Pietrasanta: Where the stone meets the hands
by Joseph Harris
As always we go to the history of the region, and this week the history is not a crown or a cathedral. It is a mountain.
Tuscany has already had its visit in this book, and that visit went where everyone goes, to Siena and Montalcino and Florence, to the throne room of the Renaissance. This week we go back to Tuscany, but not to the throne. We go to the workshop. Pietrasanta sits where the Apuan Alps fall straight into the sea, forty minutes north of Pisa on the strip of coast the Italians call the Versilia. Above the town the mountains are white, and not with snow. That is marble, the same marble Rome quarried for its temples, and the quarries are still working.
The town itself was founded in 1255 by a magistrate of Lucca named Guiscardo Pietrasanta, which tells you what Pietrasanta was for. It was a border town, a fortified place on the road between Lucca and Genoa, and for three hundred years Lucca, Genoa and Florence took turns owning it. In 1513 a Medici pope settled the argument in favor of Florence, and that is how the story of this chapter begins, because four years later Florence sent its sculptor to the mountain.
Michelangelo came to Pietrasanta in 1517 to find the marble for the facade of San Lorenzo in Florence. He did not want to be there. He had always worked with the stone of Carrara, a few miles up the coast, and he wrote home in a fury that the pope had sent him to open new quarries on Monte Altissimo where there was no road, no men who knew the work, and a mountain that killed people. He stayed three years. He built the road down the mountain himself, with his own money and his own crews. He lost men to it, and he nearly lost himself when a column broke loose and crushed one of them beside him. And then the pope changed his mind. The facade of San Lorenzo was never built. If you go to Florence today it is still bare brick, five hundred years later.
But the road stayed. The quarries stayed. The men Michelangelo trained stayed, and their sons, and for five centuries Pietrasanta has been the town where the stone meets the hands. Florence is where art is seen. Pietrasanta is where it is made.
That is what it is like to be Italian there. Nobody in Pietrasanta is impressed by a sculptor. Every street has a bronze foundry or a marble studio, and in those studios are the artigiani, the craftsmen who take a model from a sculptor and carve the thing, full size, in stone. The sculptor gets his name on it. The artigiano goes home for lunch. The town has called itself the Little Athens since the nineteenth century, and the name is earned, but it is earned the way a blacksmith earns it, not the way a museum does. In our own time the world's sculptors came to Pietrasanta because the hands were there. Fernando Botero came from Colombia in the 1980s and never left; he painted the Last Judgment on the walls of the Misericordia church and his fat bronze warrior stands in the piazza. Igor Mitoraj came from Poland. Henry Moore worked here, and Pomodoro, and now the Americans and the Japanese. Rome gathered the empire around its table. Pietrasanta gathers the world's sculptors around a block of stone, and every one of them eats at the same trattoria as the man who carves for him.
Who came from there? Two men, and I would not have guessed either of them. Giosuè Carducci was born in 1835 at Valdicastello, a village in the hills above the town, and became the first Italian ever to win the Nobel Prize for literature. And Eugenio Barsanti was born in Pietrasanta in 1821, a priest and a physics teacher who, with his partner Felice Matteucci, built the first working internal combustion engine in 1853, years before the Germans. He died in Belgium on his way to put it into production, and the Germans got the credit. The marble town produced the man who gave Italy its voice and the man who gave the world its engine, and both of them are remembered mostly in Pietrasanta. That seems about right for a town that has always done the work and let someone else sign it.
The food follows the same line, and this is why the menu matters to the story. Every dish on this table is somebody's work lunch. Pietrasanta is in the province of Lucca, and Lucca is the olive oil capital of Tuscany; the hills behind the town are terraced with olives, and the first week of November is when the mills, the frantoi, start to press. The frantoiana is the soup of the mill. The families bring vegetables to the frantoio on pressing day, the soup cooks while the oil runs, and the new oil, green and peppery and a few hours old, is poured over the bowl. We are pressing the same week on this coast. The Mendocino mills run in November too, and the oil on your soup Tuesday night will be this year's.
The lamb is the shepherds'. The Apuan Alps above the quarries are grazing country, and the quarrymen's meat was never beef; it was the lamb that came down from the Garfagnana. We cook it the mountain way, in white wine and rosemary, because the tomato came late to those hills and the shepherds never bothered with it. And the fish is the coast's. Viareggio is the Versilia's port, the next town down the shore, and its boats fed the quarrymen the way the Noyo boats fed the loggers here. Fish alla livornese, in tomato with capers and olives, is the Tuscan coast's one great fish dish, from Livorno all the way up to the marble. Two boats, two coasts, the same job.
I have not stood in those foundry streets yet. This is a chapter written toward a place I am owed, and it may be the most personal one in the book, because for a man who has spent his life making things, there is one town in Italy where that is the whole point of the place. We will go in the spring. In the meantime, this is the table.
The Menu
Primo · Olive Mill Soup
Zuppa alla Frantoiana
Lucca's olive-mill soup of cavolo nero, winter squash, potato, leek and cabbage, finished with this year's new oil. With shaved fennel and spring greens, pomegranate seeds and basil vinaigrette.
Suggested pairing: Vermentino, Doga delle Clavule, Maremma
Secondo · Fettuccine with Lamb White Ragù
Fettuccine al Ragù Bianco d'Agnello
Fettuccine with lamb white ragù: lamb shoulder braised in white wine and rosemary, finished with lemon zest, Pecorino and black pepper. The shepherds' way, no tomato.
Suggested pairing: Chianti, Poggio Vignoso
Terzo · Fish Braised Livorno Style
Pesce alla Livornese
Fresh coastal white fish braised in tomato with garlic, capers, black olives and parsley, the fishermen's dish of the Tuscan shore, on wilted spinach.
Suggested pairing: Bolgheri Rosso
The Wines
Tuscany is the one region where we do not have to borrow. The Vermentino from Doga delle Clavule is Maremma, the Tuscan coast south of the marble, and it is the wine of the Versilia beach, sea air and a little salt. The Chianti Poggio Vignoso is the honest Sangiovese that every trattoria in Lucca pours by the carafe, and it carries the lamb. The Bolgheri Rosso is the same shore as Viareggio, a few miles further south, where the Tuscan coast decided it could make a serious red; it is the one glass on the flight the quarrymen could not have afforded, and it belongs with the fish anyway. The flight is the three for $20.
$29 per person · Children 12 and under $12 · Served family style
Chi mangia bene vive bene
Florence is where art is seen. Pietrasanta is where it is made.
