Lilac is one of the colors I love the most. Pale, delicate and calm. Like this morning, that I just want to face easily.
Sun inside that warms. Light outside warms up this late springtime day.
There is a small seaside town in southern Italy, a few kilometers after the town of Salerno, where for hundreds of years the locals produce Colatura di Alici (anchovies juice). The town is called Cetara, it’s beautiful and fragile, embraced by mountains and bathed by the Mediterranean sea.
The monks who lived there began to extract the juice of salted anchovies and to store it in wooden barrels. Today the locals are doing the same in small workshops. The Colatura is a precious condiment that can be used with pasta or on bread or in salads. The anchovies are put in wooden barrels covered with the salt of Trapani (in Sicily) and then matured for years. The result is this precious nectar that you should definitely try. Unfortunately for the foreigners, you can get this pale yellow culinary jewel only by visiting their shop on location. But it’s worth the travel.
Everything I need this morning stays in a cup. Colors and strength.
The deep blue of blueberries reminds me of the color of the sky just after the sunset, when the night is close. Does it mean that I would love to keep yesterday’s memories with me?
There’s a small and beautiful region in Italy between the end of Campania and the beginning of Basilicata called Cilento. The sea is salty and wild and the men are living on their own, looking at the sky with glazed eyes. Saverio is one of these men. In the morning he goes down the mountain to a small beach, through the familiar trails. The water is emerald green and the wind is blowing through all the little yellow flowers. Saverio takes his old motor boat and reaches the small harbor of Scario. The boat collects a handful of people and brings them on his small beach. There are few rules: speak with a whisper, no music, no phones, only the silence broken by the sound of the sea.
Saverio offers cold cuts and cheese produced in the mountain village of San Giovanni a Piro. Wine is home made, it’s a kind of a red sparkling wine, very fresh and sweet. The bread is soft with a great crust baked in a wood oven; special, because it remains soft for days. But the most wonderful specialty are the small sweet marzipans garnished with candied orange peels, that Saverio’s wife prepares every week for their guests. We were lucky enough to discover this distant corner of paradise. You have to know how to listen and keep your ears open down to the harbor to know when Saverio will come back to pick up another group of people to give them half a day of serenity.
It’s amazing how just colors and flavors can condition a day. I’m floating on a pink sea on a red and white striped mat.
We are in the southern Italy. Near Naples, between the mountains of Positano and Sorrento, live many households who work the land and produce everything in-house. They spend their lives on these clods of earth above the sea without cars, internet or television. Their greatest reward, every day, is the landscape, clean air, amazing food and simple nature. We went to visit them, going up the mountain for hours before discovering their homes. From there you can branch out several paths leading from the mountains to the sea.
Salvatore cultivates the ground and his wife is in the kitchen preparing canned legumes. The work is tiring and the days very long, but the life here has a completely other kind of value. We ate sitting on the ground and Salvatore showed us their products. Grapes in anise-flavored liqueur, tomatoes dried in the wind and in the dark, wild garlic and bread buns wheat. We ate a wonderful eggplant parmigiana, washed down with white wine, falling afterwards asleep under a lemon tree.
The essence of fresh mint meets the intensity of the almond and the kindness of the strawberry. As in these mornings, all variables are mixed to make every waking special.
In the gardens overlooking the sea of Positano grow the most important lemons in Italy. The locals say that they resemble women’s breasts, because they have a round shape and a bump at the end. This type of lemon is called “sfusato” and its aroma and flavor are very distinctive; sweet and crispy. If you walk through the mountains of Positano, you can feel this fragrance in the air. Here people are long-lived, eating a whole lemon every day.
Here this wonderful fruit is transformed in one of the most important liqueurs of the coast: Limoncello. The skin is peeled and infused in alcohol for a few months, to give life to the world-famous Limoncello. Valentino, the friendly owner of Il Gusto della Costa, a small workshop on the streets of Praiano, explained to us that the sun and the ground are the key factors in making those areas particularly suitable for the cultivation of lemons. Even the salt of the sea and the mountain air contribute to the birth of the delicious fruit.
We strongly recommend to get to Praiano to purchase at least five kilos of lemons and ask the villagers few tips on how to make Limoncello. You will return home with your notebook full.
