Campania: The Bay, the Volcano, and the Lemon

by Joseph Harris

My first deep understanding of the special regional characteristics of Italy came from pottery. Not food. Not wine. Not travel. Pottery — and the bricks that built the Duomo.

This requires some explanation.

When Kathleen and I first opened the Mercato, we were doing what every new shop does — chasing suppliers, building relationships, trying to find the people who cared about the same things we cared about. We had been introduced to a smallish importer called Italian Harvest, a company that specialized in artisan small-batch items: pasta, condiments, oils, vinegars. The kind of things that tell you immediately whether the person behind them is paying attention. They were.

During one of those early conversations with the woman in the office, I mentioned that I had become interested in Italian pottery. Not an obsession yet — more of a curiosity. I didn't know much. I asked if she knew any sources. What she told me stopped me cold.

The owners of Italian Harvest, it turned out, had started in retail. They had sold pottery as part of their original business. Victoria, the wife, was a serious collector — the kind of collector who knows not just what a piece is worth but what it means, where it comes from, what the clay remembers. When they had closed the retail shop and moved into importing, they had held a going-out-of-business sale. And after the sale, there was inventory left. A large inventory. Vintage hand-painted ceramics from all over Italy, stored in a warehouse in San Francisco, covered in dust so thick you couldn't see what was underneath.

I told Kathleen. Then I drove to San Francisco to pick up our first food order, and I made time to go look at it with Victoria.

What I found was a treasure. There is no other word for it. Piece after piece emerging from under the dust — porcelain from Venice, Murano glass, pottery from Deruta and Gubbio and Vietri and Sicily. As I started clearing surfaces I began sending pictures back to Kathleen from my phone, one after another, each one more extraordinary than the last. The vocabulary of an entire civilization was sitting in this warehouse in the dark, waiting.

I didn't know what I was looking at. My ignorance at that moment seems almost comical now. But I knew it was extraordinary, the way you know certain things before you have the language for them. We bought it all, at pennies on the dollar. Vintage pieces from across the regions. And as I learned, over the months that followed, what each piece was and where it came from, I began to understand something about Italy that no cookbook had ever taught me.

Italy is not a country in the way most countries are countries. It is twenty deeply distinct civilizations that happen to share a language — imperfectly, even now. Each region has its own clay, its own glaze, its own color palette, its own way of seeing the world and putting that vision into an object. The bold terracotta and sun- scorched reds of Sicily. The ancient geometric precision of Deruta, refined over seven centuries into something that looks almost mathematical. The luster-glazed work from Gubbio, which the Umbrian potters developed in the fifteenth century and which still looks like something that should be in a museum. And Vietri sul Mare, on the Amalfi coast — exuberant, coastal, covered in lemons.

The Vietri lemon stopped me. Bright yellow, hand-painted, naive and sophisticated at the same time — the way great folk art always is. I had been cooking with Sorrento lemons in various forms for years without fully understanding what made them different. And here was the answer, painted on a ceramic plate from a coastal town I had never visited, made from clay dug out of soil that sits in the same volcanic shadow as the lemon groves themselves. The lemon is not a decoration in Campania. It is a symbol. It goes on the pottery because it belongs there, the same way it goes in the limoncello, the same way it goes over the fish, the same way it finishes a plate of fried anchovies. It is the emblem of a place.

We sold almost everything — piece by piece, here in Fort Bragg, to people who recognized something in each object without always knowing what. We kept the best pieces for ourselves. There is a hand-painted volcanic table top from Deruta in our home that I would not part with under any circumstances. It is the piece that taught me the most.

Then, in 2021, we had the particular good fortune of hosting a chef who was a native of Naples. He stayed with us for two years. In that time, working together in the kitchen, sharpening our technique in the wood-fired oven, learning the discipline of Neapolitan pizza from someone who had grown up eating it — what I had learned from the pottery was confirmed in the food. The clarity. The insistence on correct ingredients. The refusal to complicate what is already right. The Vietri lemon on the ceramic plate and the Sorrento lemon in the glass of limoncello are making the same argument. Campania has always known this. We were just catching up.

The cuisine of Campania is built on a handful of things that the volcanic soil of Vesuvius and the waters of the Bay of Naples made extraordinary and that the Neapolitan kitchen had the wisdom to leave mostly alone. The San Marzano tomato, grown in the Sarno valley in the ash of a mountain that has been active for ten thousand years — lower acid, higher sugar, thicker walls, less water, more of everything that makes a tomato taste like itself. The mozzarella di bufala, made from the milk of water buffalo that have been grazing the Caserta wetlands since the seventh century, with a texture and tang that cow's milk cannot replicate and that must be eaten within hours of production or it begins to grieve. The anchovy from Cetara. The clam from the shallow beds. The lemon from the groves above Sorrento, painted on every plate in Vietri, squeezed over everything on the table.

Tonight we are cooking from the larder of the bay. The anchovies marinated in lemon with torn mozzarella di bufala. The white bean and escarole soup that Naples has been making since before the Spanish arrived and brought the tomato. The spaghetti alle vongole in bianco — white, not red, because the clam does not need the tomato's help. The rockfish from the boats at Noyo Harbor, our Pacific equivalent of what the Neapolitan fisherman pulls from the bay, roasted on a bed of San Marzano tomatoes with olives and capers and the mozzarella melted in at the last moment. And the Torta Caprese to close — dark chocolate and almonds, no flour, from the island that sits in the bay and has been making this cake long enough that nobody remembers who invented it.

The wine is Falanghina del Sannio from Feudi di San Gregorio, the ancient white grape of Campania, volcanic and mineral in a way that the northern Italian whites never quite manage. For those who want red, the Aglianico del Taburno — same producer, the great grape of the south, structured and dark-fruited, nothing like anything from north of Rome. And at the end of the evening, Limoncello. Because in Campania the lemon is not a garnish. It is a philosophy. It goes on the pottery and in the glass and over the fish, and it has been making that argument on painted ceramic plates for four hundred years.

Chi mangia bene vive bene. Who eats well lives well. I learned it first from a dusty plate in a warehouse. The kitchen confirmed it. That is how Campania works.

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