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10/08/2007 Archived Entry: "More Sicily: The End"

It’s about time for me to wrap up my travelogue on Sicily. I haven’t even been there for two weeks. I returned to Paestum for my last Cook at Seliano session of the season, as well as for some very pleasant days learning recipes from local cooks. I am now in Naples decompressing at Costantinopoli 104, a beautiful hotel and tranquil oasis in the middle of this fabulously lively city. Last night, to give one small example of what kind of city this is, I went to an anti-Cammora (that’s Neapolitan Mafia) musical rally in Piazza Dante, a main square, and listened to an exciting concert of tarantantellas while watching the young crowd actually do the tarantella. Dancing in the street! It was mind blowing, as we used to say in my youth. The frenetic, nearly hysterical movements of the dancing crowd were just as you imagine from looking at antique paintings and prints. If only they had been wearing 17th century folk dress instead of totally of-the-moment 2007 outfits.

Tomorrow, I return to New York City, which I am surprised I miss. Among other things, I am tired of struggling in Italian for three months. Well, without going into all the details about why I now know I could never live in Italy full time, I am not only looking forward to smelling my own coffee, I am looking forward to making my own coffee. In other words, I can’t wait to get back into the routines that I usually complain about, and to have a little more control over my life.

Anyway – allora, as Italians say – after covering the west coast of Sicily, and Sciacca on the south coast, I was on my way to spend a night in Agrigento, which has beautiful Greek temples sitting majestically on the hilly countryside. The only problem was that I couldn’t find my hotel. There was a road block for whatever reason. I asked one of the policemen blocking the road how to get to the hotel if I couldn’t use that road, and he headed me, I think intentionally, in the wrong direction. I make this claim because when I returned to the same road block spot and asked one of his fellow officers where to go, he headed me in an entirely different direction. I called the hotel, and they didn’t seem at all interested in helping me find them. So, as I have been to Agrigento before, and I have toured the temples before, and in my pursuit of this hotel that I never found I circled the temples several times and saw them majestically situated on their hilltops, I decided to skip Agrigento, which by the way – and contributing to this decision as well -- has to be one of the ugliest towns in all of Italy. Instead of stopping in Agrigento, I drove on to Caltanissetta, where I had never been. It was only about an hour’s drive away.

Caltanissetta is one of the provinces (and cities) smack in the middle of the island. The other is Enna, which is the highest provincial capitol in Italy at more than 3,000 feet above sea level. Between the two neighboring cities, in their provincial lands, are rolling hills of wheat fields, all golden stubble when I was there, some burned black for sanitation purposes, as I learned earlier this trip in Puglia, where they do the same. Above the wheat fields are many bare, arid hill tops. They were not quite high enough for me to call mountains. It’s a stunning but sort of frighteningly desolate landscape. No matter. I am very happy I visited both cities, and saw the heart of the island.

Caltanissetta is very old and, although not heavily populated, it has a lively historic town center, and a big piazza that is a true Italian outdoor living room. It seemed like everyone in the city congregated there in the evening. The several cafes, all with street-side seating, were full, with both young people and the usual old men. In this town, however, even many women were out to see their friends, which isn’t often the case in southern Italy. Usually, they are home cooking dinner. At 7 p.m., the town was abuzz – on a weeknight no less.

I stayed right on that main piazza in a small hotel that one of my many guidebooks said was charming and cheap. It was right on the second point. The charm eluded me, as I don’t equate old, dingy, and dilapidated with charm, at least not those qualities in hotel rooms. Two extremely friendly and helpful desk men, and the fact that the hotel was immaculately clean, got me through the experience. There was a jazz concert in the piazza that night – very good music – and, earlier, a wedding across the street in the big church. They were diverting. The bride wore beige. I thought maybe it was her second wedding, but someone in the bridal party that I talked to said no, it’s just the style. In fact, we also saw a bride with a white dress and a red sash. Only in Italy!

There were also a couple of food vendors attending the festival. When I stopped by one to see what he was selling, he offered me, refusing money, a taste of his panelle, which are fried flat rectangles of chickpea flour, and his tiny, right-out-the-fryer, thin, cylindrical potato croquettes. The croquettes were so much smaller and narrower than any I’ve ever seen, I innocently asked him if they had a special name. “Cazzetti,” he said, grinning. That means little penises. Indeed, that’s what these are called in central Sicily.

The restaurant I wanted to go to, a place that specializes in local vegetarian dishes, was closed, even though it wasn’t supposed to be. It wasn’t its official closing day or holiday season. Although I had to go look for myself to be sure, I was tipped off about this possibility even before I fruitlessly tried to make a reservation on the phone. I had been to a book store a few doors down from my hotel, which I found out later is the intellectual and cultural center of the town, and the owner, an elegant 70-something woman, told me that they open only occasionally, although she recommend it highly.

I had struck up my usual food conversation with her. Although she was far from thin, she said she ate very little, and cooked very little, and when she did cook it was very simply, mainly pasta with tomato sauce and salad. I thought she must be one of those old-fashioned intellectuals who think an interest in food is beneath them. In fact, there were very few cookbooks in the store, and nothing at all about the local cuisine, which is what I am always looking for. She didn’t even know about the restaurant down the street from her shop that the two friendly desk men had recommended.

At that restaurant-pizzeria, L’Archetto, I ate very simply and well. While Bob enjoyed a mediocre pizza with sausage and roasted potatoes – his latest obsession (do you remember, I told you some time ago that there’s now a pizza with that topping named for me at Café Fiorello, across from Lincoln Center), I had sausage and black olives cooked with red wine, and the local version of calzone – sort of. It’s called panetti and it’s a small, pizza-flat loaf opened as for a sandwich, but merely seasoned, not filled, with pitted black oil-cured olives, grated Parmigiano, salted anchovies, and a drizzle of olive oil. That is the standard version, my helpful deskman told me, but there were other fillings, among them pieces of fresh tomato and mozzarella; mozzarella, hot salami and Tabasco (of all things), and speck, mozzarella and Gorgonzola, which is not at all a combination from this area. It probably seems very trendy to the locals.

The historic center of Enna is very different from Caltanissetta. The old city is high on a hill with spectacular views – they say you can see Etna on a clear day, and the volcano is half across the island – and very quiet. I realized, too late to explore it, that the modern town at the base of the hill, Enna Basso, was where all the action was, and it probably had some interesting food stores and maybe restaurants.

There happen to be two well-known restaurants in old Enna, however. One, Centrale, turned out to be terrible, which, I have to say, our hotel desk clerk tried to tell me. Other people I mentioned it to said merely and politely that it had become commercial. But when I arrived, there was a Sicilian-American family from Philadelphia leaving our hotel. They were thrilled with Centrale, where their Ennese family had taken them, and, well, I had to try it for myself.

The other restaurant I wanted to try was Antica Hosteria, which our hotel clerk felt was far the better. We did, indeed, eat two very good first courses, but our meat-based secondi (main courses) were not good, mainly I think because the meat in this neck of the woods is not very good. The meat – billed as veal, which is often the word used for beef -- was so funky tasting that we thought at first that it may have been “high” from long aging. No, said the informative and friendly owner-chef, Michele tktkttk, who gets quite a bit of press. He apologized for not having some of the dishes he is known for, in particular the antique recipe for pork ragu with chocolate that he made last year at the Slow Food conference. He said it was still too warm for such a heavy sauce, but he gave me the recipe. I can’t wait to get home and make it.

Those delicious first courses we had were orecchiette with broccoli and black olives, which was nearly a puree of the vegetable with garlic and a tiny bit of diced tomato, and his rendition of pasta, in this castellane, conical shaped macaroni, and potatoes, a standard comfort food in southern Italy. His had pancetta and capers. Bob wiped his plate clean of that. In the name of dieting, I had to use all my will power not to finish the broccoli dish, but I will certainly be making that when I get home.

About 20 minutes from Enna is Piazza Armerina, where I had been 22 years ago to see the excavation of a very grand ancient Roman villa that has some of the most gorgeous and well-preserved mosaic floors in the world. We went again. There is much more to see now, and many more tourists, but somehow, as I have found true in much of Sicily, the town of Piazza Armerina, which bills itself as “the city of art,” doesn’t have signage to make it easy to find its prime attraction. After driving through the ridiculously bad traffic of this tiny city, we got there with only little more than hour to spend there. That’s not quite enough to digest it all, but we did our best.

Enna itself has a Lombard castle, which we explored. We even walked up to the top of its tour in an attempt to see Etna. There are also ruins of a temple dedicated to Demeter. I hope you remember her. She’s the Greek goddess who dropped her scythe (the shape of Trapani) in search of her daughter Persephone, who was carried off by Hades to become the wife of Vulcan. What tsouris!

My own tsuouris was finding a gas station once I left Enna. Leaving town toward the north, instead of through Enna Basso on the south side of the hill, where I knew there was gas station, I did not encounter a service stop on the Autostrada for 83 kilometers. I was nearly in Palermo, my destination, and on empty, when I pulled into the gas station. There, standing around by their cars, were several dozen Sicilians -- men, women and children -- listening to the final moments of the Sunday soccer match.