DAY 5. A Happy Mix
We had discussed over dinner that staying in an off season wedding hall was not where we wanted to camp on a holiday in Italy. Yoni’s role of minister for food and drink was temporarily upgraded to accommodation czar and he found a lovely B+B in the middle of Monopoli’s historical district. We made an excuse to our “agriturismo” owners and checked out. I think they were actually quite happy to get rid of us, not fully understanding why the fuck we’d want to stay there, forcing them to be open in a season where there is really no reason for them to be working. Our new accomodation was dispersed over two locations; Mark had an apartment to himself, which suited him fine, for reasons that I will reveal a little later and we had 3 rooms 200 metres away overlooking Piazza Garibaldi. This was more like it.
Our trips always involve a lot of walking, at least 10 km a day and a lot of quaint villages, pretty views, great food and a winery or two. We also like to include a guided tour of a city with a local, or a culinary tour or cooking workshop, where possible. Not too shabby, but it’s always good to try to find something that we haven’t done before.
Italy is the world’s third largest producer of olive and most of its oil comes from the South, especially Puglia. Like in Israel, October/November is olive picking season. I regularly lead olive tours here in Israel as part of my culinary tourism business (not 2023 or 4, for obvious and unfortunate reasons) and I was curious to see how it is produced elsewhere. We were booked in to an olive oil experience here in Puglia.
We were actually out of our drab wedding hall rooms quite early, even if we didn’t have to be at the olive farm until 10.30, as we had something important to take care of beforehand. Go to a local supermarket to buy stuff for a picnic lunch. A picnic itself is a lot of fun, and even more so if it’s by the sea. But supermarket shopping in a foreign country, especially somewhere like Italy with its range of quality fruit and vegetables, cheeses and cold cuts, is a fun activity in of itself. At least for me and Yoni. Garry and Mark have a slightly more utilitarian view of supermarkets; get in, get what you want and get out. But Garry the vegetarian enjoyed choosing the cheese and veges he wanted. Yoni the semi vegetarian splurged on chicken wings, I needed local prosciutto and Mark, whose preferred food is hot dogs and sausages, was happy with everything.
With our shopping complete, it was off to the olive groves, which were only about 20 minutes from Monopoli. Even with the supermarket shopping detour, we arrived with plenty of time to spare. We were perfectly happy with that, as it gave us time to drive into the nearby small town, which was not particularly “quaint” or “charming” or special in any way. But it did have a local café with tables on the verandah, full of old townsfolk, young mothers, and assorted others who were all oblivious to the word “tourism”. For us it was a great opportunity to just soak up a corner of Puglia over coffee for 20 minutes.
With our cultural immersion programs of supermarket shopping and morning coffee with the locals out of the way, we arrived to Azienda Agricola Savoia and were met enthusiastically by Rosaria, who is married to one of the sons who are fourth generation olive farmers. It is a large farm, spreading over 60 hectares (150 acres) with more than 10,000 trees and 6 main varieties of olives, but is still run as a family business. We started by going into one of the fields where we heard about the terroir of this part of Puglia, farming practices and general agricultural background to olive growing.
From there into a sort of 2000 year old “museum”, where the family had excavated parts of the property and found historical olive oil producing artifacts and rooms from ancient times. It was both fascinating and instructive. We jumped 2000 years forward and saw freshly picked olives coming in to the crushing machines, presses and centrifuges, finishing with fresh, green olive oil. After spending the past hour learning about all things olive, it was time to put our noses and palates to work. We were given three tastings of olive oil, each different in their composition and varieties. Rosaria taught us how to swirl, gargle , swish and swill in order to maximize the nuances of the oils. I’m not too convinced that we really knew what we were doing, but it was good to learn something new. After a quick whiz around the gift shop (of course…commerce is commerce) we were off to Ostuni, with yet another beautiful but different historical centre. Here all the buildings are whitewashed and it is, well, charming. In the USA, a National Park is given that status only after it is ensured that it is unique and that it offers something different from every other National Park. I think Italy has something similar, where there’s a committee that ensures that every historical centre is different in some way. We never get sick of wandering around historical centres. In case anyone was worried, an early afternoon drink was part of post historical centre and pre return to the car.
Back in the car, we plugged Torre Guaceto State Nature Reserve into Google Maps, confident that it would direct us there along the quickest, easiest route. And it mostly succeeded, up until it had to actually guide us to the car park. Then it had one glass of fortified Italian wine too many and took us off road, along a sandy, bush-lined side track that a 4×4 vehicle would have complained about. Our large Ford Kuga was not happy. Nor was Garry, who had to moves boulders from the road so the car could get through. Eventually, about 150 metres before our destination, the track became loose beach sand and it wasn’t a matter of maybe we’ll get stuck, but we will definitely get stuck. I parked before entering the sandmire, and our seaside walk started here. If I was in nirvana in the Umbra Forest, Garry and Mark were frothing at the mouth at the prospect of a walk along the Adriatic coast.
It was mid afternoon and the provisions were weighing our backpacks down. Not too long after we set off we found a rocky outcrop overlooking the water where we could lay out all the food and had a lunch as enjoyable as any meal in any restaurant.
Well fed, we continued along the beautiful blue Adriatic coastline, past inlets, bays and beaches. True, the beaches weren’t very clean and had a disturbing amount of rubbish strewn along them, but if you just looked eastward, out to sea, then you could almost ignore the sadly polluted beach. The walk along the beach was without a defined path, but after around five km a path presented itself, leading inland, past coastal reed marshes. When this finished we walked along a small road for a bit until a clearly defined track led us into what I guess would be described as coastal bush. This is all very nice as long as the path is clear, but this is perhaps a route that is not heavily trafficked, as the path gradually became less obvious. Thankfully Kohoot, which helped me find this route, had real time navigation with its maps, so it showed us the correct direction. But still, we were bush bashing the last couple of km, even if we were bashing through a type of bush that we had never had to struggle through before. Don’t expect me to describe or name the flora, but it was totally different from the primordial forest we had walked through the previous day and could have been planets away from the snow-covered mountain top we had walked to three days previous. You can’t accuse us of doing the same thing all the time.
We were happy to see the car and even happier to get the wheels on to bitumen. Another busy, varied day was coming to an end, but not before eating what we unanimously agreed was the best meal of the entire trip.
There is the usual great to excellent that is the norm for Italy and then there’s the exceptional, best five meals of any of our trips ever, that Osteria San Giovanni served us. To be honest, our top 5 meals on any trip ever list is about 12 meals long, but this one was up there with them. The usual mixed seafood antipasti spread to 7 individual dishes that was meant for two people but was so varied and large that each of the four of us found a dish that knocked us out. The sautéed wild mushrooms had Garry melting, putting it into the to-die-for category, which he only awards on extremely rare occasions. I was getting worried about Yoni. His octopus addiction was getting out of hand. This was his fifth portion in three days. The mashed fava beans with wild chicory had the vegetarians , pescatarians and carnivores raving. Carrot flan may not sound special, but it was. Two year aged prosciutto? I had gone to heaven. Pickled local vegetables, fried cod, prawns and the fore-mentioned octopus. Wow.
Garry ordered a main dish of hand made pasta with fresh tomatoes, olives and capers. The original dish as it appears on the menu is meant to have fresh anchovies melted into the sauce, but Garry, being a vegetarian, asked them not to be added. The owner/chef forgot to remove the anchovies so we got a bonus pasta dish delivered to the table while he re-made the dish anchovy-less. Something so simple was so special.
