Arrival in southern Italy

It’s now been two weeks since arriving in Puglia from Greece. Along with living here in the white walled city of Ostuni, some eclectic reading has helped me get more of a feel for the region.

Southern Italy was once part of Magna Graecia, later it was part of the Byzantine Empire and it has had countless other invasions and occupations over the last 1000 years. Poverty and peasantry have defined it in relation to the more prosperous north.


The history is wretched, but a more positive story is emerging now: Puglia is now one of the most celebrated regions of Italian cuisine internationally and upmarket tourism is starting to take off.

Cathedral in the City of Taranto - once the prized capital city of Magna Graecia, now its old city has a more down-and-out feel

In terms of food, it is exceptional. In Crete I was learning more about the ‘Mediterranean diet’ which has helped define international dietary recommendations for the last half-century. There are some similar features between Cretan and Pugliese cuisine:

1.     A history of poverty has been hugely influential on the culture and cuisine

2.     The Pugliese are very partial to seafood

3.     Fresh fruit and vegetables are abundant and transparently grown 

4.     Olive oil is very significant in cooking  

5.     Superb regional cheeses (although some cows milk used here as well as goat and sheep)

6.     Delicious flatbread and pasta made from local durum wheat (this is more important here than in Crete)

7.     Pugliese produce and cuisine is highly-regarded throughout the country as a whole, as Cretan food was in Greece 

Insalata de mare at our local pescheria

My eclectic reading was not from careful research, it’s slightly random, but recommended if you’re visiting the region.

1.     Delizia: the Epic History of Italians and their Food by John Dickie – the history of Italy through its food. An impassioned, colourful but authoritative narrative on why food is so important to Italians. Highly recommend for pan-Italy/armchair travel.

2.     Head Over Heel: Seduced by Southern Italy by Chris Harrison – an Australian falls in love with a Pugliese woman and relocates to Italy.  Harrison is an intelligent, witty, yet unsentimental reporter of the eccentricities and complexities of Italian life and its characters. It gives a bit of insight into the north-south divide.

3.     By the Ionian Sea: Notes of a Ramble Through Southern Italy by George Gissing – I chose this because Gissing is one of my favourite Victorian novelists. I’m only browsing it, but there are some interesting snapshots of the region from 100 years ago, for example:

“Wonderful to observe the representative diner. He always seems to know exactly what his appetite demands; he addreses the waiter in a preliminary discourse, sketching out his meal, and then proceeds to fill in the minutiae… An ordinary bill of fare never satisfies him; he plays variations upon the themes suggested, divides or combines, introduces novelties of the most unexpected kind…. Throughout he grumbles, nothing is quite as it should be, and when the bill is presented he grumbles still more vigorously… in general these characteristics consist of a fundamental good humour.”

The lavish Basilica di Santa Croce in Lecce that took 100 years to complete

I’m also starting Carlo Levi’s ‘Christ Stopped at Eboli’ which is about the poverty of the south he experienced as a political prisoner from Genoa in 1939.

Thanks to the kindle for transforming my holiday reading. All of these books I’ve purchased online in seconds having been tipped off about them browsing online or in a guidebook. I would never have followed up/tracked down otherwise. 

Best food moment: what I ate on that first day in Puglia...

Hot focaccia topped with thin potato slices and rosemary or studded with tomatoes and olives.

Panino con polpo – barbequed octopus drizzled with lemon juice and olive oil and stuffed into a white roll at the fish restaurant on the corner of the street.

Toasted almond gelato

A whole creamy burrata cheese with crisp chewy white rolls, soft in the inside and the sweetest brightest cherry tomatoes off the vine. 

Tomatoes, bread and burrata cheese

Sweet golden flesh peaches for dessert.

Focaccia!

Crossing the Adriatic from northern Greece to southern Italy on the night ferry’s reclining chairs left us feeling anything but restored.  An awful cappuccino on board provided a caffeine jolt and no other pleasure.

As we rolled back onto land at Bari port we needed something delicious to kickstart our arrival in Italy. We found it in focaccia. 

This may have been a down and out dockside suburb, but the baker at this most ordinary panificio was doing a good trade in what to me is still a gourmet treat. Great rounds of olive oil-spiked flatbread swiftly transported from the woodfired oven to his colleague’s marble bench to slice, package and weigh for salivating customers.

We ate ours in a slightly trashy and rather unItalian way, in the car on the 130km/hr superstrada from Bari to Ostuni, gushing in a not original way about Italian food.

The bread is focaccia barese – it uses a similar dough to pizza, and like many Mediterranean flatbreads is derived from the flatbreads of the Ancient Greeks [for whom southern Italian provinces were part of Magna Graecia] with oil, salt and herbs.

Focaccia barese has three classic toppings: potato and rosemary; tomato and olive; and herb. But most panificio (bakery) or focacceria offer an expanded range beyond these classics, including hams, cheeses and vegetables, and sometimes as fillings rather than toppings.

That dockside sample was a perfectly good introduction to focaccia barese but was soon displaced by more interesting toppings.

My favourite places (both in Ostuni) were:

A topping of grilled aubergine and peppers made a more complete lunch.

A slice of a rectangular traybake version with sweet roast onions embedded in the rich bread was more in like a moist apple cake in texture than a bread, falling apart with silky onions.

Focaccia in Puglia tends to be eaten in the morning or for a light lunch. Different flavours are brought out throughout the morning so you may not see the full complement on a single visit. Focaccia is also often served by pizzerias – focaccia during the day and pizza at night.

Athens waking up

We arrived at Athens’ sparkling Port of Pireaus at 6.30am on Sunday and headed north along the coast to Glyfada, an affluent beachside suburb of broad avenues and luxury apartments.

Bringing in the catch, Athens northern suburbs

Dotted along the beaches here were superclubs – in summer the club scene heads beachside, and partygoers were emerging to make their way home by motorbike, tram or taxi, hair and clothes still immaculate after a night dancing.

Opposite them, fishermen were bringing in nets by the marina and retired folk were heading in to the sea for their early morning dip. Stalls were setting up on the footpath alongside parked utes – goats cheese, tomatoes, watermelon, cucumbers.   

Athens, good morning.

We deserted our car at the hotel and headed back into the central city by tram.

There is no such thing as beating the crowds at the most iconic aspect of the Acropolis, the Parthenon. It was thick with people and heat at 9.30 in the morning. You simply cannot go to Athens without visiting the Parthenon, because it is visible wherever you are in the city, if not on the hill, on a t-shirt or a snow globe. its omnipresence a reminder that you simply cannot visit Athens without visiting the Parthenon.... 

Stoa at the Ancient Agora, Acropolis - reconstruction

By contrast the agora – the ancient marketplace where Socrates used to lecture - is spread over the valley below. It’s altogether more evocative. Maybe this is because we waited until 7pm as the light was softening, the heat was diminishing and the crowds had thinned. Or maybe it was because the agora felt more like a place for the people rather than for the Gods. The agora is where public meetings were held, where people traded, where councils of magistrates met, where great minds spoke and ideas were debated. There are temples to the Gods here also, but this site’s lasting legacy was towards the development of human civilization.

The New Acropolis Museum displays the treasures of the Acropolis magnificently. It opened in 2009 just down from the Parthenon. On excavating the site they discovered the foundations of an ancient village underneath and archeologists are now preparing this area so that visitors to the museum can also tour the village underneath. See The Acropolis Museum website for more details.

Changing of the Guards

At Syntagma Square, the civic centre of Athens (also the centre of protests when Greece was in the international media spotlight for the debt crisis in June), we stood on the footpath on Sunday morning in the middle of the dual carriageway to watch the changing of the guards – costume of short kilts, tights and shoes with pompoms. 

Syntagma Square: protesters' tent village

Behind us lay the tent village of the most dedicated protesters objecting to the austerity measures, with burnt-out kiosks a reminder of very recent violence. But at 11am on a Sunday the village slept.

I have a blurry photo of Mum and me in Syntagma Square 8 years ago when, having been deposited in Athens after a late-night ferry from Santorini, we walked around central Athens with giant backpacks for about 2 hours trying in vain to find a hotel with vacancies and ended up sleeping at the airport.

This time we got very lost one afternoon, and ended up walking for an hour in what turned out to be the wrong direction. We hailed a taxi, and were offered some warnings from the driver: “This is the Albanian part of town. Put everything valuable in your front pockets. They are like mosquitos; you don’t even notice they have bitten you.” A reminder this is the Balkans: everyone free to be suspicious of the next guy.

Athens

I am comfortable in big cities. Urbanity has its downsides: ugly high-density post-war architecture, traffic congestion, crowds…  but cities give rise to interesting cultures that emerge from concentrations of diverse and creative people.

Athens is a cosmopolitan port city of 4 million, with many of those accompanying flaws; and for many years it had a particularly avoidable reputation. But watching fashionable Athenians enjoying the summer evenings, and strolling through suburbs with intriguing shops and public art, it felt like a vibrant, energetic city (indeed, in contrast to its country’s current political and economic state). It felt like we only scratched the surface.

Chania Market and the Cretan diet

I’d always thought the notion of ‘Mediterranean diet’ a rather blunt concept with such a diversity of cuisines in the region (none of which I dislike!)

But it actually refers specifically to the findings of one of the most important studies on nutrition ever conducted – and while there are many commonalities across the Med, the archetypal diet of the findings is in fact the Cretan diet.

In the 1960s Dr Ancel Keys, a well-known US physician, was considering a nutritional conundrum: in economically booming America heart disease was striking high numbers of well-fed middle-aged men, while in the poorest parts of agrarian southern Europe where nations were still in recovery mode from WWII, heart disease was virtually non-existent.

Keys’ seminal seven-countries study published in 1980 showed that people from Crete (the area of Greece selected for the study) had the lowest rate of death from heart disease (9 deaths per 100,000 compared to the highest, Finland, 466 deaths per 100,000) and this protection was due to their diet. Many studies since have developed and refined the science, and the Mediterranean diet has been popularised internationally.  

The diet that Keys studied saw the Cretan eat a reasonably high level of fat (but from olive oil, little from meat), a lot of fruit, vegetables, yogurt, nuts, fish and wholegrain bread, and moderate amounts of cheese and wine.

Market interior

There’s no better place to experience the abundance of the Cretan diet than the substantial Chania Municipal Market. With its 76 stalls, a wander through here is an immersion in the bounty of Crete. This market is an elegant indoor agora, shaped like a cross and opened in 1913 as part of the celebrations for the reunification of Crete and Greece.

Before we started with the healthy stuff though, we couldn’t walk past the excellent bread shop at the entrance to sample flaky cheese pies and chocolate walnut baklava. They had a huge selection of chunky sourdoughs, barley toasts (rusks) and other fresh and dried breads (more the cereals of Keys’ preference than baklava and pies probably!)

Fish stalls

One side of the market is given over to seafood; here it opens out towards the port, and fishmongers studiously refresh their fish with cans of cold water every few minutes. In the Keys study only the Japanese ate more fish than the Cretans.

At various cheesemongers whole round hard cheeses stacked at the front of while soft fresh sheep and goats cheese is dished up behind the counter, and the fridge is full of terracotta dishes of fresh yogurt of different levels of richness.  

The Cretans ate nearly 4 times as much fruit as Americans in the original diet. Fruit and vegetables are plentiful and delicious. Here at the greengrocers were colossal pumpkins and watermelons, great juicy tomatoes, cucumbers, aubergines, large waxy potatoes, deep wild greens, sweet apricots and peaches.  When I asked for bay leaves I was offered a whole branch 30cm long.

Cheese store

Typical dried goods stores offered herbs, fresh and dried, nutmegs, almonds, pistachios, walnuts and pretty jars of dark clear honey. Antioxidants galore. Perhaps most prized of all deep green extra virgin olive oil on tap rom some of Crete’s supposed 30 million trees. It’s all produced mechanically, not chemically, and is the ‘elixir’ of the Cretan diet: good fat, not bad. Dipping bread into the combination of tomato juice and olive oil at the bottom of a salad bowl is the best way to finish a meal.

We concluded our visit to Chania Market with a stop at one of the restaurants that line one side. We were lured by a stand (and its gregarious owner) with incredible seafood dishes on display, and decided we couldn’t leave without trying the fruits of the sea cooked to perfection with other components of the famous Cretan diet! I had swordfish with olive oil, mint, tomato and lemon served with boregi pie (courgette, potato, mizirtha cheese and mint with a thin pastry top) – absolutely divine, and prepared by the owner’s mother who took time from bustling around the open kitchen to have her photo with me.

Bakery

30 years on from Keys’ study some negative health stats encroach on the typical diet: for example, Greek children have the highest obesity rate in the EU. Maybe that’s due to the economic boom and cultural changes of that period introducing more sedentary lifestyles – not needing quite so much olive oil – but especially imported junk food habits.

Nevertheless the bounty of natural produce and the impressive scientific profile of those foods identified in the Keys study remain. Food seems to slip so effortlessly from producer to consumer, making the food supply chain highly transparent – anything you see growing you’ll be able to buy, if not on the side of the road then at the local store or market a few miles away.

Juxtaposition of a tourist destination and economic meltdown

Tourism is vital to Greece: it is worth about 10% of its GDP, bringing in about 20 million visitors a year.

But its idyllic holiday destinations are not why the rest of the world is talking about Greece at the moment. Nor for Mamma Mia, feta cheese or Aristotle – or for the other many associations with Greece that are part of wider culture.

Right now, at the start of Greece’s peak tourist season, the international media spotlight has been on Greece’s sovereign debt crisis – which is quite a different plain of reality to that which tourists are seeking or even experiencing, although it’s impossible to be unaware of it.

Here in Almyrida. western Crete, visitors from all north and central Europe windsurf, snorkel and swim in the gentle sea, sunbathe on the golden sands, and enjoy the buzz of the sunset-bathed evening tavernas. People in the industry can do nothing but put on a presentable face– after all, their business is taking visitors away from the worries of the world. Of course they’re worried, as everyone in Greece is, about their standard of living declining as a result of near national bankruptcy – not just about already pricey imported consumer brands becoming more expensive and slipping to relative poverty next to their EU neighbours, but anxiety over standards of education, health and welfare. It’s the fact that as a developed nation it faces cranking backwards its standard of living quite substantially that’s ominous.

Relative to other areas of its economy, tourism is a success story.

Greece is a long-popular holiday destination for northern Europeans. Value wise it is very competitive. So it’s all slightly odd, seeing happy, sun-filled, multi-national tourism in action on Crete, and hearing what’s going on politically, and hoping the pain of it all doesn’t change things too much for the people around here.  It seems as though the people driving the industry locally are doing most things right: they are sustaining healthy economic activity by providing good-value experiences to foreign visitors. No doubt repeated across the country.

There must be specific concerns for this sector too. What if Greece leaves the euro? Introduces a new uncertain currency? What if there is more unemployment? Will visitors expect more beggars, more crime, more civic unrest? On top of the issues impacting the country as a whole, will these issues affect the appeal of Greece for foreign visitors?

By and large I doubt it. Apart from being a well-established sunny island oasis for northern Europeans (of which there are numerous others) Greece has a fairly strong profile internationally. It is surprising to learn the population is a mere 11 million when so many people in the world have some sort of mental image or association with the country, whether or not they’ve visited.

Images of Greece or Greeks in popular culture built from films like Shirley Valentine, My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Mamma Mia. They’re not Greek films but they sustain an image of the country that is exotic enough to have cultural idiosyncracies, but also non-threateningly democratic (on the edge of the ex-Soviet world) and Christian (on the edge of the Muslim world). Then there’s Greece’s unique ancient past, which is heavily imported into wider culture and attributed back to Greece in concepts from democracy to civic architecture to the Olympics … Greece remains an important place to visit. And perhaps tourism will have an even more important role as part of an eventual recovery (no one’s talking recovery obviously, seeing as the actual crash hasn’t happened; just more unsustainable loans issued).

What is sad though and what is starting to happen already is that the local Greek population may no longer be able to afford to be at the party. Already because of a decline in domestic demand tavernas have availability where in previous summers it was impossible to get a table because more Greek families are staying away. Sensible restraint at the household budget level, yes. But in general, most people want to be able to eat in the same places as local people, see local families out enjoying themselves, not just other tourists – don’t they? A tourist destination that outprices the locals is just not the same.

The mountain herb trail

Thyme in bloom in Sfakia

 The mountains of Crete yield culinary herbs in epic proportions.

Most stunning, on the south side near Chora Sfakia whole hillsides were given away to purple-blooming thyme, with a bee poised in almost every blossom. The result of their industry, little jars of golden thyme honey, are sold throughout the west of Crete.

Oregano and sage can be seen grown abundantly in the wild in large shrubs – again, sometimes with whole hillsides given away to these crops – and based on what is available in the markets shops, so do marjoram, chamomile, rosemary and many others. As the supply chain is clearly very localised and uncomplicated, in the markets and shops the dried herbs actually resemble the real thing, buds, stalks and everything.

Good apres-beach fare was mountain herb roast potatoes with olives and yogurt – and cold beer. This is roughly what we made… the important thing to note is to leave the addition of the seasonings and olives to the last 10 minutes of the roasting time so they still have a really fresh young flavour, rather than getting cindered flavourless as I sometimes find happens to my small pieces of garlic and herbs. Fresh and zingy, they provide a nice contrast with the yogurt.

Lemon thyme roast potatoes with olives and Greek yogurt

Serves 3-4

I kg waxy potatoes cut into wedges or large chunks

Olive oil

Fresh thyme leaves – 2 tablespoons (about 15 stalks’ worth)

3 cloves garlic – very finely chopped

Finely grated zest of 2 lemons

Black olives in brine – whole or sliced

Greek yogurt – 150g

Cut potatoes into large chunks and parboil until still firm.

Drain and spread out on an oven tray and coat with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Bake at 200 for about 20-25 minutes or until starting to crispen up.

After about 20-25 minutes, remove from oven and add the garlic, two thirds of the thyme, two thirds of the lemon zest and the olives.

Cook for another 10 minutes just to release the flavours from the seasonings.

Once the potatoes are crisp, remove from oven and sprinkle over the rest of the lemon zest and thyme. Serve with Greek yogurt.

Hills of history, villages of resistance

After the drive south to Chora Sfakia, we wanted to head inland again slightly further west to where the Samaria Gorge starts near Omalos.

Orange groves near Fournes, at foothills of the mountains

We’d heard the white mountains (Lefka Ori) in that direction were quite spectacular, and they were full of stories of resistance and insurgency through the ages.

One with a major claim on revolutionary history is Theriso, a small town about 14km south of Chania, which is accessed through an attractive leafy gorge.

In 1905 it was theatre for an eponymous revolt that led to Crete’s unification with Greece. It also gave its leader national fame and he went on to become prime minister of unified Greece. Back in 1905 Crete was a separate protectorate of a number of European powers (France, Britain, Italy and Russia) that objected, along with the high commissioner for Crete, Prince George of Greece, to union with Greece.

Beehives on the hillside

Eleftherios Venizelos, a Cretan politician who had fallen out with Prince George sought a more democratic future for Crete and selected Theriso – also his mother’s hometown – as the location for an uprising to overthrow the administration. He organised an assembly of 17 leaders from around the island along with hundreds of armed men, and proclaimed the goal of a union with Greece.  Over subsequent weeks Venizelos organised a provisional government from this small town. The insurgency eventually led to democratic constitutional changes that paved the way for unification with Greece at the end of the First Balkan War in 1913. 

We drove on further into the mountains away from Theriso. The road turned into a single track curling around the hills like an orange peel. It was mostly paved, but unmarked and with no room for cars coming the other way. We passed little: the odd farm, a minute village, some stunning views back over the valleys to Chania, and fortunately, no cars coming the other way.

Village of Lakkoi

Back on the main road, Lakkoi is a village sitting perched on the hillside, its

double-steepled, domed Greek Orthodox Church a crowning centerpiece. Again stories of resistance: leading a revolt against the Venetians in the 13^th Century, against the Ottomans in the Greek War of Independence (routing 5000 members of the Ottoman Army) and much of the population, men and women, arming to resist the Germans in the 1941 Battle of Crete.

In these villages today with the populations diminished due to urbanisation, it is mainly older people, women always in black, men sitting drinking coffee or raki, who make up the village street/café life. They are the descendants of that legacy of resistance – and you wouldn’t mess with them either.  

 Goats cheese made next door

Best food moment: a mountain lunch at Omalos. With a sign for a cheesemaker’s behind the
restaurant, we ended up with quite a cheese-fest of meze. We tried little hot cheese pies filled with mizirtha with a very thin, almost batter-like pastry, dakos, the barley rusk with tomato and mizirthra, a local goats cheese variation, air-dried olives, super salty and juiceless, and of course chips for Milly. For dessert, they brought more cheese pies on the house, this time covered in a sticky malty honey. Delicious! 

Dakos

Small cheese pies