AS SIMPLE AS A PANINO

CALABRIA’S NATURAL BEAUTY has been spoiled by drought and destroyed by earthquakes. Her riches have been stolen by barons and kings, borrowed by peasants. To appreciate Calabria, you have to imagine all she has been through. You have to build a narrative from an eighteenth-century doorway around which an entirely new house has been built; a stone wall that’s sprouting weeds in its mortar and serves as the backdrop to a vegetable garden; a pile of rocks that at one point was a temple in one of the largest, most powerful cities in Magna Graecia.

On the north side of the Capo Rizzuto peninsula, and twenty-two miles south of Crotone, stands Capo Colonna. As you drive across desolate fields of weeds and scrub brush, cresting tiny hills, a monolithic figure comes in and out of view until suddenly it stands in front of you, holding strong to its ground right on the coast: a single Greek column rising about twenty-five feet from the ground. This column is the last remnant of the Greek city of Crotone (or, as the Greeks called it, Kroton). The last vestige of the great temple of Hera Lacinia, queen of the Olympian gods and the wife and sister of Zeus, it is also older than the Parthenon. At one time forty-eight such columns supported the temple, which could be seen by passing sailors arriving from Greece or returning there.

I followed Giuseppe into the ruins. The grounds surrounding the temple had been recently excavated; we walked through the bases of onetime arches, which led to an oven. Simple honeycombed designs decorated the chest-high walls. Looking up from the sunken excavation, I saw red poppies dancing in the wind. Close to shore, a military tower blocked the view of the ocean.

Much has disappeared from the temple, which was probably leveled by an earthquake. Throughout the centuries, peasants had carried off pieces of rocks and tiny treasures.

“Even that military tower was built with the stones of the temple,” Giuseppe said in disgust. “And that was built only a hundred years ago.”

I noticed one other building, a small church near the coast. It was called the Santuario SS Madonna di Capo Colonna. Italians had taken Hera, the goddess of women and children, and co-opted her as their own, now Catholic, protectress.

As we walked out, Giuseppe stopped and picked up a piece of the temple rock. “Marco, guarda,” he said. “What is this?”

I looked closely, thinking he wanted me to tell him which part of the temple it had come from.

“What is this?” he asked again. “You should know by now.” Realizing I needed reminding, Giuseppe said, “Tufo, Marco.” He looked around and held out his arms. “Tutto in tufo!”

 

 

You could stock a gourmet shop with what grows along the way north to Crotone. Flowering orange blossoms line one side of the narrow light gray road; growing on the other side are short, flat-topped peach trees and lines of drab green olive trees, some of them three hundred years old. One can see the round bushy almond trees, tucked in between, scattered throughout.

We passed a sign that read KROTON. The citizens of Crotone have reclaimed their Greek roots and changed the spelling, which from the eleventh century until 1929 was Cotrone (still used by some of the old-timers). Crotone was the first Greek colony in Italy, founded in 709 B.C. by Greeks who left their country to explore, in response to the oracle of Delphi, and landed on the south shore of Italy’s toe. For the next several hundred years it flourished, as did other Greek settlements, Sibari, Locri, and Reggio. Calabria would never be a richer place.

Two hundred years after Crotone was founded, Pythagoras, leaving behind the conservative thinking of Greece, settled here, developed his theorem, and attracted a cultish following—until it was said that Pythagoreans could pass a person on the street and know instinctively whether or not he was a believer. Pythagoras was more than a mathematician and philosopher; he was a spiritual leader who believed in the unity of the community and who outlined its codes of behavior and even its diet, which, while vegetarian, did not allow the consumption of beans. After thirty years he was forced out of the city and fled farther north to Metaponto. It may be that the Calabresi tired of someone who looked down on beans, which in a region without broad fields or grazing lands were (and still are) a staple food.

These Greek colonies raided and pillaged one another. Locri, which is south of Catanzaro, attacked Crotone. In 510 B.C. the Crotonesi attacked the more powerful and richer Sibari; with the help of Milo, one of the greatest Olympian athletes, the Crotonesi leveled Sibari and changed the course of its rivers to flood the city. It wasn’t until the 1940s that Sibari was recovered.

In 206 B.C., during the Second Punic War, Hannibal fled to Crotone. Having gotten used to the hospitality of the south, and the southerners’ desire to get out from under the Roman yoke, Hannibal felt safe and settled in Crotone, but after a time the Crotonesi, who had long been loyal to the Romans, expelled him from the city.

After Hannibal came the Longobards, the Byzantines, and, in the middle of the sixth century, the Normans, who installed the feudal system, which governed Crotone and most of the south until the 1940s, when peasants revolted in order to claim latifondi, parcels of land owned by absentee barons. It was here that some of the most violent peasant uprisings took place.

In the neighboring village of Melissa in 1949, peasants occupied an abandoned estate. A man who claimed ancestral ties to the estate called in the military. Three peasants were killed, and a monument circled by stones now lies beneath olive trees.

Giuseppe and I followed the coastal main road to the center of Crotone. The open sea was to our right, and to our left rocky cliffs rose like a wave ready to pounce on the city. With a population now of sixty thousand inhabitants, Crotone is the only harbor between Taranto in Apulia and Reggio di Calabria at the tip of Calabria’s toe.

We drove along Piazza Pitagora, named after Crotone’s famous philosopher. All the buildings around the piazza, and many throughout Crotone, had porticoes over the sidewalk, which reminded me of the majestic porticoes in Bologna. Doric columns support the porticoes, which provide shelter from rain and sun. This day the sun was strong, but the ocean wind was cold; it seemed to tunnel through the porticoes and bounce off the mountains back into the city.

George Gissing, traveling in 1897, hated Crotone, lamenting in his memoir By the Ionian Sea, “What has become of Croton? This squalid little town of to-day has nothing left of its antiquity.” But the city came alive in the last half of the twentieth century, thanks mostly to the Montedison electrical plant. Power plants and great cables and relay towers surround the city, sending electricity south to Sicily. The mafia still has a strong hold here. It’s common to read in the papers about recent arrests of members of the ’ndrangheta. Whereas ships used to bring food and spices from Asia and Africa, today Crotone’s chief import is prostitutes from Russia and former Eastern bloc countries.

Gissing found the “common type of face at Crotone [to be] coarse and bumpkinish,” but I saw beautiful full-lipped women with strong cheekbones, noble noses, and thin, straight eyebrows.

Despite the mafia, money from the electricity plants has actually enriched the city of Crotone. The municipal archaeological museum, for example, is one of the most modern museums in Calabria. It is housed inside a restored fifteenth-century Aragonese castle, and the docents are young and knowledgeable—a rarity in most of Italy. The museum offered a detailed history of the excavations of the region, including the discovery, during the rebuilding of the local soccer stadium in 1998, of another part of the Greek foundation of Crotone.

In general, throughout Italy, I found that museum attendants greeted you with a look of boredom that, after a few minutes, turned into one of annoyance as if you were the only thing that was preventing them from taking their next break. I found this to be less so in Calabria.

I asked one of the docents, a young women with long brown hair and green eyes, if there was any information available on the thirty years Pythagoras lived here—what the city was like then. She apologized, saying that all that remains is an oral history of his teachings.

“Are you staying here long?” she asked.

“No, we are just here for the afternoon,” I said.

“It’s too bad. You’ll have to come back sometime. There are treasures throughout the city,” she said, and offered a friendly smile.

She was one of the few women who would freely offer their knowledge. Many women in Calabria seem inhibited, as if they are afraid to talk to a man for fear of what people might think. But this woman and others like her seemed to view the job as a license to break tight-lipped social mores. In this way, the museum of Crotone’s past was oddly forward-thinking.

 

 

On our way back to the car Giuseppe paid a visit to one of his clients, explaining that I was trying to find any information on Pythagoras. The man shrugged but then directed us to the historical society a few blocks away. There a pleasantly plump woman greeted us and took down several volumes of history about the construction of Crotone.

Giuseppe addressed her as gentilissima; as with many things, Giuseppe seemed to know more than the experts, and their conversation became his twenty-minute peroration on the development of Crotone. The woman listened politely, gently correcting him on a couple of dates.

Giuseppe looked at his watch. He had one more client to visit later this afternoon. We hadn’t even gotten to ask about Pythagoras.

“Of course we can come back,” Giuseppe said. “We can come back next week. Crotone or Cotrone or Kroton, it will always be here.”

It had taken us only an hour and a half to get to Crotone from Catanzaro. In the days of Gissing, who traveled on a slow train or by horse and wagon, it would have taken an entire day.

 

 

Gissing had fallen very ill here and had been bedridden for days, yearning to get back to Catanzaro, which, in his delirium, became paradise. As Gissing’s appetite returned and he knew that he would soon be able to leave for Catanzaro, he was able to look at Crotone anew. He often awoke to musicians playing in the piazza beneath his hotel window: the beat of a drum, the drone of a street organ, the cry of the singer. “All the faults of the Italian people are whelmed in forgiveness as soon as their music sounds under the Italian sky … An immemorial woe sounds even through the lilting notes of Italian gaiety.” Perhaps by facing his own temporary hardship, Gissing realized the hardship the Calabrese peasant continually endured. “Listen to a Calabrian peasant singing as he follows his oxen along the furrow, or as he shakes the branches of his olive tree. That wailing voice amid the ancient silence, that long lament solacing ill-rewarded toil, comes from the heart of Italy herself, and wakes in the memory of mankind.”

It was the ill-rewarded toil that had driven my grandparents out of Calabria, although I imagine that this aspect of character, this ability to find solace in centuries of hardship, was what had allowed my grandparents to survive their first few years in America.

 

 

It’s been my experience that you can’t get a bad meal in Italy as long as you stay away from the tourist sites, and there are few such sites in Calabria. Italians will simply not eat something that doesn’t taste good—be it a dinner prepared at home or a quick sandwich at a road stop.

Along an undeveloped strip outside Crotone, we pulled up to a long roadside building with tables and benches out front. Half a dozen men were at a counter; the only woman was the bartender—a rarity in Calabria, where a masculine society still dominates—who had black hair pulled back, with a smooth light complexion and crooked teeth that would have been considered a blemish in the United States.

“What would you like?” Giuseppe asked me.

I looked up at the board of special sandwiches, each with its own name, unusual for Italy. The place reminded me of a New York deli.

I ordered a panino with salame, mozzarella, tomato, and piccante, something that I assumed was simply spicy red peppers.

Without smiling or even nodding the bartender just looked at Giuseppe, alerting him that it was his turn to order. After he had ordered, we turned to wait toward the back. Someone caught Giuseppe’s eye. A man about my height and size with light brown hair and blue eyes had walked in and looked up at the menu.

Giuseppe smiled and continued to look at him. The man must have felt Giuseppe’s stare, for he turned and acknowledged Giuseppe’s look. Giuseppe held out his hands, and his chin jutted out in an expression that said, “Hey, you should know me.”

The man walked over. “I’m sorry, but do I know you?”

“Maybe a few years ago. No, maybe eight years ago. You must have been twenty or so, and you were at your father’s store in Cariati. I brought postcards to your father … .”

Something triggered in the young man. He finally remembered Giuseppe. But there was not the excited recognition that we Americans might have expressed. It was casual, almost an “Oh, you again.”

Time is different for the Calabresi, who expect that people (for good reason) will run into one another from time to time. This means that the Italians’ long sense of history notwithstanding, they are concerned almost exclusively with the present and are not terribly nostalgic; what has happened has happened. How different, I thought, from Italians in the United States, who long for an old country that may not miss them quite as much as they miss it.

I once heard a joke about a Calabrese returning to his village after a decade in America. All the while Luigi had missed his village, his country. What got him through was his belief that he would one day amass enough money to return to Calabria for a visit.

When that day came and Luigi arrived in Reggio, his eyes welled with tears. By the time he reached his village, he was sobbing. The village was exactly as he had remembered it. And as he walked through the piazza, Luigi spotted the bar where he used to hang out and play cards with Pasquale and Salvatore. He wondered, What are the chances that my friends are there right now?

He walked in the bar. Pasquale and Salvatore were playing cards at a table in the back. Luigi ran up to them, tears running down his cheeks, and dropped his bags and opened his arms in greeting.

“Pasquale, Salvatore … I’m back,” he said.

His two friends looked up at him, cards still in their hands, and said, “Luigi, did you go somewhere?”

 

 

Back at the road stop, as Giuseppe and I carried our trays of food to the benches outside the bar, he said to the young man, “Tell your father I’ll stop by his store when we make it up there again”—whether it was a week or a decade.

I buttoned my jacket with one hand and picked up half the panino with the other. Just as I brought the panino to my mouth, Giuseppe asked, “You must have had piccante before, right?” Somehow he knew that I never had.

The ingredients in piccante, he explained, can vary, but it’s often made with a combination of dried tomatoes, red pepper, olive oil, and salt. Sometimes it’s made with pork fat, but around Crotone it’s made with resca, which is dialect for lisca, crushed anchovy or sardine bone. It is in the piccante that the Arab influence is evident in Calabrese cooking.

With the first bite I tasted the thin, chewy homemade salame along with tangy mozzarella, which melted on my tongue. Then came the punch. The spiciness of the piccante overwhelmed my mouth. Giuseppe kept his eyes on me, laughing to himself. I could taste the hot pepper and olive oil and then something subtle, though salty. The tomato and cheese tempered the spice.

“There’s something salty in this, something rich,” I muttered.

“It’s the anchovy,” Giuseppe answered. “Probably mixed with ground fish roe. They make it differently wherever you go.”

Even here at this roadside café, I was bombarded with flavor in something as simple as a panino. The vegetarian Pythagoras would have moaned.