Travel and Sightseeing Notes

Walkers’ Trip to Italy, Fall 2005

Greetings! Karen and I had the good fortune to visit Southern Italy in late September and early October. The first half of our trip was in Calabria and Sicily. It was a combination of sightseeing, family history research, and visiting my Italian cousins. The second half of the trip was in and near the region of Puglia, with research in Noci di Bari. The family and research notes are in separate documents, one for each ‘side’ of my Italian family.

Food and Drink – Some Overall Impressions

The pasta specialty in Calabria is a hand-rolled pasta about four inches long and a little thicker than a pencil. We had home-made versions and saw this at restaurants and in stores. The tomato sauces tended to be light, and usually had fresh cherry tomatoes in them. We enjoyed the home-made sausages, salami, and prosciutto of my mother’s second cousin, Donato Folino, but we had mixed results with restaurant ‘Calabrian sausage’. The pecorino cheese was great. My mother’s second cousin-in-law, Nicola Anania, added an impossible amount of hot pepperoncini to his  meals. We had fresh melons with every home meal. It was also mushroom season, especially porcini.

After each home-cooked meal, served with plenty of wine, the liqueurs came out of the freezer. Usually this was Amaro, claimed to aid digestion. It was very good and it seemed to work. Sometimes we had Lemoncello or sambucca.

Some of our food was fennel-flavored, and we often saw wild fennel plants along the roadsides in Calabria. For greens, rucola (arugula) was popular. I enjoyed the bitter taste. For lunch on the run, we enjoyed a big slice of foccacia. Of course, lunch was more typically the main, multi-course meal of the day, with a smaller supper late in the evening, and a tiny breakfast. The espresso coffee in Italy was great!

In Sicily, the seafood was all good, but the grilled swordfish was a specialty and very good.

In Puglia, we didn’t encounter quite as much seafood as expected. The pizza there usually had a thin crust, sometimes downright crispy. We decided that my Grandma Mary’s bread-like pizza in Spokane was really what is now called foccacia. The pasta specialty there was orecchiete, made in small ear shapes. Another tasty specialty was mashed fava beans with garlic, rucola, and olive oil.

The commercial wines that we encountered in Calabria were so-so. Puglia is a large and growing wine region, famous especially for its primitivo and negroamaro reds. We had some very nice wines, although we still had to be careful not to get taken by price gouging. The wineries are not set up for wine tourists. We found one large winery that had built a tasting room, but it was not open. The tourist cities do have shops that offer a good selection and some tastings.

Sightseeing

Pictures

A subset of our pictures is currently on my Flickr photo site at http://www.flickr.com/photos/wnkwalker/. This collection has general sightseeing pictures, with some extra Albi and Noci pictures. (A link from the Garcea-Spagnolo Family Update page provides access to a collection of people pictures.) I also made a DVD which has the following advantages: uncompressed digital pictures, more pictures, and pictures interspersed with video clips from the camcorder. The photos and clips are not works of art, but they give a much better impression of the people and places when combined. You can watch it on your living room TV (if you have a DVD player), and fast forward, pause, etc.

Getting Started

We flew into Rome and rented a car at the Da Vinci airport, which is outside Rome, next to the town of Fiumicino. We stayed the first night (and the last night on our return) at a nice hotel in Fiumicino which I would recommend, called the Euro House.

Driving in Italy takes some getting used to, both on the Autostrada and squeezing through old-town streets. Our Fiat Punto was great and it wasn’t long before I was mimicking the bad habits of the natives. It wasn’t without stress, hurtling along at 160kph or folding in both side mirrors to pass through gates, between buildings, or between double-parked cars. People parked everywhere and ‘no parking’ signs were everywhere. We couldn’t quite figure out when to take the signs seriously, but we never got a ticket.

We drove down the coast through Naples and stopped for a night at Maratea, a picturesque town perched high up on a mountainside overlooking the ocean. We stopped at the coastal town of Diamante, known for its now-aging murals painted on the building walls. The town had just finished a pepperoncini festival, so the bright red peppers were hanging everywhere. Then on to Catanzaro where we eventually found our elusive hotel.

Catanzaro and Day Trips

The ‘Centro Storico’ (historic center) of Catanzaro, and much of the ‘newer’ city, is built on a long, high ridge, with very steep sides. It is not a tourist city, but we explored a few sights. The traffic there is impossibly congested, but cars do stop for pedestrians.

We visited Albi multiple times and did some driving around through the countryside and nearby towns. The towns are all on mountainsides or ridge tops. Beside and below Albi were steep and vast olive orchards. I can’t imagine who tends and harvests so many trees. The town is not overly charming, other than its impressive setting. The modern era buildings in this region were all constructed in a similar, boxy way.

Another day we drove up into the mountains past Albi, to the southern edge of the Sila Mountains. The visitor center had self-guided trails explaining the flora and fauna, and reconstructed homes and farms showing what peasant life was like in earlier times. At the higher elevations, the cultivated olive groves gave way to natural chestnut and pine forests, the later reminiscent of the Spokane area.

Another day we drove to Le Castella, up the coast towards Crotone. We enjoyed the views and climbing around the Aragonese castle. Finally, we drove across the ‘toe’ to the coastal towns of Pizzo and Tropea, where we had great views, more castles and churches, good food, and Pizzo’s famous gelati.

Sicily

We took the ferry from Reggio Calabria to Messina (where we observed first hand the guidebook’s warning that drivers tend to ignore red lights). We spent three nights in Taormina, one of the most spectacular settings in Italy. Again, it was perched up on a mountainside, with ocean and Mt. Etna views. It had all the trappings: old walls and gates, steep and narrow alleys, impressive churches/palaces, and a main promenade that was packed with tourists and locals every evening. Of course this means lots of gift shops, art galleries, and interesting restaurants. The ruined Greek Theater is in a dramatic setting, facing the coastline and Mt. Etna. We took one day to explore the lava cones high up on Mt. Etna, and another day to explore the extensive Archeological Park (Greek and Roman ruins), the Catacombs of St. Giovanni, and the island Centro Storico in the city of Siracusa.

Cosenza

On our way from Sicily to Puglia, we spent a night in the city of Cosenza, in Calabria. The partially ruined castle overlooking the city and Centro Storico really evoked an image of the stereotypical medieval castle.

Taranto

We swung by the city of Taranto on our way to Puglia. The Centro Storico there was also on an island, connected by bridges. I was looking for evidence of the old shipyards where Domenico Matarrese did stone masonry. All we saw were vast, modern shipyards and small pleasure boat marinas. The outskirts were very industrial.

Alberobello

In Puglia, our home base for the first few days was the World Heritage Site of Alberobello, which is a few miles from our research destination of Noci. Throughout much of central Puglia, and particularly in Alberobello, are historic dwellings called ‘trulli’. A trullo is a mostly round whitewashed stone building with a layered dry stone roof in a cone shape. The early settlers would tumble their homes down when the tax man approached, to convince him that they were not permanent homes and therefore not subject to tax. There were trulli farms scattered through the countryside, and in Alberobello there was an entire village of trulli. It looked like Smurfville. We stayed at a hotel whose rooms are in modestly-restored medieval trulli. A 3-day festival was underway when we arrived, which meant lots of intricately arranged light displays, some carnival rides, street vendors, a bandstand with concerts, etc.

Noci, Martina Franca, Locorotondo, Ostuni

All these cities were situated on small hills rising up from the mostly flat farmland. They had modern sections, but they each had a charming (and eventually somewhat similar) Centro Storico – bright white buildings, narrow streets, jumbled stairways, ornate balconies, flowering plants, a duomo and several smaller churches. We were impressed by the white marble paving stones. As elsewhere, it is pretty dead in mid-afternoon, but lively at night.

The roads around and between the towns were almost always lined with rock walls – again usually a dry construction, and yet sturdy. Much of the farm land was marginal, due to all the rocks in the fields. The white and reddish limestone develops a grey patina on the stone walls and building roofs.

Noci has an old bell tower accessible from the church, and a standalone more modern bell tower that was in operation (electronically). We were privileged to be taken up the normally-closed old tower where we took pictures and attempted to see the Villa Monte estate on the edge of town. (Villa Monte was the home of the Marchese De Luca Resta, employer of my great-great grandfather.)

Noci does not get the tourists that nearby Locorotondo and Alberobello get. We were stopped and interviewed by a reporter for a local weekly paper. She took our picture, but her article did not appear in the issue that hit the stands just before we left the area.

Grotte di Castellana

We took the 1-hour English language tour through these impressive caves.

Matera

Matera is just outside of Puglia in Basilicata, in a dramatic setting of rocky ridges and steep ravines. It has the usual baroque churches, piazzas, palazzi, etc., but what is unique is the sassi – rock-hewn dwellings jumbled all up and down the sides of two long ravines. The original caves are Paleolithic and were slowly adapted with walls and extensions and water systems. In the 1960s the poor inhabitants were moved out, and now some of the caves/buildings have become bars, restaurants, and hotels. We walked a lot that day, including touring through three or four ancient churches that were built into the rock.

Avetrana, Manduria, Porto Cesareo

The weather was cool and rainy so we checked out of our trullo hotel a day early and headed south. One stop was the town of Avetrana, near Taranto, where I took pictures of the street where the Matarrese family lived when my Grandma Mary was born. The local police were very curious, but warmed to our story and started offering research suggestions.

On through vast and reasonably flat wine country. Most vines were covered with netting or plastic. The city of Manduria is one of the wine centers. With great difficulty, we found a winery that I had read about. We drove into the compound to find no people but pumps and equipment buzzing away. We finally found someone in an office who said there were no tastings or tours, but we could wander around and look at anything we wanted. So we did.

We found a hotel room in the charming fishing village of Porto Cesareo, which was also having a small festival. This is the place to find fish! During the evening passeggiata, several huge fish stores were open to the streets and great crowds of people were passing through to inspect and buy from the large selection. We found a nice restaurant, after once again forcing ourselves to wait late enough in the evening that we would not be the only people there.

Lecce

Our final stop was the city of Lecce in the province of Lecce on the very heel of the boot. This is a city that you should not miss. It has been called the Florence of the south, but it is different. The architecture is very baroque, but in a more light-hearted, southern way. There were several impressive churches and old town gates. There were many large, elegant buildings with huge wooden doors and interesting balconies and cornices. If you like shopping and modern bars, it has that too.

 In the old center, where our hotel was (we somehow got our car into and out of the maze), was the partially uncovered ruins of a Roman Colosseum. Next to it was a Roman column, topped by an 18^th century statue of the city’s patron saint.

We had a nice drive south from Lecce with a stop in Otranto and along the coast to Capo Santa Maria di Lèuca – the very tip of the heel where St. Peter is said to have landed on his way to Rome.

On our last day, we drove from Lecce to Rome for our last Italian supper, then home the next day.