Salento: Two Beautiful Cities
by Joseph Harris
Everyone knows Gallipoli. It is the peninsula on the Dardanelles where the Allies lost a quarter of a million men in 1915, and the name has meant that one thing for a hundred years. Fewer people know that there is another Gallipoli, a small fortified town on an island of rock off the Ionian coast of Salento, joined to the mainland by a single bridge. The two have the same name because the same people named them. Greek sailors, pushing out from the home cities in the seventh and sixth centuries before Christ, called each one Kallipolis, the beautiful city. One guarded the strait that leads to the Black Sea. The other sat at the mouth of the Adriatic. Greece was the center, and these were its two frontiers.
Salento is the heel of the boot, a flat limestone peninsula with the Adriatic on one side and the Ionian on the other and no river anywhere on it. The rain goes straight through the rock. What is left is the thinnest, reddest soil in Italy, a sun that does not quit from May to October, and wind: the tramontana off the mountains of the Balkans in winter, the scirocco off Africa in summer. It is the driest and hottest corner of the mainland, and it is closer to Greece than to Rome, by sea and by climate both. Anything that grows here grows because it can stand that. Olives, first of all. Until a few years ago Salento had sixty million olive trees, some of them a thousand years old, and the plain south of Lecce was one unbroken silver grove from sea to sea. A bacterium that arrived from the Americas in 2013 has killed most of them, and the groves are gray skeletons now, which is the worst thing to happen to this land since the Turks. After the olive, durum wheat, which likes thin dry ground, and the legumes that go with it: chickpeas, favas, lentils. Wild chicory and the other bitter greens that come up on their own after the first rain. Cucumbers, tomatoes and eggplant in the summer gardens, lemons along the coasts. Sheep on the stony ground, so the cheese is sheep's cheese, hard and salty. Not much meat. In Lecce the butcher's meat was horse, because a horse was what a farmer had when it died. On the coasts, fish, and in Gallipoli the sea urchins and the red shrimp.
That pantry is Greek because the climate is Greek. Stand in a village market in Crete and you see the same things: the chickpeas, the hard sheep's cheese, the wild greens, the cucumbers and the oregano, the twice-baked barley bread that Salento calls frise and Greece calls paximadi, both of them made to keep for a year and be softened in water or wine before eating. Nobody copied anybody. The same ground, worked for the same reasons, gives the same dinner. Lecce's great dish is ciceri e tria, chickpeas simmered with ribbons of pasta, some of the ribbons pulled out and fried crisp and scattered back on top. That is the thrift of the place, crunch where there was no meat, and it runs through our whole table tonight.
The Greeks came early and they came to stay. Taranto, at the top of the heel, was founded in 706 before Christ by Spartans, and it is the only colony Sparta ever planted. It became the richest city in Italy, with a fleet, a school of philosophy, and the finest gold work in the Greek world. The native people of the heel, the Messapians, kept their own towns inland and fought the Greeks for four hundred years, and the Greek cities along the two coasts, Gallipoli among them, were the fortified edge of that frontier. We call it Magna Graecia, greater Greece, and the name is honest. There were more Greeks in southern Italy than in some parts of Greece.
Rome came to this coast the way Rome came everywhere, slowly and then all at once. In 282 a Roman squadron sailed into the harbor at Taranto, which was against a treaty, and the Tarentines sank it. Knowing what was coming, they sent across the water for help, and King Pyrrhus of Epirus came with twenty thousand men and twenty elephants, the first elephants anyone in Italy had seen. He beat the Romans twice and lost so many men doing it that his name became the word for a victory that ruins you. He went home. Taranto fell in 272, and Rome ran the Appian Way down to Brindisi, on the Adriatic side of the heel, and made it the port for Greece. From then on the heel was the door between the two worlds. Every legion that went east and every Greek teacher, sculptor, doctor and cook who came west passed through it. Horace put it in one line: Greece, taken captive, took her rough captor captive. The Romans conquered the Greeks and then spent three centuries learning to be them.
The man who began that was from here. Ennius, the father of Latin poetry, was born in Rudiae, which is now a field outside Lecce, and said he had three hearts, because he thought in Greek, Oscan and Latin. He wrote Rome's first great poem in Greek meter. Two hundred years later Virgil, coming home from Greece, landed at Brindisi and died there. The road that carried the legions out carried the poets back.
When Rome fell in the west, the Greeks kept this corner. The emperors in Constantinople held the heel for another six hundred years, until the Normans came in the eleventh century, and the Greek rite lasted in the churches long after that. In nine villages inland from Lecce, old people still speak Griko, a Greek that came across the water either with the first colonists or with the Byzantine monks, and nobody can say for certain which, because it was never gone long enough to come back.
The sea is narrow here. From Otranto on a clear day you can see the mountains of Albania, and Corfu is a morning's sail. For most of history that was a road, not a border. Then in 1480 the Ottomans, who had taken the Turkish Gallipoli a century earlier, crossed it and sacked Otranto, and eight hundred men who would not convert were beheaded on a hill outside the town. Their bones are behind glass in the cathedral. The two beautiful cities had ended up on opposite sides of the same war.
Salento's own Gallipoli found a gentler way to reach the world. For two hundred years its olive oil lit the lamps of Europe. It was pressed in cellars cut into the rock under the town, stored in cisterns, and shipped from the little harbor to London, Amsterdam and St. Petersburg. The oil was too coarse to eat and that was the point: it burned clean. When kerosene came, the trade died, and the town went back to fishing, which is what it does now.
Trieste, two weeks ago, was four nations at one table. Salento is one people on both sides of a sea. The wine makes the point for us. Salento's grape is Primitivo, and Primitivo is Zinfandel. It took DNA to prove it, but the vine that defines the heel of Italy is the vine that defines old-vine California, and both came from a Croatian grape across the Adriatic that nobody outside Dalmatia had heard of. So the Primitivo in your glass tonight crossed two seas to get here, the Adriatic to reach Puglia and the Atlantic to reach Mendocino, and in both places it found the same sun and made the same wine.
That is what we mean by the common table. Two peoples who never met can cook the same dinner, if they are cooking from the same ground. The Greeks named two cities on two shores and called them both beautiful. Tonight we cook from the one that stayed Greek.
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