Cosenza: Italian Last of All

by Joseph Harris

I have been saving a sealed tub of pimento cheese for the right Tuesday. I am a Southerner, and where I come from pimento cheese is ours, as settled as the weather. Then I went looking for the pepper. The word is Spanish. A century ago a Georgia farmer named Riegel decided that the peppers American seedsmen were selling him could not touch the ones coming over from Spain in cans, so he had his congressman get him seed from Spain. On that seed Georgia became the pimento capital of the world. The most Southern thing I know landed in Georgia with a Spanish passport.

The same family of pepper had already taken another road. The Spanish carried it home from the Americas, and when Spain ruled the south of Italy it came down the boot and stopped at the toe, where the people took it up as if they had been waiting for it. One pepper left Spain twice. One branch ended in a jar in Georgia and the other on a string over a door in Calabria. Tonight they meet inside a chicken.

Start with where we are, because this is not the Calabria of the beach. The province of Cosenza is the northern part of the toe, and the city sits inland on its hills where the Busento runs into the Crati. Above it is the Sila, a high plateau of pine and beech and cold lakes where it snows every winter and the potatoes and the cheese are better than anyone expects from the south of Italy. Mountain people, a day from either sea, with every ruler of the Mediterranean coming up the valley in turn.

Here is what I have come to believe about this corner of the world. From Catalonia to Calabria, taking in Corsica and Sardinia on the way, the western Mediterranean is one people in layers. Greek, Roman, Moor, Spaniard, Frenchman and, last of all, Italian. Each layer went down on top of the others and none was ever scraped off. Who they are is the combination of all of it.

The city belongs to the first people, the Bruttii, who made it their capital before Rome ever heard of it. The Greeks took the coast, and at the mouth of the Crati they built Sybaris, a city so rich and so soft that we still use its name for a man who cannot sleep on a wrinkled rose petal. Its neighbors from Croton destroyed it and, the story goes, turned the river over the ruins. Then Rome came for the Sila, for its timber and its pitch, and the mountain went to sea in Roman ships.

In the year 410 Alaric the Goth sacked Rome, marched the length of Italy meaning to cross to Africa, and died at Cosenza. His men turned the Busento out of its bed, buried him there with his share of the plunder, let the water back in, and killed the prisoners who had done the digging. That makes two rivers turned aside in one valley to hide something. Nobody has found him. What the story usually leaves out is where his people went next. They walked north into Gaul and then over the Pyrenees, and they ruled Spain for three hundred years. So the first thread between Cosenza and Spain is a grave.

The Moors came next, and they came to stay. In 846 Arabs from Sicily took the fortress on Cosenza's own coast and named it Al-Mantiah, which is why the town is Amantea today. It was an emirate for forty years, and in 868 its emir tried for Cosenza itself. The Byzantines got it back, the Normans took it from them, and the Arabic stayed behind in the dialect and in the garden.

There is a tomb in the cathedral at Cosenza that tells this chapter better than I can. In January of 1271 Isabella of Aragon, a Catalan king's daughter and the new queen of France, was riding home from the crusade with her husband's army when her horse fell in a swollen stream in Calabria. She was carrying a child. She died at Cosenza, and the baby with her. Her bones went on to the kings at Saint-Denis, but her monument is still here. A woman of Barcelona's house, queen of the French, mourned in a church in Calabria. Everyone in this chapter was already related.

Aragon took Naples in 1442, and from then until 1707 the south of Italy was Spanish, first under its own Aragonese kings and then under viceroys. In 1504 the Spanish garrison at Cosenza was holding out against the French while Spanish soldiers landed at Amantea to relieve it. That was the argument for three centuries and Cosenza was the table it was held on. It was not gentle. Waldensians who had come down from the Alps speaking Occitan, the old tongue of the belt from Catalonia across southern France, had settled on the Cosenza coast. In 1561 the persecution reached them and some two thousand were killed. Occitan is still spoken at Guardia Piemontese, the only place in the south of Italy you will hear it, and the gate of the town still carries the memory of that blood. Albanians fleeing the Turks were given land by the Aragonese kings, and their villages are still speaking Albanian in the same hills. People came here and stayed, and the place kept what they were.

The French had one more turn, under Napoleon's marshal Murat, and then, last, came Italy. In 1844 two brothers from Venice, the Bandieras, navy officers, landed in Calabria to raise a revolt for a country that did not yet exist. They were shot in the valley of Rovito outside Cosenza. Sixteen years later the country arrived. It was the newest layer of all, and the thinnest.

The people prove it. Bernardino Telesio was born here in 1509 and argued that nature should be studied by looking at nature, which is why Francis Bacon called him the first of the moderns; the academy of Cosenza is the reason they called this city the Athens of Calabria. Francis of Paola was a hermit on the Cosenza coast whose reputation grew until a dying King of France sent for him, and he finished his life at the French court, a Calabrian who never went home. Joachim of Fiore, the abbot of the Sila, read history as a set of ages laid one on another, and Dante put him in Paradise.

The table is the same layers, and you can eat straight down through them. The farro on your plate fed the Roman legions. The bread under the soup is older than anyone here. The pomegranate came west with the first sailors. The spinach came into Europe with the Arabs, by way of Spain, and the cauliflower came out of the eastern Mediterranean behind it. The potatoes in the licurdia are Spanish cargo from the Andes that found a home on the Sila. The idea of stuffing a cutlet and frying it belongs, as far as anyone can tell, to the French kitchen, though the dish traveled east and came home named for Kiev.

Then there is the sausage. The soft spreadable pork of Calabria is called 'nduja, and that word is most likely the French andouille in a Calabrian mouth, the same word that went to Louisiana. Its cousin is the sobrasada of Mallorca. We have put Spanish chorizo in the roll, which gets the smoked pepper to the table by the shortest road, and folded it into the pimento cheese. It is a Spanish sausage, in a Georgia cheese, in a French cutlet, on a Roman grain, on a Tuesday in Fort Bragg. My rule for the common table is that a dish gets a seat when it comes from the same climate. The pepper wanted a long hot summer, and it found one in Calabria and another in Georgia. That is fusion the way it really happens, the same pantry worked by different hands, and tonight I am only introducing the relatives.

We do not have a Calabrian bottle in the house, and I would rather tell you that than pretend. What we have is better for this story. Greg Graziano's family has farmed in Mendocino since 1918, and he grows the grapes of the Italian south an hour from here. His Vermentino is the grape of Corsica and Sardinia. His Fiano is the old white of the south. His Zinfandel crossed the ocean under one name and is called Primitivo in Puglia. They made the same trip the pepper did.

So when someone asks you what a Calabrian is, give them this plate. Ask Cosenza the same question and it will say what it has always said. Sit down. Everybody else did.

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