Friuli: The Mother of Venice

by Joseph Harris

Every cook I've known has a blind spot on the map, and for most of my life mine sat in the top right corner of Italy. I could tell you what they eat in every region from the Alps to the toe, I've now cooked my way through nearly all of them on Tuesday nights in this dining room, but Friuli stayed a rumor. Then I started reading, and I found the oldest reversal in the country, Friuli is not some outpost of Venice. Friuli is Venice's mother.

Aquileia, on the Friulian plain, was once the fourth city of Roman Italy, a port, a mint, a patriarch's seat, a quarter million people, with a basilica whose fourth-century mosaic floor is still the largest of its age in the Western world. When Attila burned the city in 452, the survivors fled into the lagoon and built huts on the mudflats, and those mudflats became Venice. The child grew up glittering and in 1420 the child came home and conquered her mother. For four centuries Friuli was Venetian territory, which is how corn off Venice's ships found its first true Italian home. Friuli embraced maize before anyone else fully dared, planted the plain with it, and gave Italy yellow polenta itself, the gold standard, literally, of the northern table. The south noticed, and coined its insult: polentoni, the polenta-eaters, which is what southerners call northerners when they are not feeling generous, and something worse when they are not feeling polite. The Friulian response has always been to reach for another helping. Lidia Bastianich, the region's most famous cook, jokes proudly that Friulians are the ultimate polentoni, the slur worn as a medal, which may be the most Friulian gesture there is. And history, having a sense of humor, was not finished: in 1797, when Napoleon signed the treaty that erased the Venetian Republic from the earth, he signed it at Campoformido, a village in Friuli. The mother watched the child's empire dissolve on her own soil. History is rarely kind, but it is consistent.

Why did everyone keep coming through? Look at the land and you have the answer.

Friuli is where the Alps stoop lowest, the easiest door between the Mediterranean and the whole world north of it. The amber road ran through here for a thousand years before Rome, Baltic amber walking south to Aquileia's port; Rome ran its legions and its roads back up the same corridor. Every arrival since has used the door: Attila coming down it, the Lombards coming down it in 568 to make Cividale the first capital of their Italian kingdom, Ottoman raiders burning the plain in the 1400s, and Napoleon. That is why Friuli bristles with castles the way Tuscany bristles with towers, a farmer's country armored like a fortress, because the front door of Italy has never once been left unknocked. Between the mountains and the sea the land runs the whole scale in fifty miles: the Carnic and Julian Alps with their high summer dairies, the magredi, stony, wild, water-starved plains where the rivers vanish underground, and the Tagliamento, the last great wild river of the Alps. It is still braiding gravel the way every Alpine river did before we dammed them. Alps at your back, Adriatic at your face: that collision of mountain air and sea air is the region's true head chef. It cures the prosciutto at San Daniele. It ripens the grapes on the hills. Everything good here is weather with a recipe.

And in 1915 the door swung the other way. For two and a half years the Isonzo river, sixty miles of valley and karst on Friuli's eastern edge, was Italy's Western Front: twelve numbered battles on the same ground, uphill into rock, at a cost of something near a million men killed, wounded, or taken between the two sides, half of Italy's losses for the entire war, spent along one river. The world knows the Somme and Verdun; it has mostly never heard of the Isonzo, though it belongs in that company. The twelfth battle has its own name, Caporetto, and Italians still use it the way the English use Waterloo. At Redipuglia, on the karst, a hundred thousand Italian dead lie on a single staircase of stone. Hemingway drove an ambulance here and made A Farewell to Arms out of what he saw. Only once did the knocking nearly take the house down.

And the wine deserves its own testimony, because Friuli's claim is older than Italy's.

The vine was domesticated in the Caucasus thousands of years before Rome named anything, and it walked west through Anatolia into exactly this corner of Europe, the Romans didn't bring wine to Friuli; they found it waiting. The hills the locals call ponca, crumbling seabed of marl and sandstone, grow whites of a precision the rest of Italy didn't attempt until Friuli showed it how: in the 1960s a Collio winemaker named Mario Schiopetto came home with northern cellar science and effectively invented modern Italian white wine, clean and cold-fermented and fearless, and every crisp glass poured from Alto Adige to Sicily since owes this region a nod. The Habsburg courts knew before anyone; Picolit, Friuli's rare sweet wine, traveled to the tables of Vienna, Paris, and London when most Italian wine traveled no farther than the nearest tavern. And in our own time the circle closed with a poetry no novelist would dare: Josko Gravner, on the Slovenian border, dissatisfied with all that modern perfection, began burying clay amphorae in his cellar floor and fermenting his Ribolla the way the Caucasus did at the beginning, and collectors now fight over the results. Eight thousand years out, and the vine came home through a Friulian's cellar. Tuesday night's Ribolla Gialla and Friulano descend from all of it.

What Friuli did through every flattening, Attila, Venice, the Turks, two world wars, and the earthquake of 1976 that killed nearly a thousand people and knocked the old towns down, was rebuild, and refuse to become anyone else. They kept their own language: Friulian, not a dialect, a language, the largest minority tongue in Italy, with its own poets and its own toast. After the earthquake they rebuilt on a principle you could carve over a kitchen door: first the factories, then the houses, then the churches. Work, then shelter, then the soul, in that order, because the soul keeps if the people can eat. Within a decade the towns stood again, stone by numbered stone. And the first hands on those stones belonged to the Alpini, Italy's mountain soldiers, the men in the felt hats with the single feather whom Kathleen and I once found occupying an entire Adriatic city at their annual festival, twenty of them opining on our branzino from the next table. I did not know then what I know now: that these are their mountains. The Alpini were raised from valleys like Carnia's, they bled on the Isonzo, and when the earth broke Friuli they came back by the thousands, serving soldiers and gray-haired veterans alike, to dig, to shelter, and to rebuild. Italians hold the Alpini in a particular affection, and Friuli is a large part of the reason why. The world now teaches "the Friuli model" in disaster-recovery courses.

Which raises the question a fair reader should ask, and which I asked myself somewhere around the second glass of Friulano: why is this place Italian at all? It sat under Austria for centuries. Its winter table would pass inspection in Munich. Its mountains speak a language Rome never taught, and half its coast prays in Slovene. And it is not just Friuli, travel anywhere in the north and the Italy in your head dissolves. No red sauce, no mandolins, butter where you expected olive oil, polenta where you expected pasta, kraut in the soup. The Italy most Americans carry in their heads is really the south, Naples and Sicily, packed into steamships a century ago, reassembled in Brooklyn and Boston as red-checkered tablecloths and Sunday gravy. It is a true Italy. But it is also one-fifth of Italy.

And yet ask a Friulian farmer what he is, and after "Friulian", always after Friulian first, he will tell you he is Italian, and mean it in the marrow. Why? Not because of the state; the state is barely older than this restaurant's building. Italy was stitched together in 1861, Friuli voted itself in by plebiscite in 1866, and a statesman of that era admitted the truth: we have made Italy, now we must make Italians. No, the answer is older than the state, and Friuli wears it in its name. Friuli is Forum Iulii, the forum of Julius. The region is named for Julius Caesar, whose market town became Cividale. Venezia Giulia is Julian Venice; even the Alps here are the Julian Alps. Rome was here for six hundred years before anyone else got a turn, and when the Friulians developed their own language, it grew, like Italian, like every dialect from the Alps to Sicily, out of the Latin those legionaries left behind. A Friulian under the Habsburgs still spoke a daughter of Latin, still prayed in the Latin church whose great patriarchate sat at Aquileia, still walked on Roman roads to a market Rome had chartered. Vienna held the deed; Rome held the roots.

So, what makes Italy Italian is not a cuisine, and it is certainly not a temperament, the north and south agree on almost nothing and enjoy the disagreement immensely. It is a shared grammar underneath a thousand vocabularies. Dante's language, learned in school and cemented, in the end, by television. The bell tower of one's own town as the true center of the universe, the Italians even have a word for it, campanilismo, loyalty to your own campanile, and here is the paradox that explains everything: the fierce conviction that your valley is unlike anywhere else is itself the most Italian trait there is. Every region is certain it is the exception. Twenty exceptions make the rule. And beneath all of it, the table, not the recipes, the rules. Eat what the season gives. Eat what your ground grows. Courses in their order. Family around the food, and the meal itself treated as the day's true achievement. A jota and a bowl of Sunday ragù share not one ingredient, and they are the same sentence in two vocabularies. That grammar is what a Friulian shares with a Sicilian, and it is why he can eat like an Austrian, toast in Friulian, and be, without contradiction, without effort, Italian. Italy is not a nation that contains regions. It is a civilization of regions that agreed, rather late and still provisionally, to share a flag. Italy is the true big-tent party, and they all belong in it, the kraut-eaters and the ragù-makers, the polenta north and the pasta south, twenty exceptions under one canvas. The food came first. The food will outlast.

And let me say one thing else about Italy, because the world has been unkind to this country. I think the truth is that the world never really forgave Rome for falling, and it has been sneering at Italy ever since. Think about the tone people take, the affectionate condescension, the jokes about trains and governments, the astonishment when anything Italian succeeds. No one talks about Portugal or Greece that way. But Rome was everyone's parent. Its law, its alphabet, its church, its roads, its very idea of what a state is are the bones inside every Western country, and the heir never forgives the father for dying. Mockery is how the West carries the debt. And here is what the mockery misses. Rome didn't conquer peoples; it created citizens. That was the invention no empire before it attempted and no empire since has matched. Athens hoarded its citizenship, Persia ruled subjects, but Rome kept widening the circle, until Gauls sat in the Senate and Spaniards and Syrians wore the purple and, in the end, every free soul from Britain to the Euphrates was Roman by law. The conquered didn't dream of escaping Rome; they fought a war to join it. And that engine never shut off. For all the conquerors across the millennia, Goth and Lombard, Norman and Arab, Spaniard and Austrian and Frenchman, Italy absorbed every one of them and was replaced by none of them, because it did to them what Rome had always done: it enrolled them. The Lombards became Italians. The Normans became Sicilians. The Austrians left the kraut and Friuli kept the kitchen. And that is the answer to the question this chapter began with, why all these diverse peoples, who agree on nothing and eat like strangers, are together as Italians: because they are all, every one of them, citizens of Rome. The Friulian was enrolled by Caesar's market town; the Sicilian by the legions; the rest across the centuries, each in their turn, and the rolls were never closed. Italy did not invent its unity in 1861. It inherited it, and finally got around to the paperwork. At its heart, under every occupation and every insult, it is still Rome, and the proof is not in the monuments. It is on the table, where the citizenship is still on offer, one dinner at a time, on every continent on earth. The empire never fell. It just stopped ruling.

Is it a pastoral culture? Proudly, contadino to the bone, a civilization of the hearth. The Friulian home was built around the fogolâr, the open central fireplace, and when hard times sent Friulians out into the world by the hundreds of thousands, they named their emigrant societies after it: there are Fogolârs Furlans, "Friulian hearths", on every continent, because a Friulian abroad defines home as the fire the food comes from. I understand these people. But pastoral never meant unaccomplished; this countryside exported genius the way it exported workers. Pier Paolo Pasolini, one of the great artistic minds of the Italian century, grew up in his mother's village of Casarsa and published his first poems in Friulian, he chose the peasant tongue on purpose, as a flag. Tiepolo painted ceilings in Udine that hold their own against anything in Venice. Tina Modotti of Udine became one of the great photographers of the twentieth century. Lidia Bastianich, born on the Istrian coast when it was still Julian Italy and carried out as a refugee of the border's cruelest decade, grew up to teach America how to cook Italian, forty years of it, on television and on the plate, while her family's vines took root back home in the Colli Orientali. And from the little village of Sequals came two exports that tell the whole story between them: Primo Carnera, the giant stonemason's son who ambled out of the mountains and became heavyweight champion of the world, and the mosaicists. Sequals and neighboring Spilimbergo bred families of mosaic artists who laid floors across Europe and the Americas, and Spilimbergo's mosaic school still trains the world's best, direct heirs of the men who floored Aquileia sixteen centuries ago. A pastoral culture, one that sent its shepherds abroad and got back champions, poets, and the floors of palaces.

But the plate is where this region told me its secret, and it's a secret I was oddly prepared for. I know German food; I know the Oktoberfest table the way I know my own knives, and I know Hungarian cooking beside it. So when I looked closely at what Friuli eats in winter, I recognized everything, and every single element had been translated. The pork shank is the Bavarian Haxe, but it roasts in white wine and juniper instead of beer. The sauerkraut instinct is there, but Friuli ferments turnips, buried for months in red grape pomace, the pressings from the harvest, until they come out wine-dark and sour. It is the German kraut barrel married to the Italian vineyard, it is called brovada, and it exists nowhere else on earth.

The horseradish stays, but they call it kren, which is the Austrian word. The spice roads to Vienna ran over the Carnic passes, and the mountain people kept a pinch of what passed through, cinnamon and raisins folded into ricotta on their pasta, a sweetness in the savory that stops every first-timer mid-bite. Even the winter pig slaughter, the purcitâ, is the same household ritual as the German Schlachtfest and the Hungarian disznóvágás; no other corner of Italy keeps a pig this way. This is what sitting on the door of Italy earns you: everyone who ever passed through left something in the pot. Fusion is not something Friuli attempted. It is something Friuli is.

Venice supplied the rest of the pantry the way Venice supplied everything, through the cargo hold. The corn for the polenta under our pork shank. The borlotti beans in the jota, that sauerkraut-and-bean soup no Tuscan would recognize as Italian and no Friulian would surrender at gunpoint. The cheesemaking discipline behind Montasio, born in a Benedictine abbey in the Julian Alps, which the mountain farmers turned into frico, cheese and potato cooked into one great golden cake in an iron pan, because wasting cheese was a sin and inventing a dish to prevent the sin was a virtue. The sweet air of San Daniele, curing a prosciutto that Parma pretends not to envy. Somewhere between the smokehouse and the abbey, between the kraut barrel and the wine press, a cuisine assembled itself that is not quite Italian, not quite Austrian, not quite Slavic, and entirely Friulian.

On the coast of this region sits Trieste, the Habsburgs' great port, the city that gave itself to Austria in 1382 to escape Venice and came back to Italy on the longing of a nation, the city of Joyce and Svevo and the coffee houses, the city that taught Italy espresso and, through Italy, taught America. Trieste is a story too large to share a chapter. It will get its own night. Tuesday night belongs to the mother country, the plain, the mountains, the hearth, the pig, the pot.

So this is what we cook: a frico in the Carnic manner, made as one great round in the pan the way it has always been made, with a cool dollop of robiola against the crisp. A jota built on smoked hocks from our own smokehouse people down the street, because Fort Bragg and Friuli agree that smoke is a foundation, not a flavor. Cavatelli carrying the cjarsons' spice-road soul, brown butter and raisins and a snowfall of smoked caciocavallo. A pork shank lacquered in Friulano and juniper over soft polenta, with brovada and fresh kren, the Oktoberfest plate, translated into Italian by five hundred years of border weather. And a gubana from the Slovene-speaking valleys to finish, the slice anointed with plum brandy at the table, beside an espresso, because in this region even the coffee has a passport, and we will hear the rest of that story when Trieste gets its night.

A people flattened four times who rebuilt four times without once becoming anyone else, around a fire with a pot on it. That is the region. It is also, if you think about it, a fair definition of a good soup: everything in the pot keeps its character, and the pot is better for it.

Salût.

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