This time I look out of context. Apparently. I am recovering “something” from few years ago because the last of the two protagonists of this story passed away in November Twenty Twenty because of the love for his people: father Angelo Iacono, a priest. He joined his sister Pierina, not even too long after her. With them this story is over. Or not? For now I am proposing it again in the way I told you. With dedication.
To Pierina e Father Angelo Iacono
The earth is full of rubbish, and nature has rebelled. We need to return to the old work systems, in the sense that we need to go to the land with a new mentality, actually with the respect of the past”. When we meet in the cellar, my friends, while finishing eating their piece of rabbit, punctually implore me to convince myself “not to give up”. They repeat it, toasting. But they are not unprepared. They are outraged, but they keep it for themselves. Looking suspiciously the new outrages, the lobbies in ambush, of indebted and sterile, who plunder the ideas, who make the machete rotate to get the slice of landscape which, meanwhile, send help signs. Last time, at the table, in a joint table, between women and men, we fought over the last “scagliuozzi” (Italian dialect to indicate “small pieces”) of red flour: evocative tastes. In the meantime, a cold thundercloud was enveloping the night of our refuge. A winter atmosphere, ideal for telling ourselves that there are women and men still climbing among the schiappe , the terraces supported by drywalls (parracine), with pruning shears; and they jump down from the puoje, the southern hills, the embankments that modulate the slopes with clay and grass. Here they are, my friends, they are not old. And, although age is already advanced, however they did not get old prematurely. They caress the plots they hoed with the agility of those who love fertility, as the generator of all kind of good. “The good is not a small talk”, they insist. And it cannot be limited to greediness - to self-avid stuff from which Giovanni Verga distilled his fictional blood of the so-called “Verism” - to the point of promiscuously impregnating it. "They married in the family, between relatives, in order not to divide the property, split it, disperse it among undesirable heirs." We stare into each other's eyes. This happened in a time that, not only in Ischia, is quite close. Time of storms, testimonies and testaments. "Not anymore," repeat those who share my echo that glimpses the other, in an "other" Time.
“I woke up at five o’clock in the morning - Pierina explained to me - and I prepared the dough with the broken corn flour, which I grow, and the wild fennel harvested in inaccessible areas. Then I worked the shapes and I put them to rest in the wooden cupboard. I heated the old oven with the dried shoots of the vines. Before baking, I made pizza with garlic, oregano, all of our production, and honey mushrooms grown near a stump in the garden. I set them aside with oil and chilly”.
The pizza? Unique. Extraordinary.
“I do everything by myself, like the ancient anticorium”, Pierina added, with a joke that distorted the Latin a little, but still gives an incredible strength to the story.
After a couple hours, the bread was also ready.
“I notice that it is now cooked, touching the door of the oven, made from a piece of slab in wrought lapillus”.
Golden, magnificent loaves.
“You can keep them in the pantry easily for four weeks”, father Angelo murmured, as if he was confessing to me.
“But have you tried this bread soaked in wine?” Pierina pressed.
Frames from the past.
“All this is meant to end”, remembered Father Angelo with a smile.
But Pierina didn’t listen to him. Then and now. While, in the still hot oven, she quickly puts in a lot of hazelnuts. A snack, toasting to the future.
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