Basking in the soothing light of any early Puglian afternoon and recovering from passing nearly all of the region’s sixty-five million olive trees, I drizzled olive oil over some expertly seared aubergines. The sun poured over us as the oil poured out of me.
“Sicilian olive oil has its distinct tomato couli flavour. And Ligurian olive oil, of course, has that unmistakable apply zing. But you can’t beat good old nutty Puglian stuff, “ announced , having memorized a portion of a guidebook to impress bystanders.
“We’re in the right compartimento here for real olive oil. It’s what southern Italy’s famous for.”
I drank my “Primitivo” wine and absorbed some more “orecchiette” ear-shaped pasta. My wife looked at me after listening to me and came to a decision.
“I’m driving,” she said, seeing me fill up my wine glass and not hers.
“Where are we going to go? This is meant to be a romantic break.”
There were plenty of places. I suppose we could see a few more temples, churches and cathedrals and should pay our respects to the “trulli”. “But I’ve heard once you’ve been inside one conical stone -domed hobbit home, you’ve been in them all.”
My wife consulted her guidebook. “There seem a lot of noteworthy 7000-year-old villages carved out limestone gorges. Like Matara. ”
This gave me food for thought. I said I’d be just happy just doing a tour of the “oserias, “trattorias and “pescatorias”. Passing noteworthy Renaissance/ Baroque facades in between.
But my wife wears the trousers and in them she keeps the credit cards.
The premise of our Italian break was romance. A celebration of marriage. Something special to mark an anniversary. So we had discounted the container port of Taranto and a hand-in-hand walk around Bari airport shopping facilities. We had done Lecce and not down-played its culture enrichment. We had had our fill of sites of sackings.
Both of us by now had also openly admitted low “striking gorge” thresholds and high “almond intolerance” . Neither of us have ever been that interested in Swabian castles. That is why we have been married so long. We don’t like to see each other on beaches any more either.
My wife riffled away for a suitably seductive destination. “ Perfect!”
She got out a map and studied it like a reflexology chart.
A siesta later, we embarked on our mystery tour of Puglia, a couple of middle-aged foot fetishists exploring the heel of Italy and a bit of its instep.
After miles of gnarled trees, dry-stone walls, scruffy fields , endless mozzarella farms and pomegranate groves, annoyingly innumerable olive oil mills, two hundred species of fig and only getting badly lost a slightly less number of times, we eventually bumped to a hot-and-bothered halt. Above a deep gorge.
“A ravine,” I said, unimpressed.
“Puglia is not known as the Land of Ravines for nothing.”
My wife told me not to be sarcastic and informed me it was no ordinary ravine. It was the ravine belonging to Castellaneta, twenty miles from Taranto.
We parked and walked down the town’s Via Roma. My wife looked more than usually smug.
“Does the name Rudolfo Alfonso Raffaelo Pierre Filberto Gugliemi di Valentine D’Antonquolia mean anything to you?”
Thinking we had no secrets, I shrugged and guessed he played for Juventus. Then we stopped at Number 116, a non-descript three-storey white house among many similar. My wife spread her hands wide.
“Rudolf Valentino was born here! In the second floor apartment. In 1895. Now how romantic is that?”
The site of pilgrimage is not open to the public but the a life-size statue of “Valentino” around the corner is. As is a laundrette, a hotel and a restaurant bearing his name. All the owners, doubtless claiming their grandmothers had met the man and swooned at him.
Naturally ,there is also a Rudolf Valentino Museum. Ironically, it is a former convent.
We entered its “Lovers’ Hall”. Under the barrelled-ceiling, we were followed ( rather ambi-sexually I thought) by the eyes of the legendary Latin lover and epitome of romance. From film posters and black and white movie stills, wearing his Cossack, matador and gaucho looks and sporting his signature Islamic older/ Arabian noble pose, the silent silver screen matinee idol gave us the eye.
We enjoyed a part of the tent seen in “The Son of the Sheik”, a business card with his handwriting on it and comments from two visiting Californian “Rudy” fans who had been bowled over by the region’s cuttlefish almost just as much as the museum.
“ We’ve seen Rudy’s Silver Ghost Rolls Royce in the Car and Caravan Museum in Luray Caverns, Virginia. But this is awesome. The birthplace of the world’s greatest lover. The world’s first hearthrob.”
His wife, who seemed to have just had a cataract operation, was mesmerized by the posters. The closest she had been to the legendary sex symbol, her lover told us, was in a wax museum in Buena Park, California. I imagined burly security guards dragging her off “Lo Sceiaco”.
Valentine’s mother was French and his father Italian, a vet who died of malaria. Rudy emigrated to the States in 1913. The museum boasts his childhood bed. And a business card carrying his handwriting.
It was rags to riches. “Valesino” proved if you went to agricultural college as he did in Genoa and combed your hair the right way and put the right stuff on it, you could become a film star and have hundreds of women and more, queuing hysterically to cuddle your coffin after your premature death at the age of thirty-one.
Valentino is the favourite son of what he called “My land of sun.”
His hometown is pure Puglia. A maze of piazzas, narrow alleys and connecting stone steps.
At dinner back at our hotel, an old fortified farmhouse and Saracen deterrent , I poured some local “nettari” first pressed olive oil over my sun-baked tomatoes and a little “lacrima” ( the tears of unfiltered ,pre-pressed pulp ) on my roast red peppers.
My wife ordered another bottle of wine because she had already had a half of one. We clinked glasses and toasted Apulia. And ourselves. I smiled around the pepper mill and quoted from the heart and from the museum, “I am the canvas on which women paint their dreams.”
She laughed into her glass of spicy “Nero di Troia” and, after re-gaining her composure with several mls, she replied in fluent “Rudy”. “To generalize on women is dangerous. To specialize is infinitely worse!”
I looked at the label on the oil bottle. “ Productii Italiano cento per cento”, I read. “Just like Rudolph, the red-blooded Italian stallion and fabled tight-trousered lothario.”
Then came an idea. “They use olive oil on everything around here.. Maybe I should pomade my hair with it for the authentic, slicked-back you-can’t-resist-me Rudy look.”
My wife gave my scalp a long look that told me that it was too late for that. But not all was lost. I could still be a pop icon.
Castellaneta has another favourite son, Dan. Who does the voice for “Homer Simpson”. Valentino’s birthplace is also the ancestral home of “The Simpsons”.
My “D’Oh!” rang around the restaurant and echoed around the nearest ravine. I’m sure the gorge echoed back, “Prego!”
www.easyjet.com offer flights and holidays to Puglia
