune Grass seaweed blown in by a recent storm. The multicoloured triangular sails of kite- and windsurfers whip across the shallow bay, piloted by lean young men in wetsuits leaping high into the air, twisting and turning.

  I find an upturned boat with a cracked turquoise bottom among the rough vegetation. It makes an agreeable office. I rest my back against it and jot in my notebook and watch the kite- and windsurfers. Away to my right an abandoned building – home? boathouse? fishing station? – stands on a spit of sand sticking out into the bay, dark, decrepit, brooding, mysterious, slightly sinister. Behind me is a shallow, brackish lake in which pink flamingos pick their dainty way, as absurd as they’re beautiful. Really, there are worse places to be and worse ways in which to spend one’s time.

  It wouldn’t be true to say that my journey so far had exceeded my expectations, because when I set out I didn’t have any expectations beyond a generalised hope that I would have a good time. I didn’t know what I’d find or what would happen. But serendipity, with the odd nudge from John Irving, has already provided me with an abundance of brilliance. Even soulless Stintino and Alghero have provided food for experience and thought.

  When I get back to Is Xianas, Bianchi’s partner Nadia has arrived and Bianchi is cooking dinner. Nadia, a teacher from Asti, is Bianchi’s partner. She’s trim and wiry with short blonde hair and big earrings. She radiates a kind of impatient energy and decisive intelligence. Her green eyes are as expressive as Gabriella Carfagna’s, but lean more towards the ironic, sceptical and downright incredulous. She and Bianchi bicker in affectionate habit, a wrestling match of personalities.

  Bianchi’s cooking prawns in a pan without butter or oil. He explains that any oil or butter would interfere with the flavour of the prawns. Nadia rolls her eyes at such peculiar particularity. He makes a risotto with crayfish broth left over from an earlier feast. After dividing the risotto between three plates, he dribbles a little olive oil over his. Nadia rejects this as heresy, provoking a lively debate. I try it and find that it gives smooth ease to each mouthful.

  We talk long into the night, about their lives, how they’ve known each other since… well… since for ever. Unfortunately, they had both married other people with unhappy results. But they always kept in touch, kept talking to one another. Finally they’d got together after their respective marriages had ended. Now they seem to have arranged their lives on an equable footing, embracing friendship, mutual support, affection and love, but without the more testing pressures of daily domestic proximity.

  The next day I walk in the woods of Pantaleo a few kilometres away, among wild olive and cork trees. Tiny starbursts of myrtle flowers, whiter than snow, explode against shiny dark leaves, and oleander as pink as strawberries and cream hangs over the path marked by the sere, brown husks of rock roses and euphorbias, lilies and stonecrop. There’s a cool breeze and the vigorous rasping of crickets, and the silent dance of butterflies into sunlight, into shade, out into the sunshine again. The warm air is suffused with myrtle, allspice, camomile, white pepper.

  I take a fork in the path, to the left, up the slope, looking for a path that might lead back to the road, and soon take another to the left, up and up. I come to a third fork and pause, sweat sluicing into my eyes. I have a drink and consider. I can remember following similar paths across the Monti Lucretili in other summers long ago.

  My uncle John and his wife, Brenda, settled near Licenza, a small village on the borders of Lazio and the Abruzzi some thirty-five kilometres from Rome, in the mid-1960s. At the time, the steep-sided hills around Licenza seemed to have changed little in the preceding 500 years. Electricity was something of a novelty. White oxen were still used to till the smallholdings and turn the soil in the olive groves. Sheep and goats were still driven up the rough tracks that led past John and Brenda’s house, to the high pastures in the hills, bells on their necks tinkling in the silence of the early dawn. The local dialect was so impenetrable that even visiting Romans couldn’t understand a word. John and Brenda, not to mention the steady flow of brothers, sisters, nephews and nieces, were an exotic addition to the area.

  John decided that he could use the waters that flowed liberally from a spring higher up the hill behind the house, which was reputed to be the Fons Bandusia celebrated in the Odes of Horace, to fill tanks in which he could farm trout. The trout tanks, themselves, were built by the indentured labour of various nephews and their friends.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, he discovered that trout farming would not supplement his naval pension to the necessary degree, and he turned with rather more success to smoking salmon instead.

  In retrospect, it all seems rather improbable, and indeed it was. However, it meant that each summer, for several years, I went to stay in the spartan accommodation offered by John and Brenda, lured by the prospect of a cheap holiday and the girls of Licenza who were beautiful beyond measure (and beyond reach), and worked on whatever stage John’s various schemes had reached at the time, while I ambled paths very like these, exploring the countryside around Licenza and the life that abounded in it.

  I think of my younger self, who’d had boundless faith in his physical capabilities. He would’ve pushed on, propelled by some inner conviction that the path he was following would come out somewhere that would lead to somewhere which would take him to the place he wanted to be.

  I remember, too, the occasions when the cheery optimism had slowly evaporated, when the paths simply petered out, and, tired and disconsolate, I would simply push myself downhill through scrub and brambles until I came to a road and returned to the house, bloody, sweaty and streaked with dust.

  I wipe the sweat from my eyes. I turn and go back the way I came, glad that I’d got as far as I had, gladder still that I’ve finally learned that there’s nothing to be gained by boyish obstinacy.

  Just down the coast from Porto Botte
is Porto Pino, a marina where holidaymakers park their yachts and boats and tan themselves on the ten kilometres of caster-sugar beach fringed with pines. There’s a campsite and holiday homes that remind me of Chateau Vert in Middleton-on-Sea that my grandmother used to take to house her grandchildren during various summer holidays when I was a child. It isn’t the style of the houses so much as their character – sensible, practical, jolie-laide, just a bit scuffed – that remind me of Chateau Vert. It’s easy to imagine the same piles of soggy towels, cast-off bathing things, trails of sand, beach bats and balls stacked in random heaps, to hear the shouts of squabbling children and the sharp interventions of parents, the sniggers and muffled laughter.

  Before it reaches Porto Pino, the road runs straight for a couple of kilometres between huge, shallow lagoons in which candyfloss flamingos, egrets with the blinding white of sheets in a washing powder commercial, and other wading birds forage with delicate intent, and shoals of grey mullet, sea bass, bream and witch sole breed and grow fat on the abundant feed until they’re ready to be harvested.

  A canal connects the lagoon to the sea. The stream of seawater is controlled by a sluice gate on a weir. Below it two lines of stakes form a huge V. The sections between the stakes are lined with smaller palings of metal or plastic, in effect forming walls with a narrow channel between them. At the point where the two arms of the V meet is a round kind of chamber. I’ve come across this system twice before, neither remotely connected to Porto Pino. The fishermen of Lake Comacchio in Northern Italy use exactly the same configuration to trap eels in the lake. Even more remarkably, so do fishermen on a remote island off Korea to catch anchovies. How three such disparate fishing communities have come up with exactly the same method of catching fish is a mystery.