Local markets are fun and a great way to see how and what locals shop. I read that Bari, the capital and biggest city in Puglia had a great fish market. This would be a perfect start for the day, before our “free” tour of Bari at 10.30.
Google maps this time had no trouble leading us along highways and bitumen roads to the market, placed quite logically on on a pier next to the sea. Great. Well, if last night’s meal was a disappointment, this was a Greek Tragedy. The fish market consisted of one single, bad tempered local, who had lost his last tooth at the fall of Il Duce and was fighting lung disease with another cigarette. He had caught, or stolen from a local pond, 6 fish, floating belly-up in a large tub of water. I’m not quite sure who he thought he was going to sell his 6 fish to, as we were the only people there. He seemed to be arguing with two other locals, but maybe that’s just the animated style of talking common in Italy. And that’s it. There were empty stainless steel tables around, and the ground was too clean for it to be naturally so, thus we can assume that at other times there are more fish for sale than today.
We had given ourselves a 45 minute buffer to see the market before the tour, which was now dead time. After a quick walk around the area, a coffee break seemed about right. Sort of. I can’t testify who the smartarse was who suggested a 9.30 aperitif. It could easily have been me, Garry or Yoni, but in any case, here we were, sipping a negroni, aperol spritz and vermouth in a downtown bar before 10 a.m. Tough life
Our guide for the tour of Bari, Michele, which is male Mikhel in Italian, introduced himself as a part time guide, part time film maker in China for the Chinese government (yes, really) . He also holds the Australian Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, as a model of world leadership. For those reading this who aren’t up to date on Australian politics, she is virulently anti Israel, borderline antisemtic, who whilst in Israel refused to meet the family of an Australian citizen murdered on 7th October. We could guess where his sympathies lay in relation to Israel and chose to take the path of least resistance. We were Australians, which made him very happy, given his worship of the said Penny Wong. Whilst the tour wasn’t the best free tour that we had done, it certainly wasn’t bad. We got a pretty good feel of the city, its history and the sites worth seeing, including Saint Nicholas Church, where father christmas’s bones are reprortedly buried and has both an Orthodox and Catholic church in the same building.
We also saw the obligatory street where local ladies make orecchiette, the local pasta, by hand. He was very clear that the tour was only meant to give us enough of an introduction to Bari to inspire us to see it properly by ourselves. I respect that and whilst we didn’t have the time to properly explore Bari as this was our last day and we were returning to Israel later that night, I think we all felt that it would be worth returning to in the future. Maybe even the fish market will be open.
We asked Michel for a recommendation for our last meal in Puglia. He recommended a place called la 2 Aquila (The 2 eagles) which was simply fantastic. Had we not been so overwhelmed by the dinner we ate two nights previously at Osteria san Giovanni, this would have been the best meal of the trip. There was something ironic about starting this trip in the city of L’Aquila and finishing at a restaurant in Bari called La 2 Aquila. If I was a world famous novelist, women at their weekly book clubs would discuss the hidden symbolism behind it. Alas, sometimes irony is just a result of coincidence. (Ah, more book club analysis)
We couldn’t have a trip abroad, especially to Italy, without a winery visit. We may as well not have come. So Garry found Cantina Coppi, about half an hour’s drive from Bari. This is a medium sized estate winery that has been family run for a hundred years. We learnt that it wasn’t until the past twenty years or so that the recently deceased patriarch decided that he wanted to produce quality wine rather than plonk that would be sent to wineries in Northern Italy as part of Italy’s cheap mass wine production industry. Our guide for the wine tour, whose name I don’t remember, isn’t part of the family. He is the international sales manager, travelling the world, finding local importers for the winery’s product. Not a bad job, I must say. But his passion and belief in the family’s mission was admiral and infectious. We started with a quick tour of the vineyard, then into the production area and finally wine tasting. The wine was very good, but not wow, amazing, life changing. And in any case, we couldn’t buy any as we only had hand luggage and wouldn’t succeed in getting bottles of wine through airport security. We finished our tour with something not wine related, but almost as interesting. Old man Coppi was a car collector. In the basement of the winery we saw his large collection of vintage cars, which was very cool.
And that was about it. A quick flight to Rome, hanging around Fiumicino airport where we tried to find a spaghetti Bolognese or a minestrone soup for Mark. It took him quite a while to understand that Spaghetti Bolognese is not Italian food. In fact, it was a bit difficult for him to break the myth of American/Australian Italian restaurants that ignored the regionality of food in Italy. Ragu Bolognese is found either in Bologna in Northern Italy or tourist traps in Rome/Florence/Venice. We visited neither during this trip and thus didn’t see it on menus. We couldn’t even find it at the dreadful restaurants at Rome Fumiacino. Yoni settled for second rate ramen noodles whilst Mark and I settled for second rate pizza. Both were a world away from the delicious, local food that we had enjoyed at every meal bar one.
On a final philosophical note, I couldn’t shake the feeling, especially after seeing both Bari and Lecce so superficially, that we had seen too much, travelled too quickly and not actually immersed ourselves in anything. There were objective reasons for the superficiality of the holiday. We needed to start in L’Aquila as I needed to see a man about a house. The journey from L’Aquila to Monopoli is a long one, especially since we wanted to see the Gargano Peninsula which was a further detour. And then, as the benevolent dictator, I had to take the different desires of each of us into account when planning. Too much nature for one of us is not enough cities for another.
Or maybe I’m just overthinking it. Maybe I just need to be satisfied that all four of us had a fantastic holiday together.