Ali, Shane and I rented a car in Salerno and went on a proper tootle across the ankle of Italy’s boot, stopping in three different places for a couple of nights each. Shane, as per custom, had done his research, and more’s the logic there: this part of the world is his family’s ancestral homeland. I’ll leave that story for another telling, but suffice it to say the only thing that exceeded our eating was our walking.
Also, just as a point of interest, the rental car company gave us what must have been the largest car in Europe. It was some sort of crossover SUV from a Chinese brand (Link & Co?), with already 50k kilometers and some deep gashes and inappropriate paint swatches from previous renters’ crashing into bollards. As one of the two people who signed up to drive, I was not too excited about trying to maneuver this thing into a parking place. Anyway, we did great with it, it served us well and had quite a lot of power when needed. But cars, parking spaces, lanes, and alleyways are smaller here! So we’re lucky we did as well as we did.
This was our route:
Naples and Amalfi are in the Campania region, but when we left Salerno we ended up, for our first night, in Basilicata – specifically, Melfi. Basilicata is known for its vineyards, particularly those made from the volcano-influenced Aglianico grape. Melfi is a quiet city but I think my favorite meal was the one we found just minutes before a restaurant closed at 3:00 p.m.:
We were genuinely hungry (as we generally were), but somehow this spaghetti, the easy-drinking red, a “zucchini flan” appetizer, friarielli greens, and some homemade potato chips, made a stellar impression. The tiramisu – not usually my thing – was so good I begged the owner/chef for a recipe. As in other places in Italy, we found this one on Google Maps, but it had a name we had heard before: Miseria e Nobilita. But this time we asked what it meant, and it refers to a movie by the beloved black-and-white film actor Toto.
We needed a lot of walking to justify more food later, so we continued on to visit a Norman castle from the 1000s, right at the high point of the city. The museum was oddly organized but a mind-blower in terms of content. So much Roman leftovers just lying about the region, apparently – plus this castle with its unexpected clocktower: it has only six hours on it, not twelve.
Thanks to Italia.it for this great pic.
Village life
Having a car allowed us to get up close and personal with some teeny villages around Melfi, and later on in the trip through other parts of Basilicata as well. The first we visited was Ginestra, where the side mirrors of our giant rental car nearly touched walls on both sides of the street. Smalllll town. It had a history of Albanian migrants, and the names of the streets still reflected that, along with a “tableau not-so-vivant” of outfits from Back In the Day:
Once we scraped our way out of Ginestra’s tiny streets, we went on to Ripacandida, and the San Donato Sanctuary. This tiny jewel box of a church features impressive frescoes, some of which are restored and some of which show how time has snipped away at human works of art. Each panel of the domed ceiling, the archway over the entry, each column, and the altar have framed scenes from the bible painted in vivid colors. For me, the framing makes each one stand out more – along with the dark blue-black skies over each scene. It reminded me of a church in Naples called La Sagrestia that made me catch my breath.
I did not grow up with great religious iconography. Nor am I particularly visual, with respect to art. We all need meaning to make things make sense, and with all the churches were were visiting, I needed a focus. I always liked the Prince of Peace idea, that Jesus’ raison d’etre was about bringing peace. (And I think religions should deliver more on that promise.) So I decided to look for doves. I didn’t always find them, but there was a lovely one in San Donato.
One for the road
San Donato had one other feature that was… surprising. Just across from the church sat this innocuous-looking self-service gas station, right?
Like, really self-service. There’s no one there but this machine and a place to put the money/card – even with English instructions. Somehow we got on its bad side. Maybe it preferred credit cards, so our efforts with a 20-euro bill were underappreciated. Shane was pulling his hair out. Ali couldn’t believe we were considering leaving without the gas. I was pressing every button I could find. (Actually, we all three did all of these things.) Finally another customer pulled up. He couldn’t figure out what to do either, but when we were just about to pull away with our tails between our legs (and 20 euros poorer), he returned to our side and tried One Last Thing.
Which, of course, worked. We got the gas and continued on our way.
We dropped by Venosa to see a castle but it was closed. Instead we found Trattoria Locanda Oraziana which filled whatever need we might have had about that town. I know I never need to go back to the underground public toilet that had only squatty potties and no paper. (Zero stars on Keri’s Krappers toilet-rating website.) (Of course, had I gone into the women’s rather than the men’s, maybe it would have been marginally better. Those pictograms are remarkably similar.)
Finest wine: Basilicata edition
I don’t know how to sum up the sheer class and quality of the Elena Fucci winery we visited. It was adorable and familial, as well as functional on a very large scale. Elena herself prepared our tasting and toured us around. The winery is run in a highly scientific way (she told us, repeatedly, what polyphenols do to the tongue but I don’t remember what that is) but the place is also fully organic and zero-waste, zero-carbon impact – a project she has worked on for over ten years. All this grew from her own family’s wine-making history, and now she and her husband make it work.
Here’s a view down their valley:
In addition to wine, they do olive oil and chestnuts – all of which are harvested about the same time. About now, actually, late October and early November. It sounds frantic – all the folks they hire for the harvest come in and get it done in less than a month. the grape is Aglianico and the site is Vulture, a volcanic mountainside atop which the vineyards sit, just below treeline. Elena Fucci’s grapes are harvested last in the region because they are the highest up the mountainside.
The wines are award-winning, and delicious, from a rose that is not like any other rose I’ve ever tried to deep reds and a monster riserva, plus a Vermut. But at a point near the end of the tasting I got a text reminding me about a work phone call I had to take, in about ten minutes. I’m pretty sure all the nice wine color drained from my cheeks in that instant. It was an hour-long call and I took it while standing outside the winery on a glorious day.
A fortunate Basili-castle
In one of Shane’s many well-researched forays, we found a gorgeous castle that was… also closed. Walking around the outside we found a band of older women maintaining the grounds wearing matching jumpsuits and wielding weed whackers that they turned off when we passed. On the same grounds we met Massimo, a quiet retired fellow who used to take students on tours of this castle and others in the region.
After giving us some castle history in beautiful English, such as about Charles D’Anjou’s influence on these bisected windows, Massimo gave us more recommendations in the region. Later in town we ran into him again, and we learned he speaks beautiful Spanish as well when he bought me a coffee!
Something you didn’t know existed
One of Massimo’s recommendations: Pietragalla. We drove there not knowing quite what to expect, and found a hillside covered wtih hobbity-looking huts where people used to make wine. They look like this:
She’s stomping grapes! Took us a minute, too.
Again, Shane with the Mystery Villages
From Pietragalla we spied another medieval-looking town on a hill with a big cathedral poking up out of it. It was across a deep valley that took us corkscrewing downhill and then back uphill on the other side. Couldn’t have been a better day for it.
Then we arrived in Acerenza. Ali’s failsafe “system” for choosing restaurants was on the nose again, a cave-y, castle-y warren with white tablecloths and a teenaged waiter: Palazzo Gala. We had all the specials and then went exploring in the cathedral.
Unfortunately for this blog, the best part of the church was actually an unlit basement that had all these pagan-y symbols and surprising sculptures, but that we did not have enough light to photograph. There was a distinct feel to the town and the cathedral that seemed like a Dan Brown conspiracy. Then we figured it out: Dracula wuz here.
I got separated from the guys and when I found them again, they had been swept up into a Dracula museum mounted by some dubious descendants who were overly eager to keep us there. I felt like we were in a Scooby Doo castle mystery and immediately regretted shaking Papa Dracula Museum’s hand… it was ice cold!
More posts from this awesome trip:
