Molise: The Region That Doesn't Exist

by Joseph Harris

There is a joke in Italy, and it has been running for twenty years without losing a step: Il Molise non esiste. Molise does not exist. It is on the t-shirts, in the memes, in a mock documentary that treated the region the way other films treat the moon landing. The premise is always the same. No one has ever met anyone from Molise. The photographs are staged. The maps print a shape between Abruzzo and Puglia to keep the coastline from looking broken. It is the youngest region in the country, carved off from Abruzzo only in 1963, and the second smallest by population, some three hundred thousand people, fewer than Bakersfield, in a country of sixty million that mostly could not point to it. The Molisani, for their part, have printed shirts of their own. Theirs say the same three words and add: e io non ci vivo. And I don't live there.

In 1978 a road crew was cutting the bed of a new highway near Isernia, one of the two provincial capitals, when the bulldozer opened a layer of earth that stopped the road for good. What came out of that cut is called Isernia La Pineta, a Paleolithic hunting camp more than half a million years old, its floor paved with the butchered bones of bison, elephant, and rhinoceros and the limestone tools that did the work. In 2014 a sifting screen caught a child's milk tooth, shed on that spot roughly five hundred and eighty-six thousand years ago, the oldest human remain ever found in Italy. The region that does not exist holds the earliest evidence of anyone existing anywhere in the country, and Italy found it by accident, while building the road it had neglected for a century.

The Romans noticed. This was Samnium, and its people were the ones Rome could not digest. Three wars over half a century, and in 321 BC, at a mountain pass called the Caudine Forks, the Samnites trapped an entire Roman army without a battle and made every man of it walk bent double beneath a yoke of crossed spears while the hill people watched. It was the deepest humiliation the Romans ever recorded. At Pietrabbondante, high on a mountainside in what is now Molise, the Samnites built their sanctuary, a temple and theater of cut stone with a view that runs to the horizon, its inscriptions in Oscan, a language that is not Latin. Rome won in the end the way Rome always won, with roads and colonies and patience, and after the Social War, the Roman general Sulla set out to finish the argument. The geographer Strabo wrote, a lifetime later, that the cities of Samnium had dwindled into villages. Most of them never came back. Il Molise non esiste is not a new joke. Sulla told it first, and he was not laughing.

What survived the erasure was a walking economy, and it is the key to everything else in this chapter. The tratturi are the great droving roads of the transumanza, the migration of sheep between the high pastures and the winter plains of Puglia, and the principal ones run through Molise because Molise is what lies between. The royal tratturi were fixed by law at a width of sixty Neapolitan paces, about a hundred and eleven meters, the widest roads ever built in Europe, made of nothing but grass and right-of-way. The Kingdom of Naples ran its treasury on them, taxing millions of animals a year through a customs house at Foggia from 1447. A civilization organized itself along those green rivers: churches spaced a day's walk apart, cheese made in transit, the caciocavallo slung in pairs over the shoulder because a walking man needs his hands. And the roads taught the region its rhythm. The flocks walked south when the cold came and walked home to the high country in late spring, so that summer, in Molise, has always been the season of return. Because the roads carried more than sheep.

For a century and a half, Molise's principal export has been Molisani. The young left for Naples, then in great waves for the Americas and Australia, until the Molisani abroad comfortably outnumbered the ones at home, and look at what became of the cargo. Robert De Niro's people left Ferrazzano, a hill village above Campobasso; the town has since made him an honorary citizen. Don DeLillo's parents left Casacalenda, and their son became a great American novelist. Vincenzo Cuoco of Civitacampomarano watched the Neapolitan Revolution fail in 1799 and coined the idea of the passive revolution. Antonio Di Pietro of Montenero di Bisaccia walked into a Milan courtroom in 1992 and took apart Italy's entire postwar party system with the Clean Hands investigation, and for a few years he was the most famous man in the country that could not find his home town on a map. There is the pattern, De Niro is New York, DeLillo is the Bronx, and Cuoco's best idea answers to another man's name. Molise's exports arrive famous, and labeled as something else.

The woods run the same trade. The oak and hazel country of Alto Molise, around a village called San Pietro Avellana, produces truffles in quantities that would make a Piedmontese blush, whites of the very species that makes Alba famous, and blacks in every season. By industry estimates, something approaching forty percent of Italy's national truffle harvest comes out of Molise. You have never heard this, and there is a reason. The hunters sell to brokers at the edge of the woods, the trucks drive north, and the truffles arrive in the famous markets wearing other regions' names, priced accordingly. The regions that take the credit do so because they like truffles, not because they source them. The truffle leaves Molise anonymous and arrives famous, exactly like the actor, the novelist, and the idea, which makes it the most perfectly Molisan thing in Italy.

Even the vine was told it belonged to someone else. Tintilia is the native grape of Molise, and for most of the twentieth century the experts said it was a Spanish import, tinto with a local accent, while the postwar subsidies paid growers to rip out this shy-bearing mountain vine and plant heavy croppers. By the 1970s it had all but vanished. A handful of stubborn growers and the University of Molise went looking for it in old vineyards, propagated what they found, and ran the DNA. The grape was native after all, related to nothing in Spain, a Molisan original that had been standing in its own soil the whole time being told it was someone else. It has had its own DOC since 2011, and it is in your glass Tuesday night Among all the exports in this chapter, Tintilia is the one that turned around on the road and came home.

And one town never sent its treasure away at all; it sent the sound instead. Agnone, five thousand people in the high country, has cast bells for close to a thousand years, one family, the Marinelli, working clay and wax and bronze by methods a medieval founder would recognize. The Pontifical Marinelli Foundry is among the oldest family businesses on earth. Its bells hang in St. Peter's and in cathedrals on five continents, and after September 11 a Marinelli bell was cast for New York and rung in remembrance. When the bells ring in Rome, some of them are Molise talking, and almost no one listening knows it. Agnone also ages a caciocavallo that connoisseurs drive hours for, and it keeps la santé, the soup it serves at weddings, and in the villages of Molise the weddings come in summer, when the emigrants can make the trip. Which brings us, finally, to the point.

A region that watches everything it makes become famous somewhere else learns to agree with the world; and it keeps a calendar instead. Summer is when Molise celebrates itself, because summer is when Molise is full. The flocks came home up the tratturi in June. The diaspora comes home in August, and the hill villages that hold a few hundred souls in February hold thousands at the feste patronali, the church processions and the long tables in the piazza, the sagre where a town throws a festival for one food it does best. Isernia has held a fair for its sweet white onion on the feast of Saints Peter and Paul since the Middle Ages. The garden crowds the kitchen in July, the weddings fill the churches, the peppers are put up in oil against January. Nobody in Molise ever waited for Rome, or Milan, or the tourist board to confirm that the region exists. They just set the table every summer and proved it.

So Tuesday night the table does what a Molisan summer does. The sweet onions open the meal raw, the vegetable a town has honored with its own fair for centuries. The santé follows, the wedding soup of Agnone in its summer season, the little cacio e uova dumplings of the poor kitchen fried golden and set in a clear broth made from Tuesday night's own birds. The orecchiette come dressed with zucchini and their blossoms, the garden's briefest tenants, the shapes that walked the droving roads between here and Puglia. And then the gallina ripiena, because the chicken was never a weeknight bird in Molise; it was the wedding bird, the feast-day bird, raised all year for the season of return. Tuesday night the wedding stuffing bakes in the pan with split birds roasting on top of it, drinking their drippings as they go, and beside it go sweet peppers stewed silky in oil. A family dinner in summer is the most Molisan occasion there is. The region exists. Every summer, it insists on it. Taste it.

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