Two winds blow across the region of Puglia, in Italy’s heel. One is the mistral, which blasts across the Adriatic laden with the cold of the Balkans, and the other is the sirocco, the breath of the south. The sirocco wafts fierce heat from North Africa and moisture from the Ionian sea, and the first time I came to Lecce, about eight years ago, all the car windshields were covered in Saharan sand. I found that people in this city often frame their conversation in terms of the two winds, for the Adriatic lies just to the east and the Ionian to the south and west. Each of the region’s coasts has its own wind, its distinct terrain and marine life, and its own dialect. But Puglia (a designation that in our language has succeeded the sweeter, Latin Apulia) is joined by the fact that it has often been poor and lorded over by foreigners; no aspect of the civilization of the Renaissance was invented here. That’s not to say that the Puglians don’t have a style of their own, however: When they get hold of an interesting idea, they often reduce it to its simplest, purest form, in everything from architecture to the food on their tables.
Nearing the walls of Lecce, one of Europe’s most beautiful cities, I caught sight of the pinnacles of fantastic towers, colorfully tiled domes, and the crowns of palms. Then a whitish labyrinth swallowed me up: The pale leccese stone, whose texture people compare to the fluffy mollica (inside) of the local bread, is so soft that it can be rapidly carved into the shape of any ornament, which explains the overloaded facades of the town’s principal buildings. These rows of palazzi are almost all in the Baroque style, but their arches are corroded and their volutes half-effaced—walking among them, I felt at times as though I were wandering a city of sand castles.
Many of Lecce’s monuments were built in the late 17th century by renowned architect Giuseppe Zimbalo or one of his colleagues. Though the Baroque may be the least lovable of all European architectural styles, Zimbalo knew how to simplify it. The town’s narrow streets, enlivened by churches crawling with fabulous beasts, lead to the entrance to the main square, the Piazza Duomo—it’s the architectural equivalent of a strait, and I happened on it by chance. Through the narrow gap between two buildings, watched over by a row of stone saints, I found myself staring at a perfectly proportioned 17th-century stage set, complete with campanile, cathedral, episcopal palace, and seminary. True, it is a show of Baroque style, but compared with the ornate buildings of Rome or central Europe, it is pared-down indeed.
I discovered that as it goes in architecture, so it goes with Puglian cooking, which is noted for its simple, delicious vegetable dishes. On that first trip to Lecce, I sought out a restaurant that had been recommended to me. I walked beneath a neon sign reading “Trattoria Cucina Casereccia” and into a brightly lit chamber. It was nine-thirty in the evening, and there was no food in sight. The décor suggested a pensioners’ club, but in the middle of the room, in high heels and gold jewelry, stood an attractive woman in late middle age. She was illumined by a single lighting fixture that hung, tiara-like, over her regal coiffure. She looked more like a beautician than a cook.
“Is this really a restaurant?” I asked.
“Sit down,” she said, in Italian. It was not an invitation, it was an order.
“I am Concetta Cantoro,” the woman said. “If you’re hungry, put yourself in my hands. I can’t stand bad appetites or fussing over food. You’ll eat what I give you, understood?”
I had just taken a seat when, to my relief, a party of two couples came in, eliciting cries of joy from the proprietress. The particular object of her enthusiasm was a gentleman of a certain age, sprightly and bewhiskered, who looked like a music-hall comedian. “Ah, little Federico!” Concetta said, embracing him and pinching his cheeks.
Federico and his wife and the other couple sat down at a nearby table. “I am Concetta’s cousin,” Federico announced to me.
Meanwhile roasted peppers and pickled eggplant arrived at my table, delivered by a stocky, gray-haired man who introduced himself as Marcello, Concetta’s husband. Wine was set down, and then ’ncapriata, the local specialty, a delicate purée of fava beans dressed in olive oil and escorted by mustard greens. Concetta told us about fava beans, about what a fava bean really is—its ineffable essence, you might say. She told us about the taieddha—a scrumptious dish of thinly sliced potatoes and zucchini, baked with mussels and the liquor of the mussels—that Marcello was just then putting on my table. Talking and talking, Concetta spun from one table to the other like a figure on a music box.
Federico addressed me in a stage whisper. “This isn’t a restaurant really, it’s a café chantant.”
Marcello, bringing in dish after dish, would each time kneel beside me, catch my eye briefly, look worshipfully up at his wife, then screw the knuckle of his right index finger into his cheek—the sign for good eating. More food arrived—vegetables, cuttlefish, filets, braised meat—and all the while Concetta twirled, speaking of America and tomatoes.
When at last I rose to leave, I glanced up at the clock: two-thirty in the morning. I had been gorging myself for five hours. As I lurched out the door, Concetta wished me sweet dreams.
“Is this really a restaurant?” she mimicked, with the barest hint of sarcasm.
About 15 years ago, when I was living in Florence with my wife and small son, we noticed that Puglian bread arrived each day from the town of Altamura, which is perched in the western hills known as the Murge. Now there’s obviously nothing wrong with Tuscan bread, yet the Puglians had somehow managed, using wood-burning ovens, to produce, by hand and in vast quantities, a different sort of bread—southern-style, using only hard wheat, yeast, and a little salt—and had marketed it all over Italy. We learned that just a few generations earlier all the bread in Altamura had been made at home. On Saturday or Sunday, toward midnight, the baker would collect the women’s loaves and bring them to the communal brick forno, shove them deep into their customary spot, and then retrieve them a few hours later.
Recently, on a swing through Puglia with my son, then 15, we stopped at Altamura, which turned out to be a beguiling town with several sleepy piazzas and a cathedral with a wonderful Gothic porch. At a large commercial bakery called Panificio La Maggiore, Antonio Barile and his father, Giuseppe, head of the local bakers’ association, showed us scores of beautiful, gold-domed loaves being slowly baked in oak-fed ovens—the organic wheat is of strictly local origin, and the wood is from neighboring Basilicata. After whetting our appetites with bruschetta drizzled with the regional olive oil, Giuseppe told us to try a restaurant called pein asutt, “the dry piece of bread.” (Its formal name is Antica Osteria, but no one refers to it that way.) “Ask anyone in town,” he said. We took his advice, and for a few euros we found ourselves presented with a splendid meal of fava purée, salumi, and a superb minestra of lentils and pasta, served with olio piccante (peppered olive oil).
The golden bread of Altamura stands in my mind as emblematic of a certain resourceful evolution. For unlike, say, the Tuscans, the Puglians never lived in great numbers on the land: Dwelling in towns and villages, they commuted every morning to the fields as day laborers. In part because of this, and in part because most of their terrain is flat, they began industrializing their agriculture—mass-producing bread, olive oil, and wine for blending—after World War II. Yet their food remains excellent.
In recent years, the region’s viticulture, in particular, has greatly improved, with three varieties of red grape being grown in large quantities: Uva di Troia; Negroamaro, which frequently turns up as house wine in trattorias; and Primitivo, its wines now popular in the U.S. Also grown in abundance, in addition to grapes, olives, and durum wheat, are vegetables, including tomatoes, fava beans, chicory, broccoli, cabbage, and potatoes. Together, these provide the Puglian kitchen with its staples: tomato sauce (which may, set in shallow pans, be thickened by the sun for whole days); bread and macaroni in many shapes, notably ear-shaped orecchiette; and olive oil of the strong, or fruttato, type, less suitable for salad than for flavoring the hearty local dishes derived from legumes, herbs, and tubers. These are many and various, the most common being the queenly fave e cicorie, the purée of fava beans accompanied by boiled chicory.
On the coast of the Salento, the southernmost peninsula of Puglia, which is rocky to the east and sandy to the west (and studded in parts with stone fortresses erected by Charles V of Spain to ward off the Ottoman threat), seafood of all sorts is served, with the scorpion fish imparting its distinctive savor to many kinds of soup. In fish restaurants in the sunbaked seaside towns of Otranto and Gallipoli, you can see the catch—which may include sea bass or grouper but also more-exotic eels, tiny mollusks, or various roes, including bottarga—and select what you want.
A good place to find a traditional table is in one of the old stone farmhouses or small manors called masserie, many of which are guesthouses. My son and I stayed almost exclusively at these inns, which were commonly fortified against pirates and tend to resemble miniature castles. Many are working farms, and—although you may have the same dish two nights in a row, or be awakened by roosters crowing at four in the morning—they tend to be fun and inexpensive.
At Masseria Marzalossa, a grand place near Ostuni, Anna Pantaleo gave me a lesson in traditional orecchiette-making. (Orecchiette are to Puglia what spaghetti is to Naples.) A terrific cook, Pantaleo is the eldest of 12 children, so she knows how to do pretty much everything, and she proved very, very patient with this novice chef. I watched as, with lightning speed, she made a snake of pasta dough, cut tiny disks from it, depressed them one by one against her marble tabletop with a dragging action of her thumb, and then with a spiraling motion detached perfect little earlets with the fingers of her other hand. I’m not sure I ever got the hang of this trick, which had to be done in a twinkling. “Think of it like this,” Pantaleo said, encouragingly. “Orecchiette are really only inverted cavatelli.”
Pasta geometry. A big help.
Another Anna—Anna Fedele, at a masseria called Lama San Giorgio—introduced my son and me to a different rustic dish. This Anna, fascinated by how wholesome and delicious the poor people’s cooking of old Puglia could be, had been rediscovering bean dishes and strains of pulses and found mills that still use stones. Fedele was especially keen on the black chickpea, a premodern source of iron for women nearing childbirth, and on the seldom-seen cicerchia, or chickling pea. She served us a robust first course of threshed and simmered wheat kernels with a sauce of herbs and mussels. According to Fedele, this bulgurlike dish was created during World War II, when milled flour couldn’t be had. (Though I later found numerous recipes for preparations of this sort, called cranu stumpatu, dating from far earlier, in Luigi Sada’s authoritative La cucina pugliese.)
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.