Cobblestones, Conversations, and Corks by Giovanni Ruscitti

Author:Giovanni Ruscitti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Radius Book Group
Published: 2022-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

The winding road hugs the base of the mountain as we approach Pescocostanzo. Like Cansano, Pescocostanzo is over one thousand years old, rich with history and local tradition. Unlike Cansano, Pescocostanzo is prospering, which I notice as soon as we walk into town. The buildings look just like the buildings in Cansano, with the same Renaissance-style architecture and made from the same local materials of limestone and timber. But they have been well-maintained and none are falling apart. The main street entering into the center of town is lined with rows of homes and charming little bottegas, or shops—pastry shops, bakeries, and art stores. Mixed in are a few artisanal shops where handmade iron goods, lace, and jewelry are made and sold. Several small hotels, restaurants, cafés, and wine shops dot the main street, named Via Roma (every town in Italy seems to have a Via Roma).

“I love this town,” Donato says as we walk up the street and visit several of the botteghe.

We returned here many times over the years and enjoyed some of the simplest, yet finest, meals I have ever had at a small restaurant named Il Gallo di Pietra inside the Hotel Le Torri. We celebrated Izabella’s fifteenth birthday there in 2014 with my parents, and, in 2017, I had one of my top five meals ever at Il Gallo—a simple polenta with lamb sausage, mushrooms, shallots, and olive oil, with a nice Italian chardonnay.

Perhaps it was his lack of food and his life in poverty as a child, but my father had a romance with food that I didn’t appreciate until these trips to Italy. During our hunting and fishing trips when I was a young boy, lunch was almost the most important part of the experience. My dad and uncles brought a larger cooler with enough food to last a week—dried sausage, prosciutto, mortadella, cheeses, pasta dishes, marinated peppers, pickled vegetables, crusty bread, marinated olives, and chicken, goat, or lamb cacciatore with more potatoes and red and green peppers. And wine. All homemade. And they brought an abundance of seasonal fresh fruit—cantaloupe, watermelon, peaches, plums, or apricots. If it was watermelon season and we were near a river, the watermelon chilled in the river before it was served. If American friends joined us, they quickly abandoned their bologna-and-cheese sandwiches and potato chips and joined the Ruscitti feast.

“Throw away that junk,” my dad told his friends of their packed American lunch. “This is the real food.”

With the pocketknife he always carried, Dad would cut some homemade bread and a chunk of provolone cheese. He’d layer the cheese on the bread with some prosciutto, mortadella, and marinated peppers. He would hand it to me with a small amount of wine in a Styrofoam cup with some 7 Up soda. It was the best sandwich I ever had.

Our lunches on these trips lasted an hour or two. I watched my dad carefully peel a peach, slice it, and put a few slices into his wine. This was something he and his brother Armando always did.

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