From Sperlonga to Gaeta, the coast is punctuated with Genovese watchtowers on rocky outcrops. Along the twenty-minute drive stretch the heavenly beaches of Lazio. One requires descending three hundred steps. One is a hidden cove you only can reach by swimming. The rest are splendid walking beaches at this season, early May, but in summer, I’ve seen in photographs, they become the typical Italian lidos with closely placed umbrellas, concessions, and changing rooms. I’m not enamored of the beach life Italians love, but what feels claustrophobic to me is convivial and fun to everyone else. Ed says you have to get into it. He likes being able to stroll a few meters and order a lemon granita. Italians visit with friends lounging around them in the sand, often renting their station for an entire vacation.
LEGEND SAYS AENEAS landed along this strand after leaving Troy. Here he buried his wet nurse, Gaeta, naming a town for her. (Legend doesn’t say why a grown man was traveling with his wet nurse on this voyage.) Alternately, the name comes from Kaietai, Greek for concave, cavity, for the mouth-shaped harbor. Gaeta was a resort for the ancient Romans. Hadrian built a villa. Not that it went well for all the Romans. Cicero was decapitated while trying to escape on a litter. When Marc Antony displayed Cicero’s head in the Roman Forum, his wife, Fulvia, pulled open his mouth and jabbed his tongue with a needle, posthumous punishment for his inflammatory speeches.
Later, the Byzantines, the Angevins, the Spanish took their turns with the seductive harbor. Who wouldn’t want to hold this strategic and gorgeous land?
WE CHECK INTO the Villa Irlanda Grand Hotel. Parklike gardens and a pool with an island surround a peaches-and-cream neoclassical, nineteenth-century villa and several handsome outbuildings. Right on the sea, although separated by a road, the hotel is close to town and a great choice for a quiet and pretty stay.
GAETA, FABULOUSLY BUILT along the water, is a quiet town of around 22,000. In the relatively newer part, eighteenth century onward, fishermen set up their market at evening, when everyone is suddenly flooding the streets, out shopping for dinner. I have not seen this before; usually markets are held in the morning. The lungomare is lined with stalls for every wiggling octopus and breathing fish hauled in today: anchovies gleaming like just-polished sterling silver, boxes of mussels, plus mounds of the famous red shrimp of the area.
Just inland, narrow via Independenza is also thick with shoppers at produce stands and tiny grocery stores. Some strollers are ready for an aperitivo. Teenagers roll along in clumps. The street ends in a group of crammed cafés. All this under a benison of late-afternoon light off the water, a soft luminosity that can rise at evening.
A WALKWAY ALONG the sea leads out to the jutting peninsula where the centro storico sits under its tower, flat-topped castle, and cathedral. A small church falling into ruin, quiet residential streets, boatyard. We decide on Antico Vico for dinner and happily fall under the spell of Chef Walter De Carolis, another of those young, intrepid cooks who go off to train, then happily bring home their talents and new skills. The restaurant is in the lower part of a palazzo that goes back to early Gaeta history. A piece of medieval wall and two Roman cisterns were found under the floors during restoration. The restaurant’s rustic elegance is enhanced by a charming modern mural showing a marriage feast in progress. Costanza, in the fourteenth century, is marrying Ladislaus, later to become the king of Naples. The artist used local people as models, dozens of them dressed in colorful clothing that wouldn’t be out of place in a Renoir painting, and though the mural creates a marriage scene from long ago, the artist has left a portrait gallery of striking faces from our own time. If you’re from here, you can dine with Uncle Giacomo or Zia Maria looking on. Imagine how many of the models have come in over the years and pointed out their own faces to friends.
“Do you think Cy Twombly liked or loathed this?” I wonder.
“I think he’d have to like it. How long did Twombly live here?”
“He came to Gaeta in seventy-nine and kept a place here until he died in 2011. Long time. Of course, he lived in Rome, and he had another place north of Rome. When he was old, he took a place back home in Lexington, Virginia, again. His partner still lives here in a palazzo that goes back to the year 1000.”
“These Italian remains. There’s no fathoming them.”
We sample across the menu: ravioli with burrata; octopus with capers, tomato sauce, and olives; sea bass in acqua pazza (crazy water poaching broth) and vegetables; crispy baby pig with truffle fondue. Walter presents each course with a knowing little smile: They are going to like this. He brings us a Lazio wine, the chaste white Antium Bellone, 2015, golden as the light that bounces off the harbor at sunset.
BACK AT VILLA Irlanda, we sit by the pool with our feet in the cold water, talking about how we came to spend so much of our lives in Italy. Early on, both of us heard all the usual siren calls. (Others do, too, but they don’t run off and buy abandoned houses.) Separately, on first trips to Europe, both of us experienced unexpected and irrational flashes of this is for me. Ed hopped off the airport bus into Rome, looked around, and surprised himself by thinking I’m home. On my first trip to Italy, I remember walking along the Adige River in Verona on a golden fall afternoon and realizing that I wanted to stay. Italy snared me. We have by now stayed half of forever.
I’m beguiled by Cy Twombly’s half-century and more in Italy. He was a southern eccentric, going his own way when his compatriots Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol went theirs. He lit out for Italy in 1957. Myth, literature, classical art, gods—these were his idiosyncratic muses. Often poetry went right on the canvas, as well as graffiti, collage, drips, and huge blank spaces. On the Riviera di Ulisse, Ulysses’s coast, he breathed the myths that pushed him to paint his cryptic impressions of Hero and Leander, Leda, Venus, a ten-piece work on the Trojan war.
I often wonder what if I had stayed at home? Did he ever look back and wonder, too?
AT THE LAVISH breakfast in the garden room of the hotel, I ask the young woman who brings our cappuccino where the best tiella can be found. “There are many best,” she says, “but why not go to Calegna.”
The pasticceria-forno is unassuming but bustling. Tiella, a local specialty, is a two-crust pie filled with anything you fancy. Perhaps most loved is the octopus with tomato, capers, olives. There’s a range on view in the glass cases: chard, spinach, potatoes, leeks, cod, broccoli. “Is it possible to see them being made?” Certainly. We’re shown to the kitchen in back where a Romanian woman glowing with sweat rolls out rounds of pastry and flops them into the round pan, actually the tiella. (The word varies all over the south: tegella, Latin, tegame, teglia.) She fills them from large pots, then fits the top pastry over, sealing the edges with big pinches. A man is making taralli, those appetizing crunchy, variously flavored (hot peppers, herbs, cheese) little twists that are so perfect with an aperitivo. They’re first boiled to cook then baked for texture. He’s stirring a vat, scooping them onto baking sheets and into the oven. He’s making a sweet version flavored with limoncello, grated lemon rind, and sugar.
We buy four quarter pieces of tiella, the octopus, spinach and ricotta, broccoli, and escarole and onion. Ed picks up several sacks of taralli to take home.
WE LEAN ON a sea wall, eating. We’re at a park, Monte Orlando, with a spectacular cliff overlooking the sea, and a stony path to a place where two enormous rock hills almost meet, revealing a V of impossibly blue sea between them. What’s that George Herbert poem?
Having a glass of blessings standing by,
“Let us,” said he, “pour on him all we can…”
That must have been the creation idea for Gaeta, too. A fortunate landscape everywhere you look. Below, a perfectly empty beach. The tielle are browned, flaky, and savory. Not perfect picnic food. I spill spinach on my shirt. There are soft almond biscotti at the bottom of the bag, a gift we didn’t know about.
AT THE END of the afternoon, we’ve walked eleven kilometers. We’ve breathed the air of Aeneas.
THE BLISSFUL DAY ends at a terrible restaurant. We didn’t mean to eat here but a wild storm came up, we got lost in nearby Formia, and eventually had to pull over until the rain let up because I was sure we were going to have a wreck in the claustrophobic traffic and savage wind. Our first choices were booked by then. It’s hard to find a bad meal in Italy but we manage tonight. A tired old trattoria with greasy plastic menus. Even the bruschetta is bad. How can that be in this glorious tomato land? Really sad olive oil. The waiter is watching a game on TV. We are the only customers. Chalk it up!
Late, it clears and we walk again in the freshest air along the water, the spit of land that is old Gaeta sparkling ahead of us.
WE’RE GOING HOME to Tuscany today but decide on a detour this morning. The olives of Gaeta are famous all over the world. I’m shocked to find that they actually come from Itri, about twenty minutes inland, and are called Gaeta only because they’re shipped out of here. Itrana is the particular cultivar of the prized olives. Lazio grows many kinds of olives, including canino, Tuscia, Ciera, Marina, Sirole, Sabina, Colline Pontine. All new to my Tuscan ears.
With the best weather in Italy, fertile plains, and sea breezes, everything grows in Lazio. Surprisingly, a major crop is kiwi. This region is a main European exporter and Italy is the largest worldwide producer. More familiar, the famous Roman artichokes are grown in vast quantities, along with every other vegetable, grape, and bean imaginable.
We stop in lower Itri—bustling newer part of town, much of it rebuilt after suffering fifty-six aerial bombings in World War Two—where we pop into a frutta e verdure and buy a cone of maroon-colored brined olives, one of dark, salt-cured olives, a bag of wild greens, and also a bunch of sedano bianco di Sperlonga, the elongated celery of Sperlonga. Can a vegetable be elegant? Yes, this is. Crisp, with the palest bulb, and ribs like flutes in Doric columns.
Itri is on the lava-paved Appian Way, construction of which began in A.D. 312, the world’s first autostrada, stretching 563 kilometers into Puglia. The old town is dominated by a picturesque castle, which Charles Dickens once said is “like a device in pasty, built up, almost perpendicular, on a hill.”
We could but don’t linger, driving on through the Parco Naturale dei Monti Aurunci, a vista of blue hills and dips of valleys, and isolated farms, on to the village of Campodimele. Field of Apples. Who could resist a town with such a name? You could hold this secret place in the palm of your hand. The ancients knew how to site their villages. Circular Campodimele sits on top of a hill, its panoramic views sweeping around hills of holm oaks and beeches, and valleys of olive groves. No apples? Ah, the Latin name was Campus Mellis, having to do with honey production, not apples.
Where are the six hundred people who are said to live here? We walk all around the village walls with its half-cylinder towers. No one. A water main has broken (or is draining?) and the streets are running. No one out looking alarmed. The town is clean as can be anyway; now it’s getting a wash. Actually, there’s no town, just vertiginous, densely packed stone houses in pristine condition. A church up top.
We find a small grocery store, the Municipio building and its spreading elm planted in 1799. And, ah! A bar. Here they are. A dozen people, all older, having their morning visit in the sun. Paese della longevità, the village is called. Town of long life. Also of robust food. Locals feast on their fine cheeses, pasta with goat sauce, and snails picked from the stone walls and cooked in green sauce. Is it the air, the food, the lack of stress, or a genetic fluke? People here are studied for their low cholesterol and low blood pressure. Often they live to one hundred; more over-eighty citizens live here than in any town in Italy and general life expectancy is stunning: ninety-five.
Lack of stress, I said. But at the end of a walk past the school and community center, we come to a war memorial and the somber reminder that the idyllic was not always so.
In World War Two, Campodimele was directly on the Gustav line, a main German supply route. Alberto Moravia, deported by the fascists to Campodimele, wrote a novel, La Ciociara, which became the famous Vittorio De Sica film Two Women. After the victory at Montecassino, the French Allied commander Alphonse Juin allowed his Moroccan troops fifty hours to do what they wanted among the Italian population. His horrifying proclamation: If they win this battle, for fifty hours they will be the absolute masters of everything they find beyond the ranks of the enemy. Nobody will punish them for what they do, nobody will ask them for explanations…
Widespread rape—even of children, of the elderly—and terrible pillage. Moravia gathered his novel around the event. A new word entered the vocabulary. The raped were said to have been marocchinate, moroccaned.
I don’t want to imagine this whole area wracked by violence and loss. The recovery looks sublime but with many residents over the age of one hundred, brutal are the memories that must still haunt them.
The flowing has stopped. The stone streets of the newly washed town glisten. A woman, unbent but surely one of the lucky, century-old residents, hangs her wash in a small back garden. Three dish towels, an apron, and two pairs of big, white underpants. Her black cat glances at us with disdain and goes back to sleep on the warm wall.
ED HAS FOUND Caseificio Paolella, a mozzarella di bufala maker in nearby Fondi, an attractive market town surrounding a fairy-tale, round-towered castle with merloned walls. We stop at a produce market for directions and find such gorgeous vegetables that we stock up on things to take home. Torpedini, torpedo-shaped tomatoes, are strictly local and prized, the owner says. They look like bigger San Marzanos. We take some other Sicilian tomatoes called Marinda, ridged like small pumpkins, and luscious strawberries.
What a thrill to see the artisan mozzarella production. As we arrive at the caseificio in the industrial zone, the workers are just finishing the morning’s work. We only can stand at the entrance, for hygiene reasons. Four women in white with shower caps lean over tubs with egg-shaped mozzarella balls floating in greenish-milky liquid. They pack the pure white balls into plastic bags. Other cheeses—shaped like cherries, eggs, knots, and braids—still float in vats. The floor is wet, with the white water sloshing around.
We’re lucky to meet Signor Paolella, the owner, whose grandfather began the work in 1933. Where did the water buffalo come from? I wonder. He says no one remembers. I’ve read that perhaps originally Hannibal brought them. That would have been around 200 B.C. Or maybe they came ten or twelve centuries later with the Normans via Sicily, where they might have been brought by the Moors or Saracens. Water buffalo have been raised in Italy as far back as memory. His herd is kept down the road, milked twice a day, the milk rich with twice the fat of cow’s milk.
I love scamorza grilled on the fireplace, and scooped onto bread. The name means “beheaded,” for its lopped-off and tied shape. We often buy the smoked, cow’s-milk scamorza. These are buffalo-milk scamorzine, small versions with a fresh fragrance, not smoked. We select a few of the ribbon-tied little sacs for ourselves and to take home to friends. We want ricotta, of course, nestled in pierced plastic containers that imprint a pattern recalling the straw baskets that once were the forms used for ricotta. Signor Paolella gives us tastes of casatica di bufala, a soft Camembert-type texture, and his buratta, which is melt-in-your-mouth soft and creamy. He piles all our cheeses in a Styrofoam box for the drive home.
THE MORNING HAS turned warm and, as we skirt Roma, from the backseat rise the humid scents of tomatoes, celery, strawberries. Lazio! When you travel, you’re trying on a life to see how it fits. We’re always asking, “If we were moving to Italy today, where would you live?” Lazio would be an easy life to choose. Close to Roma, close to Napoli, Gaeta especially seems ideally balanced between the place of myth it occupies in history and the vibrant, everyday market and fishing village of today. We have the stash of mozzarella, a box of mixed Lazio wines, bags of taralli, the olives of Itri. Our own heart’s needle, chosen long ago, lies north of here. We can’t wait to get home.
NOTES:
Article from Vogue archives on Cy Twombly in Gaeta: https://www.vogue.com/article/from-the-archives-cy-twombly-a-painted-word
Ciociaria is an unofficially named area around Frosinone—the lands of those who wore le ciocie, thick leather soles tied over the feet with straps.