The Intrepid Travelers in Spilinga
Lessons from Southern Italy
Culinary Tour Is Delicious Taste of Doing Life Right
by Melinda and Bob Varboncoeur F
or nine days this spring, we took a culinary tour of Calabria, the “toe of the boot” of Italy, led by Dave and Rynn Caputo, husband-and-wife owners of Caputo Brothers Creamery in Spring Grove, Pennsylvania. As organic gardeners and true “foodies,” and with an upcoming issue of Natural Awaken- ings focused on food, we signed up to learn the culinary culture of this re- markable place. We ended up learning so much more.
Tropea The opportunity to arrive in Italy a day before the official tour starts is fortu- nate, as neither of us slept well on the plane trip. That extra time allows us a peaceful afternoon and evening to nap and eat a wonderful meal. And as we soon find out, it’s a very Italian way to start our trip.
Meeting up with the rest of the folks on our tour, we board two pas- senger vans and head to the seaside town of Tropea with our three guides, Dave, Rynn and Kyle Carter, director of culinary experiences (we want that
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job!). Tropea is a town of about 5,000, built on a steep cliff that’s actually part of a reef in the gulf of St. Euphemia. The town’s narrow, cobbled streets are lined with shops and cafés. Garlands of sweet red onions, a local delicacy, hang everywhere. As we explore, we notice that most of the stores, in typical southern Italian style, roll up the side- walks from one to four each day so its employees can eat and rest, much like we had done the day before.
The next day we drive up into the mountains to Spilinga, where we visit a working farm that produces a local delicacy called Nduja (en-doo-ya), a unique spreadable pork sausage. It’s a national holiday, but the facility’s owners open the place just for our tour. They’re obviously proud of their prod- uct and know the local source of every ingredient that goes into it. Friends and family grow the peppers that give Nduja its distinctive, spicy flavor. And the farm’s all organic—no herbicides, pesticides or fertilizer, just compost. To cap off a unique day, the Nduja consor- tium has arranged for a local agritu- rismo to provide an amazing farmhouse meal: a dozen or more appetizers, two pastas, vegetables, fish and seafood, grilled meats, and desserts, finishing with a wonderful farm-made liqueur called Amaro.
Agriturismo Appetizers On our last full day in Tropea, we
head to the town market, where David and Rynn pick up everything we need for lunch on the hotel terrace. Every town has its own market—some big and some small, depending on the size of the town—and that’s where the community gathers each day. We walk into this two-block market in Tropea and feel like we stepped onto the set of an Italian Cheers. True, not everybody knows our names—or even speaks our language—but everybody we meet makes us feel welcome. A bit of serendipity… we’re all
packed to leave Tropea and the credit card machine at the hotel won’t work, so we have to hang around for an extra half-hour or so before it’s fixed. Just as
Tropean Red Onions
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