Basilicata – Regional Food with Poise
By Roberta
Muir
Photography Franz
Scheurer
Our Best Meals in Italy were in Matera
From Roberta’s Travel Diary
On our first
night we dine at Baccanti (a recommendation from Sabino, a Melbourne importer of Italian foods from Puglia),
a groovy cave setting, chic instead of clichéd, with good service and refined
food. I start with an excellent budino of ricotta
topped with a small splodge of rich, oily tomatoes
and capsicum. Franz has foie gras
which makes him very happy. My next dish involves the find of the trip black
chickpeas (ceci neri)
blended into a nutty puree underneath baccala; we’re
intrigued by the colour and nuttiness. Franz’s pasta
is broken wide ribbons coated in a broadbean puree
(pulses are popular in Basilicata), scattered with deep-fried pepperoni cruschi; mine is also a wide ribbon (lagana),
with local mushrooms in a slightly viscous tomato sauce - both are plate-lickingly good. Franz then had a horse T-bone steak and
throughout the meal we drank a pinot nero from Alto
Adige. A lemon sorbet ‘affogato’ with white chocolate
was served in a groovy square glass set inside a larger, ice-filled square
glass.
Baccanti
was probably the best meal of the trip, and we were tempted to go back the
following night, but were also keen to explore further and so opted to try the
Hotel Sant’ Angelo restaurant, also a cave carved out
of the soft tufa, though not quite as smart as Baccanti. The actual menu was more limited than the display
one we’d been shown at breakfast and initially we were disappointed, but soon
settled in to enjoy the experience. Crisp pettole
(deep-fried chickpea dough), some with anchovy in the centre (like Calabrian zippole), were a
complimentary snack.
The legume
theme continues with a ‘pasta e fagoli’ of broadbean puree with wild chicory, capunti
pasta and beans, it’s slightly spicy and delicious! For main course I have a
thin, plate-sized slice of local provolone whose name translates as ‘back of
the donkey’ (perhaps, like cacciocavallo, because
it’s aged in pairs hung across a rod like a pair of saddle bags), it’s drizzled
with local honey and served with a salad of iceberg and sorrel and is more
interesting than memorable. Franz has fried eggs scrambled with salsicce with a whole pepperoni cruschi
on top. We drink a local Aglianico from Cantina Venosa and finish with a torrone semifreddo.
The next
morning we have breakfast in the same restaurant and the lovely waitress
arranges the traditional local dish cialledda for us
to try, it’s dry bread soaked in oil and water with chopped tomatoes, cucumber,
greens and lemon - tangy, tasty and filling, this rustic dish, a good way to
use stale bread, may have been introduced by Arabs as gazpacho was in Spain.
The coffee’s excellent and the blood orange juice is good and fresh as are the
pastries and tomato foccacia and bruschetta
on the breakfast buffet.
But my favourite dish of the trip was a lunch pasta at I Due Sassi, a very unprepossessing trattoria
just up the road from Hotel Sant’ Angelo with good
hospitality. We wandered in after our big walk around the town, hungry and
tired and a little worried that we were the only guests. We were given four
deep-fried balls of dough as a starter - hot, crisp, airy and good, they were
our introduction to pettole. Then came small plates
of the salty fried potatoes and oily local wild onions that we’d ordered.
Franz’s pan-fried salsicce was good and my orrechiette with cima di rape, pepperoni cruschi and
crisp breadcrumbs was one of my great pasta moments! A 250ml carafe of primitivo completed the meal and we wandered back out into
the sunshine content with the world.
Here’s a bit of background on Matera:
Matera started as a Paleolithic troglodyte settlement. On one side of a
deep ravine are the 2 ‘sassi’ where homes have been
carved out of tufa caves, while ancient churches have
been fashioned out of the caves on the opposite side. Mel Gibson used Matera as
Jerusalem to film The Passion of The Christ. The first sight of the sassi is wondrous!
We stay at the
small, smart Hotel Sant’ Angelo beside Piazza San Pietro Caveoso ~ our room
looks over the wide sweeping ravine and cave churches on the other side, the
Romanesque-Baroque Chiesa San Pietro
and, carved out of the rock above it, Chiesa di Santa Maria d’Idris.
It’s a steep climb up to Chiesa di Santa Maria d’Idris which is
dug into Mount Errone (“the Idris
rock”) just above San Pietro Caveoso.
a narrow corridor leads through to another church, San Giovanni in Monterrone, which has well preserved frescoes dating back
to the 1300s - until a few years ago it was used as a crypt.
On our first full day in Matera we throw cameras around our necks and
walk for 3 hours - up the hill past San Pietro to the
‘new town’ at the top of the hill, a charming mix of old and new with a very
ornate gilded cathedral. Further on we reach Sassi Barisano, the larger and better restored of Maratea’s two sassi, then down hill winding through narrow stair ways we somehow pop
out opposite the ravine just up the hill from Hotel Sant’
Angelo.
We head back up the street beside San Pietro
in search of local foods and find Sapori dei Sassi - a wonderful provedore selling pepperoni cruschi
(dried sweet chillies), the wonderful ceci neri (black chickpeas) which
I’d had at dinner last night, small red-skinned eggplants preserved in oil,
pasta, dried beans, preserved mushrooms - I could go quite crazy here ... and
do. Best of all we manage to get it all home except for our precious ceci neri which customs take.
In the
afternoon we go through the arch beside the church and wander along the edge of
the ravine up and down narrow stairways past old abandoned cave dwellings. We
visit an old cave house that’s been preserved furnished as it would have been
when a family lived here until the late 1950s. It’s much more sophisticated
than I expected (compared to the ‘black houses’ of the Outer Hebrides).
Leaving Matera we drove around to the other
side of the ravine and the Parco Archeologico Storico Naturale della Murgia e delle Chiese Rupestri
del Materano (Murgia &
Matera rock churches natural history & archaeological park), where there
are over 150 churches carved into the soft rock and the sweeping view back to
Matera puts where we’ve been into context.
Contact Details:
Hotel Sant’ Angelo
Piazza San Pietro
Caveoso
75100 Matera, Italy
http://www.hotelsantangelosassi.it/
Tel. +39 0835 314010
Baccanti Ristorante
Via Sant'Angelo,
58-61
75100 Matera, Italy
+39 0835 333 704
Trattoria I Due Sassi
Via Ospedale
Vecchio
75100 Matera, Italy
Tel.: +39 0835 331 916