Then Abruzzo...

So after all my Shelleying, I deposit myself in the capable hands of Frui Tours for a wander off into the Italian wilderness East of Rome, with cooking classes and climbable mountains, shepherded by an Italian-Canadian redhead who knows every chef in the region no matter how deep he or she is hidden in this hinterland. He drives us up and down what look like vertical escarpments, through acres of rock wall and climbing grasslands, with switchback roads that must have been made by shepherds and not engineers. There's not a human in sight, no billboards, no streetlights, only the odd hawk, some sheep, a wayward hare. Then he'll pull off the road and we'll discover some kitchen carved into a hill with a chef ready to teach us how to use zafferano [saffron] or the like. The olio, the vino, agnelli, tartuffi, we are eating like Medicis. At every restaurant, they serve us their Sunday food, festival food. It's gorgeous. I will have to walk from Wall Street to Inwood when I get back to make up this trip. Daily. For the next three years.

Meanwhile, Abruzzo is just what I wanted. This is Ladyhawke country: seriously medieval. Picture your most iconic crumbling ancient castle, put it on a mountain nobody could climb, nearly falling off the top, surround it with wheeling birds and a sunset that turns the landscape into a transition shot from Star Wars, that's Rocca Calascio, the fortress we found on our first day. The Gran Sasso is a national park, so it's supposed to be fairly unpopulated, but I didn't expect such purely perfect wilderness as we found in our first B&B up in this corner of the Appenines.

Hollywood found this place (Ladyhawke, The Name of the Rose, Clooney's The American) but it seems like nobody else has. It's like the moon. The hills are all rock, with pale dry grass and prickly vegetation that sticks if you walk too close. There are sharp white mountains in the distance, and we're nearly as high, but our mountains are rounder and you can go right up in a brisk 30 minute climb if you don't stop every ten steps to take a picture, scream like Titanic, "I'm the king of the world!" Really, it feels like that. Closest feeling there is to being a bird. The only things to harvest here are lentils and rocks. Lavender grows wild in the hills and cukoos live in the meadow below. Everywhere you look, there are fragmented stone walls studding the mountains in unfinished lines, low walls that come and go with no apparent reason for dividing anything from anything else. They seem to hold up the mountain, but of course they don't. The rumpled terraces they make in the slopes are the only evidence of what used to be an agricultural landscape. You go driving, you see a village carved into a mountain, or perched on the edge of one, every five miles or so - some inhabited, some abandoned. This part of the world is more Western than the West. And when I say Western, I mean cowboys. Sergio Leone filmed his Spaghetti Westerns in these hills. Germans go backpacking on the ridges, but apparently Italians never do, and Americans or any Inglese seem to be a rare sight, as I've heard hardly any English outside of our bunch, except for one English couple in a restaurant.

Tarragon is called dragoncello in Italian. Best word I've learned is transumanza, which is what they call the annual migration of the sheep from these mountains down to Puglia. The word on its own is beautiful - I want to be transumanza. It used to happen on foot every year, but there there used to be millions of sheep, now there are a few thousand, so the sheep take the train these days. They tell us that's why you'll see churches in the middle of nowhere between here and Puglia, for all the shepherds and all the sheep. The word for sheep is pecora. Pecorino is a grape, a wine, and a hundred kinds of cheese. In a stone cottage that refrigerates itself, an ex-professor of Greek and Latin named Magdalena still makes pecorino ricotta by hand, alone with one cauldron, in the shadow of Castel del Monte. There are some holdouts.

During one of our (rare) breaks from cooking (/eating), I went trekking off on a dirt road through the wonderful nowhere of our nearest hills, to see the more and better nowhere of the next set of hills, and I found a new mountain rearing up ahead of me, all green until its very top, which was perfectly set with a crown of rocks, and for a moment without thinking it on purpose, I was picturing Dr. F on the deserted dirt road ahead of me, in that last mad pursuit at the end of Frankenstein, when he's in the great nowhere of the world and the only sign of civilization he finds are the notes his creature leaves in the tree bark to taunt him, complete with packets of food "keep up your strength so you can keep hunting me" (horrible misquote, I didn't bring the book with me). I had a moment that was ten parts appreciation for the day/trip/grant/myfeet, one part good creepy thrill about being alone which I never am, and one part super regret I didn't bring a copy of the book along on my trip to sit down and read in a desolate/excellent place like this.