L'Aquila: The Grill I Did
The first Abruzzo chapter in this book opens at a festival in Rimini, at a long table full of Alpini, with a salt-baked branzino that made us friends for an evening. But I have already told that story. Something else happened at that festival, out in the street, between the beer gardens, and it is the beginning of this chapter.
The streets of that town were full of smoke, and the smoke was full of lamb. Everywhere the Alpini gathered, there were long narrow iron troughs glowing with coals, and over them, laid crosswise like the rungs of a ladder, dozens of thin skewers turning, turning, turning. Arrosticini. The street food of Abruzzo, which travels to every festival in Italy because no festival is complete without it. Nearby, whole pork hocks turned on rotisseries, lacquering slowly, and if that image sounds familiar, it should: the stinco I served three weeks ago at the Friuli dinner is the same thing. That festival, it turns out, has been feeding this book for months. And when we came home to Fort Bragg, I did something small. I found the iron, the real one, imported from Abruzzo, and I bought it for the restaurant. A narrow canal grill, built for exactly one job. A small street cred, sitting in a kitchen on the Mendocino coast.
I want to put that purchase next to another one, because the two of them together are this chapter. The first Abruzzo chapter is called "The Property I Didn't Buy." It is about eleven hectares in the Abruzzo hills, three stone houses six hundred years old, a hundred olive trees, a vineyard I planned down to the grape varieties and never planted, for two hundred and forty thousand euros I was never going to spend. I held that hillside in my mind like a warm glass, did the math, and drove on to Gubbio. The dream stayed in Abruzzo. But the iron came home. A modest thing, festival hardware, humble as a shovel, and it is the purchase that turned out to matter, because on Tuesday nights the coals go in and it feeds people in Fort Bragg. There is a philosophy hiding in that, and it happens to be Abruzzo's own philosophy. The word for the region's cooking is cucina povera, the cooking of the poor, and the phrase carries no shame in Italian. It names an entire civilization of making abundance from scarcity, of knowing the difference between what you dream of owning and what you actually need. The hillside was the dream. The grill was the need. Abruzzo would have told me which one to buy, and apparently, without my noticing, it did.
The first trip saw Abruzzo from the coast road, mountains on the left, Adriatic on the right, and fell for it at highway speed. This chapter climbs. Because the province of L'Aquila, inland and upward, is where the region's soul was made, and it is unlike anywhere else in Italy. This is the roof of the peninsula: the Gran Sasso massif, the Corno Grande at nearly ten thousand feet, and behind it Campo Imperatore, a high grass plain so vast and bare they call it Little Tibet. Europe's southernmost glacier is dying up there on the north face. In 1943 they imprisoned Mussolini in the hotel on that plain, on the theory that no one could reach him, and the Germans reached him anyway. They landed gliders on the grass in the most famous commando raid of the war, flying him off the mountain in an airplane that had no business taking off with that many men in it. The plain shrugged and went back to being grass. It had seen stranger things.
Because the true history of this province was written by sheep, and by the men who walked them. For something like two and a half thousand years, every autumn, the flocks of these mountains, millions of animals at the peak, walked south to the winter plains of Puglia along the tratturi, the great grass highways of the transhumance, some of them a hundred meters wide, droving roads so old and so important that kings mapped them, taxed them, and carved boundary stones that still stand in the fields. The shepherds left in September and came home in May. Half a year gone, every year, for a hundred generations. The wool they brought back made the city of L'Aquila one of the richest towns of the medieval south. And everything on Tuesday night's table walked those roads. The pecorino is what the flock gave its shepherd, morning and evening. The arrosticini are his lunch, meat cubed small because a walking man cooks over a small fire, threaded on a stick because a walking man owns no pan, fat left among the lean because the fat is the sauce. The dish on my imported iron is not festival food that became shepherd food. It is shepherd food that became a festival.
The city those shepherds and wool merchants built is one of the strangest foundations in Italy. L'Aquila, the Eagle, was not founded by a king or grown from a Roman camp. It was founded, in the 1250s, by an agreement: the castle-villages of the surrounding mountains decided to build one city together, each raising its own quarter, its own church, its own piazza. Legend insists there were ninety-nine of them, and the city took that number as its soul. Ninety-nine churches, ninety-nine piazzas, and in the old quarter a fountain with ninety-nine stone masks, each one said to be the face of a founding village, all of them still spitting water after seven centuries. Every evening the civic bell tolls ninety-nine strokes. A city built not by conquest but by cooperation among small mountain communities, wearing the count of its founders on its fountain, and ringing their number into the dark every night.
The city's greatest hour was a strange and tender one. In 1294 the cardinals, deadlocked for two years, elected as pope a hermit from these mountains, Pietro da Morrone, who did not want the job. He was crowned at L'Aquila, at the basilica of Collemaggio, took the name Celestine V, and before the year was out he did the unthinkable: he resigned. The only pope in seven centuries to walk away. Dante put him in the antechamber of hell for that great refusal, which tells you what Florence thought. L'Aquila thought otherwise. Before he left, Celestine decreed the Perdonanza: one day a year when the basilica's holy door opens and forgiveness is free to anyone who walks through it.
The Perdonanza's home is the Basilica di Santa Maria di Collemaggio, in L'Aquila itself, the provincial capital, this chapter's own city. It stands just outside the old walls at the head of a great lawn, and it's the building Celestine V was crowned in (August 29, 1294) and where he lies buried today. It's also the province's architectural masterpiece: the famous facade of pink and white stone in a checkered geometry, unlike anything else in Italy, with the Porta Santa, the Holy Door, on its left flank. That door is the mechanism of the whole thing: the Perdonanza Celestiniana runs August 28–29, the papal bull is carried in procession from the city hall, the door is opened with a strike of olive-wood, and anyone who walks through it, confessed and, in the decree's spirit, forgiving of others, receives the plenary indulgence free, no payment, no journey to Rome. It has run every year since 1294.
And then there is the gold. Around the year 1300, a Dominican monk of the Santucci family, native of the Navelli plain, came home from Spain carrying crocus corms hidden, the legend says, in his hollowed walking staff, smuggled past monopolies that did not take kindly to smuggling. The plateau turned out to grow saffron better than Spain did. Zafferano dell'Aquila is still there, still hand-picked at dawn by a few dozen families, the flowers gathered closed before the sun opens them, three red threads pulled by hand from each, toasted over embers. A hundred and fifty thousand flowers make a kilo. For centuries this was the province's treasure, sold to Milan and Venice and Frankfurt, and here is the fact that tells you everything about cucina povera: the people who grew the world's most expensive ingredient ate almost none of it. It was money, not food. The poorest province in the region grew red gold and shipped it away and sat down to chickpeas, which the same Navelli plain also grows, small and thin-skinned and prized. This Tuesday night, both of Navelli's crops are on the table, the gold in the pasta and the chickpeas under the lamb, together at last, which the growers themselves could rarely afford.
I cannot write about L'Aquila and skip the morning of April 6, 2009, and I would not want to. At 3:32 a.m. the mountain moved, and 309 people died, and the medieval heart of the eagle city was cordoned off behind barriers, a red zone, silent for years. Readers of this book have met an Italian earthquake before. Friuli, 1976: a thousand dead, and the reconstruction so swift and so sane that the world teaches it as a model, factories, then houses, then churches, done in a decade. L'Aquila's story is not so kind. The city had been shaking for months, and six days before the quake a government commission arrived to calm everyone down; the science they stated was narrowly true, that swarms rarely lead to disaster and no one can predict an earthquake, but the message the public heard was "relax," one official going so far as to recommend going home for a glass of wine. Some Aquilani who by old mountain habit would have slept outside after the big tremors stayed in their stone houses instead, and six days later the houses came down on them. So Italy put the scientists on trial for manslaughter and convicted them, the world's seismologists watched in disbelief, and the appeals court eventually acquitted the science while upholding the conviction of the spin, which is as precise a verdict as you will ever get on the distance between what experts say and what officials need said.
The restoration moved at the speed of stone. And yet, the Perdonanza never missed a year, not even that one. The bell never stopped tolling its ninety-nine. Collemaggio's restoration is now counted among the finest in Europe, and year by year the center fills back in. Friuli rebuilt fast, and L'Aquila is rebuilding long, and they are the two panels of one fresco, because the answer underneath is identical: the people stayed. In the mountains, staying is the whole religion. The shepherds always came back in May.
So this is what we cook, on the province's own terms. Tomatoes from this week's farmers market with red garlic in the manner of Sulmona and shavings of canestrato, the transhumance cheese. Then the sagne, and I owe the reader an honest note: this humble cut has been on an Abruzzo table of ours before, hand-torn into a lentil soup back in March, doing its ancient job. This Tuesday night it is promoted. The sagne in its proper glory, bathed in the golden saffron cream of its home and showered by the gift of its sheep. The pasta itself has papers: it comes from Rustichella d'Abruzzo, a family mill in the Abruzzo hills that has been this restaurant's supplier for years, which means the region was in our pantry long before it was in our book. Rustichella is the pasta of the people, and this is the people's night. Then the iron earns its passage: arrosticini, lamb shoulder cubed small by hand, marinated in oil and garlic and rosemary, salted at the fire, grilled over coals on the actual Abruzzese grill with a rosemary branch dipped in oil swept over the last turn, served over a purée of chickpeas in Navelli's honor, with chicory sautéed with garlic and a little heat. And to finish, ferratelle, the thin wafers pressed in a hinged iron that Abruzzese families pass down like jewelry, with grape jam, because the grandmother's answer to flour, eggs, and an iron is always right.
Somewhere below these mountains, on a hillside I still haven't bought, a hundred olive trees are getting on fine without me. The first chapter ended with a hope: that whoever buys that property plants the vines. And I stand by it. But I have stopped keeping score against myself about that, because I understand the arithmetic better now, and it is Abruzzese arithmetic. The dream stayed in Abruzzo, where dreams keep well, the mountains are full of them. The iron came home, where tools belong. And on Tuesday nights the coals go in, the skewers turn, and for a few hours Laurel Street smells like a street festival on the Adriatic, which is to say: like happiness, made audible, in a felt hat.
I hope they plant the vines. We lit the grill.
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