The Secret of Altamura: Nazi Crimes, Italian Treasure by Dick Rosano

Author:Dick Rosano [Rosano, Dick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: uploadable
Publisher: Creativia
Published: 2016-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 26

New Lessons

Carlo spent the morning at the bread ovens again under Zia Filomena's tutelage. The ladies gathered to bake bread were a generation older than their American visitor, but they had embraced him warmly, to the point of preening and sometimes embarrassing themselves.

“Carlo, do you want to knead my dough?” asked Lidia with a twinkle in her eye. Marta stood next to her but elbowed Lidia after that comment.

Carlo blushed lightly but took it kindly enough; at times he laughed at their jokes, knowing that these ladies were acting out an age-old drama in the human story between man and woman. The compliments are sometimes exaggerated, the jokes sometimes risque, but this is a part of relationships between the sexes that has played out in every society for centuries.

Zia Filomena gave him careful instruction on the shape and texture of the dough before it went into the oven. She passed her wrinkled hand close to the mouth of the fire-hot pit, even dipping her long fingers quickly into the opening to test the temperature. Not satisfied with the heat, Zia reached behind her for a long-handled wooden spade, poking it into the oven to rearrange the timbers that burned within. Smacking the paddle on the edge of the oven to cast off the embers, she tested the temperature again, nodded her head in a satisfied way, and turned toward Carlo.

“In your oven, at home, the temperature can be set by a dial. It's easy, semplice,” she said, “but the walls of your oven do not concentrate the heat like our stones do.” Zia emphasized her comment by pointing to the rounded roof of the oven in front of her.

“Home baking won't produce the good bread, the bread that Altamura is known for.” She smiled, nodding her head, “The bread that the spirit gives us.”

Carlo knew that Zia Filomena and the other women at the oven – in fact, all the people of Altamura – used the term 'spirit' with more reverence than a simple reference to yeast. To them, the spirit moved the bread and wine and brought these products into being. He wondered whether the Chiesa dello Spirito Santo, the Church of the Holy Spirit, was named for their yeast, or the town's reference to the yeast came from the church.

In the afternoon, Giovanna took Carlo along on her rounds of shopping, first to the butcher shop and then the open air market for dinner that night. Many of the ingredients they used for cooking were grown in their small garden, but gardens couldn't grow pig and cow, nor could all the herbs necessary for an Italian repast be squeezed into the several square feet that Zia and Gia cultivated outside their home.

Carlo knew that Cristiano had a larger plot of land devoted to vines, but hadn't visited it yet.

“Why don't you command some of Cristiano's vineyard for your vegetables and herbs?” he asked Gia.

She laughed and shrugged her shoulders.

“The vineyard is on the edge of Altamura, too far from the house, so growing anything there would require too many trips back and forth.

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