But it’s not only at masserie that you can stumble upon affirmations of the rustic and rediscoveries of the half-forgotten. At Angelo and Filomena Silibello’s fascinating Cibus, a restaurant in the ancient white city of Ceglie Messapica, my son and I found goat, horse, and donkey listed on the menu. I refrained from ordering them, in deference to my son’s pet-loving sensibilities; but the fillet of pork stuffed with delicate, slightly bitter lambascioni (rosy-violet bulbs unique to the area and resembling those of the hyacinth) was both utterly delicious and a remembrance of times past.
Like other parts of southern Italy, Puglia has a number of large, bewildering, and unlovely cities. But after the meal at Cibus, as we drove through the Itria Valley toward twilight, among the serpentine terraces and strange, twisted shapes of the millennial olive trees, we were back in an unspoiled Puglia, where, since Roman times, the olive had flavored food and soothed bodies and lighted lamps, and where the rising of bread in communal ovens had reassured even the poorest villagers that their life together would endure.
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