Life
Abroad In Abruzzo
Italy's oft-overlooked Abruzzo is a food and wine lover's dream that marches to the beat of its own drum.
The gazpacho is deceptively simple, yet every mouthful sings of summer. I could be supine in the Mediterranean sun, eating sweet tomatoes straight from the vine - not in a 16th-century monastery in the mountains of Abruzzo.
This lost pocket of central Italy is having a moment, thanks in part to Reale, the Michelin three-starred restaurant of chef Niko Romito and his sister, Cristiana, currently ranked number 19 in the World's 50 Best Restaurants.
Set on a gentle hilltop above Castel di Sangro, Reale - and the 10-suite hotel Casadonna Reale - is an exercise in achromatic minimalism. Whitewashed walls and bare wooden floors evoke the quiet of a monastery.
The labyrinthine streets of Scanno seem to meld into the surrounding hills (Credit: Getty Images).
The ambience flows to Reale, its picture window gazing onto a collar of mountains brushed blue in the last gasp of light. In this bucolic setting, Romito redefines Italian haute cuisine with what he calls "apparently simple" food.
Like alchemists of old, he tinkers with ingredients - fermenting, distilling, smoking or slow-cooking - in pursuit of flavour. Vegetables take centre stage, with dishes that put a modern spin on Abruzzo classics.
The humble cauliflower sparked Romito's obsession with plants, a two-year study that ultimately led to the 12-course tasting menu we are dining on tonight - all of it plant-based and sublime.
"More than the ingredient itself, I was interested in how a raw ingredient could be transformed into something more," he explains, his head cocked in a philosophical bent. In Romito's hands, cazzarielli, the rustic pasta in fagioli bean soup, is here reimagined as a summery pasta of lemony Swiss chard, luridly blue and saucy.
Wild greens bathed in gin arrive with the exhortation to eat bottom up, the sharp botanicals colliding with a smear of hidden almond cream.
One course is simply pane - bread. It is a glorious still life of twirled baguettes, salted batons, and husk-rich loaves made from ancient Abruzzese grains.
A REGIONAL REINVENTION
Lake Scanno's cerulean hues.
"Reale has been at the centre of Abruzzo's reinvention," says Valerio Fantinelli, co-founder of Italy Tour Co - a luxury travel outfit specialising in bespoke tours of Abruzzo and Rome - and my guide on this private two-day tour. "The way Niko marries innovation with tradition has truly put this region's culinary heritage on the world stage." It's a theme that sums up Abruzzo to a tee.
For centuries, this rugged region lay cut off from much of Italy by the sheer spine of the Apennine mountains. It made for resilient people who marched to their own drum.
In the Middle Ages, the hilltops bristled with medieval villages, defensive forts and watchtowers shrouded in clouds. It also gave rise to a cuisine that is unabashedly rustic, with producers grounded in the earth and the rhythms of the season. "In Abruzzo, it has always been their culture and traditions,"
Fantinelli says when we meet in Rome for the 90-minute drive to Santo Stefano di Sessanio, a 12th-century village high in the Gran Sasso National Park. The chef and owner of Perth's Fire & Flour restaurant was born on the coast of Abruzzo, in Pescara. But it's in the mountains where Abruzzo was first settled that our journey lies.
"Abruzzo is incredibly narrow, with only 15 to 20 kilometres of flat land. So it was natural that people came to these mountains to live." We spin westwards, spooling past farmlands and fields and up into the Gran Sasso, at 1,250 metres the highest point in the Apennines.
During the Roman Empire, these high plains were nature's pantry. Saffron - its crocuses supposedly brought from Persia by a priest - flourished under the sun's high beam, along with lentils, farro, and the button-shaped ancient legume, cicerchie.
Sheep grazed on the plush summer grass before beginning the slow migration south to Puglia for the winter.
FLAVOURS OF ABRUZZO
Chiesa di Santa Maria della Pieta, a Renaissance-era church, perched in the hillsides of Abruzzo (Credit: Rocca Calascio).
In Santo Stefano di Sessanio's tiny delicatessen, we browse shelves of robust Montepulciano d'Abruzzo wines and Centerba, a digestive so staggeringly bitter, it demands a steady hand. Saffron, once so prized it was guarded under lock and key, sits alongside the local black liquorice and mortadella di Campotosto, a small pork salami with a big stick of lard at its core.
My education continues at a local trattoria, where the rounded shoulders of mountains are the backdrop to hyper-local food. Platters of antipasto are followed by steaming bowls of zuppa di lenticchie (lentil soup), a glorious saffron-infused pasta studded with chunks of guanciale and slow-roasted spring lamb, grass-fed in the high plains.
During the Medici rule of the 17th century, Santo Stefano was a gateway town between Rome and the Adriatic Sea. Four hundred years later, it had fallen into poverty. The population dwindled and the town soon lay abandoned.
Sextantio, the hotelier behind Matera's luxury cave dwellings, swept in, restoring the buildings and transforming the village into one of its "Albergo Diffuso" scattered hotels (authentic stays in medieval homes). It opened the reclusive Abruzzo to tourism.
Abruzzo's rewilding came next. Mountains, valleys and fields were gathered up and slowly converted to national parks and reserves - more than a quarter in a decade.
Following the signs for some home-spun delights (Credit: Getty Images).
Livestock of Abruzzo feed on fresh pastures.
Today it is home to three national parks and more than 75 per cent of Europe's animal species, flora and fauna - making this the greenest parcel in Europe. This means there is always somewhere to walk off lunch. We do just that, scaling the heights of Rocco Calascio, a Gothic ruin with arrow slits onto clouds, the world below us spread out like a chequerboard.
At Bominaco, an hour away, a caretaker opens the small chapel just for us, revealing 14th-century frescoes so dazzling they easily rival the Sistine Chapel. Wherever we go, the history is palpable but something else strikes more - the total lack of crowds.
It's as if we have stumbled upon an Italy of old, one that existed before cheap flights and overtourism. I had stayed the previous night in Six Senses Rome, waking at dawn to capture the sights. It was early June, and the city was already heaving under the influx of people.
They flooded the Colosseum and swarmed the Trevi Fountain, a sea of influencers in pretty frocks waiting for their perfect shot. In Abruzzo, I found none of that. Of the record 62.2 million visitors to Italy last year, less than 3 per cent made it to Abruzzo.
Even fewer found themselves in L'Aquila and its storybook wilderness of peaks and valleys. This means that it is easy to find any number of peaceful hilltop towns, each with their own sleepy charm, resplendent cathedral, casual trattoria and wine still at 1980s prices.
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