What luck to land at Le Nicchie Guest House, outside Lucera. It looks like a typical large brick modern house in a rural neighborhood, nothing venerable at all. But inside the welcome is genuine and the response to my missing passport is “no problema.” Ed calls Erene, the lovely student who helped us at the Lecce B & B. She goes up to our room and locates my forgotten things. I am so embarrassed. Credit cards, insurance cards. Library card from Hillsborough, North Carolina. Even the card they punch when I buy beauty products in Cortona. “Tomorrow,” she says, “or the day after.” She is calling DHL. Dee-occa-elle-eh. “Do not worry.” But we do. We are here for two nights; will the package arrive?
Our two-room suite is a tranquil haven. All shades of white-to-taupe. The immaculate duvet, the bed draped in gauzy fabric. Perfect bath, and a living room with natural sofa and two light taupe chairs. Good Wi-Fi, not always a given in Puglia. What a gentle base for seeing a few of the many villages in the area.
We’re in the province of Foggia, inland from the spectacular Gargano peninsula, the spur of the boot, where we last year spent a blissful week exploring Vieste, Peschici, the national park, and numerous beaches. Ed kept saying “Why go to the Amalfi coast? This is stupendous.” That trip prompted our interest in coming back to explore more of Puglia. We’re lucky to be here in spring, when each turn off the main road leads us into oliveti and almond orchards. These massive olive trees make our Tuscan ones look like twigs.
Only one other guest is dining, a business traveler glued to his phone and wine bottle. Francesco, owner of the hotel, likes to talk and we spend the evening with him, though he is serving and going back and forth to the kitchen, where a local woman is in charge.
We learn about his family, about the relatives who control the other half of the house and have their own hotel and restaurant. One of those Italian stories I’ve heard a million times. A falling-out. A truce but no going back. Family businesses often come to this and, side by side, they all somehow go forward. Since Francesco is passionate about wine, much of our talk is about local production. The cook feeds us well. Stuffed rings of calamari. Oh, bread! The bread is everywhere the quintessence of what bread should be. Where does she get hers? In Troia. We are going there. Dinner is leisurely; Francesco pours liberally. “We are drinking a lot of wine, Francesco!”
“Local, can’t harm you,” Francesco maintains. “2011 Ferraù Cacc’e Mmitte di Lucera, Paolo Petrilli.” That’s a mouthful! Francesco now speaks quickly and I’m not sure I follow. The wine is the local grape, uva di Troia. But. There’s a baffling list of other grapes that balance it out: montepulciano, sangiovese, malvasia nera, or doses of white local bombino and trebbiano. Sounds unholy but the taste is full and spicy, dark as a Puglian night in the country.
Ed asks, “What does Cacc’e Mmitte mean?”
“Um. You drink one and then another? But actually it is what’s pressed and the holding tank.”
Out come friselle, rounds of bread usually topped with tomatoes and basil, but here served with sautéed wild mushrooms on a bed of mâche. Friselle is to Puglia what bruschetta is to Tuscany—soul food. A vegetable sformato with cannellini, a squash soup with crisp guanciale and Gorgonzola. Pause. Roasted baby pig with prunes and pine nuts. Molto buono!
YOU CAN’T BE long in this part of Puglia without becoming enthralled with Frederick II. He ruled as Holy Roman Emperor from 1220 until 1250. He’s responsible for most of the castles and fortifications scattered throughout the countryside. In Lucera, the ruins of his castle fortress stand on a hill just outside town, overlooking the Tavoliere, the immense plain where golden wheat ripples in the wind. He built castle, mint, treasury, and, some say, a harem, when he brought twenty thousand Arab Muslims from Sicily—a bold troop buildup. Loyal to Frederick, they became his royal bodyguards.
Later expanded by his successor, Charles of Anjou, the brick walls reached nine hundred meters. Towers, bastions, remains of Frederick’s palace and, inside, stones of a Roman acropolis, proclaiming we were first. Actually, the Daunians, an Iapygian tribe, were first, but who were they?
Citizens’ DNA swabs must have fascinating results. Lucera spins out the spectrum of conquerers: Lombards, Swabians, Byzantium, Angevins. Rome left its mark. Only in 1932, also just outside town, an amphitheater was uncovered. From a distance, it looks like a football stadium. Built in the first century B.C., it seated eighteen thousand for its gladiator games.
ELEGANT JEWEL-BOX LUCERA. Everyday busy wine town, market town of thirty-four thousand. The gate into the centro storico, Porta di Troia, bears Arabic inscriptions testifying to their problems with Christians. Walking toward the heart of town, we pass many noble palazzi; people have lived in elevated circumstances here for hundreds of years. So much time present in the sand-colored buildings, the stone streets. The Angevin church, built in 1300, looks like a strange northern import with its flat brick face and angled roofline. Something else is odd, too. On the left, the slender tower is obviously a Muslim minaret! In 1269, the Angevins invaded and murdered the Arabs, except for those who escaped to Albania or converted to Christianity. They destroyed the mosques. Santa Maria Assunta was built on the ruins of the town’s last remaining mosque. Was the minaret left for its grace?
I look in an interior design shop. Fur pillows and extravagant glass vases. Expensive cookware. Someone’s not looking toward the past. In a hardware store, we buy packets of cicoria, and fava seeds. The best wild greens in the area are said to grow on the grounds of Frederick’s castle.
Not wanting to take the time for a restaurant, we pause in a bar for friselle with tomatoes.
I WILL NEVER forget Troia. A pleasant, tiny village with views—there’s one reason you must come here. Simply unforgettable and sublime, the 1039 church of Our Lady of the Assumption. Small, in just proportion to the piazza it dominates, with three blind arches flanking either side of a portone, big door, fashioned by Oderisio da Benevento in 1119. The bronze door shows scenes from the lives of saints and bishops. The glory, the jaw-dropping, fall-to-your-knees glory is the façade’s stupendous stone rose window, more delicate than any lace doily my great-grandmother ever crocheted. “Let’s just don’t say anything,” I whisper. Who made this? Who designed a wheel on a piece of parchment, an intricate design that recalls fine lace and Arab tiles? Eleven radiating spokes with the pie-wedge pierced-stone designs in between. The wedges recall screens dividing nuns from view, the patterns on miradors that Muslim women hid behind, or mandalas. How intricate this stone lace: crosses, clover shapes, interlocking curvaceous framing borders. Eleven ribs. Often there are twelve, for the Apostles. Was Judas’s section removed or did the design just achieve equilibrium with eleven? Surrounding all, a simple stone edging under an arc of carved stone phantasmagorical figures—simian animals, a man on a lion, rams, others I can’t identify. I’m glued to the ground by this enchanting, out-of-the-way church. Lions peer from behind columns at the upper windows. Bulls, ubiquitous symbol all over the Mediterranean world, poke out under the roofline.
Isn’t this why we travel? To be lifted thus? To be seduced and refreshed? I look around at people going about their morning, wondering if living in constant contact with such beauty transforms their faces. Even if nothing shows, the structure of their thoughts and dreams must be influenced by the filigreed fineness of the stone carving in the rose window; the eleven dividing bars must structure their days; the circular center with its six-pointed star must give them strength to hold all else in balance, and the small center hole: What is most loved resides there.
What finally lures me away is wafting scents of baking. In Pasticceria Casoli, we sample a soft tiny cake with pistachio frosting and a rosette on top that looks like a design in the rose window. In such a small town, we pass three pastry shops. Couldn’t one of them please move to Hillsborough, North Carolina?
UNTIL LATE AFTERNOON, we drive in the countryside, around the plain dotted with windmills and up to the village of Alberona with its Knights Templar tower and panoramic views. We start out on a walking trail but the wind picks up and we turn back to a café where we have lemonade and I read bits of Old Puglia to Ed. I would like to spend more time in Pietramontecorvino. We discover Santa Maria Assunta with a charming campanile of green and yellow tiles, buildings buttressing each other with arches, stepped streets, and some houses built into rocks.
Near where we park, a man is selling produce from his panel truck and a group of women in dark dresses and neat pumps crowds around him. Ed walks over to buy some fruit. The object of all the attention is a crate of what looks like gnarly onions. Soon we are in deep discussion about this delicacy. Lampascioni. Something to do with raspberry, lampone? No. They’re amused that we’ve never heard of lampascioni.
“They’re wild,” the man says. “Just peel and cook like anything else,” one woman says as she holds out her sack to be filled.
“Un tipo di cipolla?” I ask. A type of onion? Another laugh.
“Muscari,” another says. “Com’e un giacinto.”
What? Hyacinth? Yes, a type of hyacinth. I didn’t know they were edible and the ones I plant are too expensive to eat. These are small and covered with papery layers. We buy a bagful.
The man approves. Yes, you will like this. He cradles several in his palm. “This is something we wait for. Especially good with sausage.”
By now, Ed has looked up the word. “That’s right. Hyacinths. Muscari comosum. After you eat them, the next day blossoms come out of your ears.”
AWAITING US AT the hotel, the package. DHL was fleet of foot, and Erene a princess to dispatch my things so quickly. Dinner at Nicchie again rewards us for a crammed day of travel. There are other guests tonight but we get to tell Francesco about our exploits and to confer with him about wine. He brings over what will surely become a favorite: Polvanera Gioia Colle Primitivo, 2017, a beautiful pour of ruby red from the Murgian area near Bari. Before we leave tomorrow, he will put together for us a case of this area’s best. Dinner begins with stuffed calamari and rolls of cod filled with green olives and a sauce of red carrots. Then classic Puglian orecchiette with wild greens, anchovies, and bread crumbs. Home cooking. Ed has a local fish in a crust of crushed taralli, and I quit at this point. In Puglia, I could survive on the divine bread alone.
AFTER WE RETIRE to our room, in my notebook, I try to draw the rose window of Troia from memory.
NOTES:
Frederick II is for me the most interesting of all early rulers. He was born in what is now Le Marche, and although he ruled over a giant swath of Europe, his affections were always for Italy. This is a brief summary of his life: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Frederick-II-Holy-Roman-emperor
Angevin and Anjou: Angevin means “from Anjou,” western France. When a building is Angevin, it was built in the twelfth to early thirteenth centuries, when kings of the House of Anjou ruled England. Henry II, Richard I, and John were Angevin kings.