First week in Fossacesia

For the first time in a week the sun has taken a rest and the clouds and wind have come to visit. It has been quite a nice change from the usual 40°C searing heat and blaring sun. But it did not stop me going to the beach. If anything, it’s really nice to have a cool breeze on my skin. However, the Italians don’t quite feel the same way. To them it’s like a hurricane has come…If only they could spend a day in Wellington.

Today it is Tuesday, so I have now been here for a week and have loved every day of it. My daily routine goes like this: I wake up around 8 or 9, have an espresso and see if anything of note has happened in New Zealand (thus far stuff confirms nothing major has occurred, except storms), I then have my cereal out of a mug (because that’s how they eat cereal here), go down to the beach and sunbathe/swim/read for 2 or 3 hours, return home for a delicious lunch followed by giant fresh peaches and more caffè, then I try and learn German (in desperation for my exchange) but end up reading on my bed and falling asleep. When I wake up it’s much cooler, so I go down to the beach again, come home to go for an hour long walk around 7pm, have dinner around 9pm and then go out for a few hours to get a gelato or just fare una passeggiata.

The caffè macchinetta for making espresso - it is a tiny macchinetta.Note the eco-friendly cups.

When we arrived here it actually took me a couple of days to properly go down to the beach because on our first morning Lina asked me if I wanted to accompany her and Gino to a mall in a nearby town to do some grocery shopping. Thinking that shopping generally takes an hour at the most, I accepted the offer because it was still early. More than two hours later – I kid you not – we arrive at the supermarket. Even though Lina and Gino have come here for the last three years, neither of them are yet sure of how to actually get to the supermarket. So we drove through several pretty towns, oodles of roads, went past many supermarkets and round and round in circles in search of some other shop that I swear we had already passed. When Gino asked what the street is called and Lina responded that she didn’t know and generally just drives around until she finds it I knew we were in trouble.

Gino decided to follow a road to god only knows where, despite our insistence that he had taken a wrong turn. We followed this road over a mountain, through the countryside lined with groves of olive trees and vineyards, then along the coast and back up the mountain, through more vineyards and olive groves and one hour later, one whole hour, we found the shop, albeit a different one with the same name. All for the sake of an extra curtain.

We also eventually made it to the supermarket and spent ages looking at everything and buying loads of interesting foods like my favourite stuffed olives (stuffed with a sort of mortadella and parmigiano mix and then crusted and baked), and about 9 varieties of cheese. After a while Gino and I got so bored looking for sugarfree juice that we went and hid in the wine aisle to admire the thousands of bottles of wines. I recognised only a bottle of merlot because there are so many variations I have never even heard of. I was blown away by the prices too. Wine here is around €3 a bottle, and apparently that’s expensive!

Gino snuck a bottle of sparkling white wine into the trolley, but I have my eye on the giant Montepulciano d’Abruzzo bottles that retail for €3 and a couple from Sicilia and Sardegna. I might have to go back and be very selective with my choices, however, as I’m already over my baggage limit and still have to fly to Hamburg.

The delicious wine we purchased for Sunday lunch

After an excessive amount of time at the supermarket we had all become extremely hungry. Thank god the fruttivendolo had come that morning bearing mozzarella and bread all the way from Afragola (near Casalnuovo), and fruit and vegetables from Naples, so we had the perfect ingredients for a beautiful insalata caprese!

Fresh pomodorini 

The mozzarella all the way from Afragola

Insalata Caprese

When asked the other day if I wanted to go back to the supermarket at 6pm I gave Lina my stern “are you serious?” face, to which she immediately responded “No, not that one! Another one! We know how to get to this one.”

Our travels did, however, entice me to go for a wander in the opposite direction to the beach to get some photos of the vineyards behind our house. When I went up there on Saturday I got so excited when I realised there were fig trees absolutely covered in fruit!! I wasn’t sure if I should eat them so I carried on and discovered there is a really good view of the castle from just up the road, along with miles of vineyards and olive groves:

The view of the "castle" through the vineyards 

Olive groves and vineyards line the countryside

Grapes on the vines ready for making wine

By Friday I was really excited because there were posters everywhere advertising a week of festivities such as the local Notte Bianca and several sagre, and they had started putting up stalls in preparation. A Notte Bianca is when everything stays open all night and there are lots of markets, food and wine, and performers. They are generally held in huge cities, but they have local ones in summer for something to do.

The Fossacesia Notte Bianca was on Friday night and was quite cool. The lungomare was lined with ethnic stalls (mostly Peruvian and African) along with general Italian clothing/footwear/jewellery/music stalls. There were lots of places to get kebabs, panini, porchetta (the meat of a whole roasted baby pig in a bun), fresh corn, bags of peanuts, candy and candyfloss. Most of the bars and gelaterie were also participating with singers and special drinks or food outside.

Transportable candy store with a girl holding fresh candyfloss to the right 

At the market I bought a really cool new bikini and a sundress. We then went and had the most delicious gelato I have ever had (I had coconut and a wild berry yoghurt thing)…toooo good. We strolled around for a few hours with some family, but it turned out there wasn’t a whole lot to do if you weren’t planning on drinking. Before we went home however the scent of freshly baked cornetti was calling us from a sneaky pasticceria and we just had to stop to get three wildberry ones and sit outside to devour them. It was my first Italian cornetto (croissant) because I refused to eat them last time. It will also be my last, not because it wasn’t delicious…it’s just that all this food and that tiny bikini I just bought do not go well together. Though there will always be room for gelato, it is my absolute weakness.

My new bikini!

On the note of new, my new shoes - I was watching the sun set

As for the sagre, however, they were not so eventful. They are supposed to be local celebrations of food typical to the region and occur every night basically everywhere. Here, starting on Friday we were supposed to have a sagra for sfogliatella tipica napoletana (a famous Neapolitan pastry), on Saturday one for bruschetta, watermelon on Sunday, porchetta on Monday and torcinella (a type of hideous lamb sausage) on Tuesday. After failing to even attempt to follow through with the schedule, they had started to lose credibility and basically everyone in Fossacesia gave up hope. Apparently they had the watermelon sagra on Sunday after so many complaints, and pushed the last two into last night. But when we went out last night to see if it would happen, we were thoroughly disappointed by the turn out, as were they I would imagine.

But all is not lost! Tonight (Wednesday) we are going to a different sagra which will actually go ahead. It’s to celebrate arrostincini (little fried things) accompanied with local red wine!! I think it’s actually at the vineyard, so I’m looking forward to tonight’s one.

More food news:

I have a few more photos of some food for those who like the pictures, but my camera was out of focus on Sunday when I took photos of my second course – a whole fish with salad. Fortunately the neighbour dropped off three more that night, freshly caught. So when we have them again, I will take a better photo.

Insalata di friselle, pomodorini, olivi, latuga e cipolle
Friselle are half of a dried, very crunchy bagel shaped bread.
You put a little bit of water on them before eating.

This is grilled flattened provola (smoked mozzarella) eaten for dinner.
I could only manage a taste. That much cheese is too much cheese for me.

Melanzane, pomodori e olivi neri: eggplants with tomato and black olives
Eaten as a contorno with the above cheese

A delicious piccante formaggio di pecorino: a spicy sheep milk cheese
Inside it there are olives, rocket and chili

Prosciutto e melone for dinner

Preparing for Sunday lunch: those are pretzel sticks that Lina is so happy about

Our aperitivo: bitters with lemon and sugar

Our primo piatto on Sunday: Spaghetti alle vongole but this time the sugo (sauce)
is not tomato,  instead it's made from the juices of the vongole (cockles)

Our neighbour caught three of these fish for us. We ate ones similar to this for our
secondo piatto on Sunday, cooked with tomato, garlic and coriander,
served with a salad...but I messed up the photo so will have to do another

I liquori from left: Homemade nocino (walnut liqueur) in an Anice bottle,
strawberry liqueur, Gianduiotto (chocolate), amarena/dark cherry liqueur.
The bottles are so old Lina cannot remember when she bought them.
In front: Bocconotti, a dolci typical of this region. They are little tart-like cakes.
These ones are lemon flavoured, but we also had amarena ones and hazelnut ones

I also finally got to try my first fresh figs. Straight off the tree! While Lina and I were waiting for Gino we clambered in the trees to find some big and ripe enough to eat. We found two fresh green ones each, and one dark one (that are really ripe). They were really really good, with just the outer skin peeled off and nothing added to them whatsoever. Lina said at the end of the month they will all be ripe and we can go out and pick them all with everyone else. I can’t wait! They are impossible to find fresh in New Zealand.

Other things:

I just remembered, on Monday night instead of hanging out in Fossacesia again, we went to Lanciano, a town nearby to get a gelato and wander around. We didn’t get there til just before 11, but the streets were still packed with people. Lanciano is gorgeous. It is very wealthy, with wide cobbled streets, expensive stores with beautiful windows, two ancient churches, one of which is built on what I understand to be “nothing” (I am yet to see it to believe it), and millions of piazzas, villas and parks. We got more amazing gelato here: orange, cinnamon and white chocolate flavour, and amarena again for me. I think we are going back in the daytime to visit the churches because they’re really famous. One of them supposedly has some of Jesus' flat bread in it. I’m not so sure, but I am excited to see inside this fortress of a church.

And on a bad note, the other day I heard and then saw a girl get hit by a car. She was riding a scooter and I don't think the car saw her. At first I thought she had been run over with the amount of screaming there was, but we later heard she was "only" hit. Nonetheless, it just goes to show that there is a reason the cars around here should not be driving the way they do.

Anywaaaay, I need to start taking my camera everywhere with me again because I keep missing out on opportune moments (this is not related to the above paragraph). Hopefully from tonight I will have some somewhat more stimulating news and photos! It’s just hard to elaborate on the intricacies of tanning, such as getting the angle of the sun right, lying on the stones in the right way etc, without boring everyone! But I will have you know I am finally able to say I am tanned! For the first time in years!!

I hope everyone is keeping warm at home…it’s hard to believe it could be so cold right now!

Until next time,

Cheyne