The Devil is in the detail by Rachel Hore

Rachel Hore is the author of nine novels, nearly all with historical settings.  Last Letter Home was chosen for the Richard & Judy Book Club in association with W.H. Smith.  She lives in Norwich and teaches creative writing part-time at the University of East Anglia. 

We hope that Rachel will soon be joining us on The History Girls. Meanwhile, here is a taster of her work.

Researching LAST LETTER HOME

Research for an historical novel can be a chaotic affair.  I’d always imagined a process whereby I’d read everything relevant I could lay my hands on, visit the sites, study objects in museums all before I began planning and writing the fiction. 

Unfortunately, I’m not the sort of novelist who discovers exactly what interests me about a subject until I start writing.  My relationship with research is therefore one that changes throughout the journey to the finished work. I thought it interesting to reflect on that journey with my recently published novel, Last Letter Home (Simon & Schuster, 2018).

Last Letter Home has a dual narrative, featuring a youngish woman historian in the present, who investigates the story behind a collection of letters from the Second World War past between an English girl and a German refugee and finds in it connections to her own family.

I’d set novels in this period before (A Gathering Storm, A Week in Paris), so already had a general feel for the background. It was the locations and the characters that were different this time. Scenes in Norfolk, Egypt, Sicily and mainland Italy would all require detailed research, as would the possible trajectory of an enemy alien who was determined to join the British war effort.  I also intended to write about military engagement, a first for me. Part of my pleasure in writing is to try something challenging and new.

Before I thought of any of this a fuzzy, dreamlike scene of a woman in a wild garden kept coming to me, I think because I’d been visiting walled gardens in East Anglia. My favourites were the mature working garden at Felbrigg Hall, near Sheringham, and a more desolate one at Thornham Magna near Diss, which was being brought back into use.  I liked the communal purpose of these gardens, but also the sense of security they imparted; they felt like places of sanctuary from the troubles of the wider world.   A fictional walled garden became a central motif in my novel - a safe harbour for my wartime characters, and a liminal space between past and present.  A garden in Italy became important, too.

A garden in Italy rather like one in the novel

I love gardens, but am not a plantswoman, so I resorted to books and the advice of a good friend who is.  I relished an excellent tome published in 1930 entitled The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers by Sutton & Sons, and explored plans of walled gardens until the details of an imaginary one flowered in my mind.  Indeed it felt so real that I was dreadfully sad when I had to write about its spoliation as a result of wartime directives to grow more vegetables.

If a walled garden in Norfolk was where the past story began, wartime Italy is where it was to end.  The gruelling Italian campaign of 1943-45 particularly fascinated me because of the physical intensity of the fighting and the high level of psychological strain that participants endured.  The first scenes that I wrote take place in the present, in the mountains near Naples where historian Briony Wood is on holiday with friends. Here she views old wartime footage and is handed the all-important collection of letters.  By writing this episode I committed myself to featuring Italy, but in doing so my problems began.

It is my belief that historical fictions that purport to be realist, as opposed to fantastical, should be respectful of known fact and not betray the reader’s trust.  I  set out on this novel with Norfolk at one end of the past story and Italy at the other after reading in Frank Meeres’ Norfolk in the Second World War that infantry from the Norfolk Regiment took part in the Italian campaign, and in the firm belief that my German refugee, Paul Hartmann, could join the Norfolks and wind up in the aforementioned part of Italy where Briony went on holiday.  It was only when I was deep in the writing that I discovered to my annoyance that the movements of the Norfolk Battalion in Italy had not taken place where or when I had imagined them to, and nor had the men necessarily been involved in the preceding Egyptian battle that I’d planned to feature.

When faced with such a stumbling block the historical novelist has several options.  One involves substantial recasting and rewriting of the book.  Another involves fudging it and confessing this in an author’s note.  A third involves less rewriting, but more research – looking for evidence that underpins a slightly recast version.  In this case, the third option worked.  I uncovered examples of soldiers who’d become separated from their platoon, or whose companies had been decimated, who might then find themselves part of new ones in a completely different regiment.  In the chaos of war, all sorts of confusing and ridiculous things happen.  The challenge for the historical writer is to make  fictional versions of these seem authentic.   

Wartime chronology, again, nearly did for me when it came to tracing a realistic path for a German refugee who wished to fight for the Allies.  The King’s Most Loyal Enemy Aliens by Helen Fry recounts the experiences of many such men, but most of them had not become combatants until quite late in the war – the Normandy Landings being most commonly cited – because of earlier rules preventing them bearing arms.   How, therefore, could I credibly send Paul from an internment camp near Liverpool in May 1940 to fight near Cairo in June 1942?  Again, more detailed excavation provided the answers.  Paul could join the Pioneers, a non-combatant force.  From there appeals to his previous employer, a Norfolk baronet, led him to active service with the local regiment, then onto a ship bound for Suez. These odd kinds of things actually happened.

Should this level of detail actually matter to the historical novelist?  It depends how hardline you are, but they certainly matter to me and I believe they matter to readers.  Most often it’s even tinier details that thwart one, the ones not mentioned in the history books.  Fiction written at the time and memoir are good sources for discovering answers to problems such as how extensively electricity has been installed in rural areas, when people did and didn’t shake hands, who did someone’s laundry, how the telephone system worked.  Some of these snags the writer can save to check once they’ve finished writing, but occasionally key aspects of the story can hang on them so solutions can’t wait.  The writer must sigh, put down their pen and investigate.

The worst traps of all, though, are the questions you didn’t think to ask in the first place. I had no idea, for instance, when I wrote A Week in Paris, that a Wren wasn’t generally allowed on a ship until a reader with first hand knowledge pointed it out.   I’m still waiting for someone to challenge me with something similar in Last Letter Home. No doubt it will happen. It’s an occupational hazard, I’m afraid!

The Kindness of Strangers By L.J. Trafford

Autumn is upon us. The summer is over. And I find myself reflecting on my holidays and my holiday reading.
One of my holiday reads was Eric Newby’s book Love and War in the Apennines. This is a memoir set during the Second World War and concerns a subject I knew little about prior to reading: the fate of British POW’s in Italy at the time of the Italian armistice in 1943.

Eric Newby was one such prisoner of war when on 8th September the Italians surrendered.
The British Authorities ordered the POWs to stay put in their camps thinking that the allied advance would be rapid. However, it was not and the Germans issued an order that all POWs should be marched northwards. 50,000 Allied troops were marched to new camps in Germany and Poland where conditions were far harsher than they had experienced in the Italian camps. Thousands died either from failed escape attempts or the harsh winter conditions.

Eric Newby managed to escape this fate. At his camp they had ignored the British order and the POWs had walked out on mass, their Guards letting them go. Though free of their incarceration they faced a new danger: the Germans
They had issued a proclamation that made their intentions clear:

“It is hoped the population will have the good sense to abstain from all inconsiderate activities - all acts of resistance - all acts of sabotage - all hostile acts against German Armed Forces will be constrained by severe counter measures.” 

With the Germans advancing Newby had to rely on the compassion and the help of the Italian civilians to avoid capture. A reward of 1,8000 Lira offered by the Germans per prisoner recaptured (around £4300 in modern terms) added to the danger faced by Newby and his fellow escapees.

But despite threats of execution for anyone caught harbouring escaped prisoners many of the Italian civilian population did offer help to those on the run. One Italian businessman Giuseppe Bacciagaluppi helped hundreds of British POWs escape to Switzerland. Bacciagaluppi was married to an English woman and with a home on the Italian/Switzerland border he was in prime position to help the escapees. He setup a network, with the aid of his factory staff, that helped the POWs cross over into Switzerland.
That Bacciagaluppi was betrayed by a colleague and arrested by the Gestapo in April 1944 shows the danger the Italian helpers were in. Indeed German proclamations stated clearly what anyone helping the loose POW’s might face.

4. Those giving refuge to Anglo-American escapees will be severely punished. 

5. Anybody that gives food, supplies or civilian clothing to Anglo-American escapees will be referred to the War Tribunal for the application of severe penalties. 

But help they did. As one RAF report said:

Italian civilians gave clothes, food, railway tickets and considerable 

sums of money to escaped POWs.

Iris Origo and family.

Iris Origo, an English biographer living in Italy during the war, recalls in her diary how four Englishmen were kept hidden by a Tuscan peasant:

“The peasant’s story is remarkable. He took in these four Englishmen at the beginning of October, when they were obliged to leave here, and fed and housed them –disregarding the danger as well as the expense – for over three months.” 

She herself assisted many allied prisoners of war evade capture.

This was the experience of escaped British POW John Mallen:

“I found what I considered to be good hideaways - one was a cave in an area of dense woodland and the other was a barn. It was just bare ground in the cave and I had just one blanket that I had been given. As I was still in the area I could still contact my Italian family through another person. The next night after I had done this, the 11 year old daughter arrived in darkness, at my cave. 'Giovanni, I heard... Camilla' And there she was with a big basket strapped onto her back loaded with meat, cheese, bread, a bottle of wine and a big bunch of grapes. Dear oh dear.... that was very welcome. Just imagine though a young girl going a mile and a half in the dark and taking that risk.” 

Newby himself evaded the Germans by hiding in the caves and forests of Fontanello in the Po Valley. He also experienced great kindness.

’No you can’t sleep in my hay," he said after another equally long pause. “You might set it on fire and where would I be then? But you can sleep in my house in a bed, and you will, too, but before we go in I have to finish with Bella." And he went back to milking her.

After injuring his ankle Newby was taken to the local hospital. Here he met a young Slovene nurse named Wanda. She gave him language lessons, a friendship formed. One which later became a romance.

But danger was ever present, as again John Mallen’s experience show:

“One early morning I was about to move off from my cowshed and I was looking around to see if anyone was around, any nasty people in German uniform, when I heard machine gun fire. The sound echoed round the valleys and it was hard to tell where it came from. Later I heard that a squad of Italian SS had tracked these Americans down to their hiding place. The sound I heard was them being shot. I was told by local people that it was the German SS.” 

Newby had his own encounter with the enemy up in the hills:

 “ I woke to find a German soldier standing over me.” 

Thankfully though this German’s interest was primarily butterfly catching. He had no intention nor desire to hand Newby over to his commanders.

Staying in multiple households, sometimes sheltered by shepherds, Newby evaded capture for five months. However, his luck ran out when he was betrayed by a villager and arrested. He spent the remainder of the second world war in camps in Germany and Czechoslovakia. After the war he tracked down Wanda and they married.


I found this book an engrossing read and formed a great admiration of the courage of both the POWs and the Italians who risked all to help them. 

Where the Living Meet the Dead: The Capuchin Monastery Catacombs - By Anna Mazzola

Once you’ve had your fill of gelato, cannoli and palazzi, you can descend from the dusty streets of Palermo into the cool of the Capuchin catacombs.

There, hanging from the walls, lying on shelves, sitting on benches and staring out from coffins are, it is said, nearly 8,000 corpses. Those on view are almost all clothed and in various states of decomposition, most mere skeletons, some still with remnants of skin and hair. One sports a fine waxed moustache.

A surprising discovery

The catacombs were created in the late 16th century when the Capuchin Monastery outgrew its cemetery. When the friars exhumed corpses from the overflowing charnel house to transfer them to the new cemetery, they found that something incredible had happened: forty-five friars had been naturally mummified. Their faces were still recognizable.

To the Capuchins this was clearly an act of God. Instead of burying the remains, they decided to display the bodies as relics, propping them in niches along the walls of their new cemetery.

The first body to be housed in the catacombs was that of Fra Silvestro da Gubbio, who is still greeting visitors today, holding up a sign commemorating the date of his burial (16 October 1599).

From monks to celebrities

Although the catacombs were intended to be exclusively for monks, dead priests and nuns were soon muscling their way in. Later, prominent locals paid to be buried in the catacombs and the passageways were expanded to make room for more lay people.  

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, thousands of wealthy citizens paid for the privilege of being on eternal display on the walls of the underground cemetery. Mummification became a status symbol, a way to preserve dignity even in death. What had begun as the Friars’ private cemetery became a sort of museum of death. 

The particularly dry atmosphere allowed for the natural preservation of the bodies. Initially, priests would lay the dead on shelves and allow them to drip until they were depleted of bodily fluids. A year later, they rinsed the dried out corpses with vinegar before re-dressing them in their best attire and allocating them to their designated room.

Divided in death

The skeletons have been arranged according to gender, occupation and social status. There's a row of religious figures, a row of professionals, a room for women, a room for infants, and a chapel for virgins. Soldiers are preserved in their dress uniforms, priests in their clerical vestments. Families wear the fashions of their era – 19^th century bonnets, 18^th century gowns.

The Sleeping Beauty

The cemetery was officially closed in 1880. However, there are two more recent arrivals. The first, in 1911, was the body of Giovanni Paterniti, Vice-Consul of the United States. The second, in 1920, was Rosalia Lombardo, who died and was embalmed aged two. She is so well preserved that she is known today as the ‘Sleeping Beauty.’ 

All in all, a thoroughly unnerving experience. I recommend it. 

Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime fiction. Her first novel, The Unseeing, was published in 2016. Her second, The Story Keeper, will be out in July. 

https://annamazzola.com/about/

At the warm heart of the Italian family - Michelle Lovric

This week I’ve been lucky enough to meet Vicky Bennison, who happens to be a neighbour of mine in London. Being myself an author of extremely greedy historical novels set in Italy, it was a great pleasure, mixed with just a little mouth-watering jealousy, to interview a writer who has spent the last five years researching culinary and social history in the bel paese.

Except it is much more fun than that. Vicky’s project is called ‘Pasta Grannies’. And you can see the results in over 100 videos online.

For this month’s post, I have talked to Vicky about her fascinating archive and how it came about.

What is your mission with Pasta Grannies?

Pasta Grannies is on a mission to document traditional handmade pastas still being prepared from scratch in the home. I’m interested in women – housewives not chefs – over 65 years old.

I’m a food writer, but I’ve been filming these sessions, as it’s such a visual technique and I think it’s a good way of paying homage to these wonderful, characterful women and the flavours they create. Of course, I am also simultaneously documenting the recipes to turn into a book.

The book is organised regionally, which effectively means according to the ingredients available. In the past, you had no choice about what you ate. You were grateful for what came out of the ground within walking distance or a cart jolt from your home.

 Styles of pasta are also regional. Northern pastas usually include egg. Southern pastas have less variety in their shapes, but the sauces tend to be more interesting. The mother-lode of pastas is the Po Valley, home to fascinating ravioli of all shapes and sizes.

The book has inevitably become a kind of social history as well, as each Granny tells tales of her life – not just of her work in the kitchen.

In a way, the book is a kind of reaction against the cult of celebrity chefs who tend to graft themselves onto a particular cuisine, often not the one they were born to. They rely on a huge team of people behind them. My Pasta Grannies are doing it all for themselves, including raising their own chickens, growing their own tomatoes, foraging for herbs.

Celebrity chefs are often men or beautiful women. These filters of celebrity rule out the very people, like my Pasta Grannies, who occupy the heart of the family kitchen. (Of course, I have a few glamorous Grannies too). Cooking for the Pasta Grannies is about love, not business. I think that’s why so many of them have been proud to take part in this project, and perhaps also why, in front of the camera, they are quite unselfconscious. The food is the thing. Communicating the story of the food is the thing. It is not about them.

And yet, of course, it is.

Do you eat what you film?

Vicky with Giuseppina
who makes zuppa gallurese
 

Yes, you bet. Pasta, three or four times a day, sometimes. When you’ve watched it being made, your appetite is sharpened by the aromas and the camaraderie that you’re offered. It is extraordinary how the Grannies welcome us into their kitchens. Part of sharing their recipes includes having us taste the finished product. So yes, of course we eat!


What kind of professional/personal background led you to this project?

 I spent many years working in international development in places like Siberia, South Africa, and Turkmenistan. The next decent meal was always on my mind and I began writing about my culinary adventures: like mushroom hunting with the Russian mafia and cooking zebra stew in near Lake Turkana in Kenya.

 I progressed into writing books. 'The Taste of a Place' food guides tell you where to find good cooking and wine in Corfu, Mallorca and Andalucia. They were recommended by the Observer, The Times, and Delia Smith Online, amongst others. I also co-wrote Seasonal Spanish Food with London-based Spanish chef Jose Pizarro.

 

 My husband, Billy, and I have a home in Le Marche, central Italy, and I divide my time between there and London. I had bought an old school-house in Italy because I wanted a big kitchen and couldn’t afford London house prices. Fortunately, Billy loves it too.

How did you come up with the idea of Pasta Grannies? Was it one particular Granny and one lightbulb moment?

 

Everyone loves a Granny. Especially an Italian Granny. And everyone loves pasta. But pasta-making skills are dying out domestically. This was something I noticed when I was researching for another book – that there are all these amazing older women getting up at 5am to make pasta but their grandchildren are being brought up on industrially produced pre-packaged pasta, which is often extremely smooth. It quickly turns soggy and its nutrient value is reduced. Proper dried pasta has a rough texture like a cat’s tongue. It gives the jaws and gut something to work on.

The Italian family is changing. Divorce is now a commonplace in Italy. The birth-rate is declining. Women are going out to work. They buy their pasta in the supermarket. They get their sauces in jars. In twenty years’ time, a new generation of Grannies won’t even know how to cook pasta from scratch. We are on the cusp of losing something precious. So I decided to do something about it.

The first Granny I encountered was when I asked a local supermarket manager to bring his grandmother, Maria, along for a session of pasta-making and documentation. Maria is in her 80s; she was a seamstress and cleaner. But in her retirement, she makes pasta for a local restaurant.

The very first Pasta Granny - Nonna Maria with her ravioli stuffed with ricotta

Our filming session was the first time her grandson had ever cooked with her. He loved it. He even got his hands dirty, helping with the sauce. A man who had always been too busy to take an interest, he suddenly stopped taking pasta for granted. He saw how special it was. It was an extraordinary day. There was such an emotional connection between family members and the food.
I was inspired.

How do you track down your Grannies?
I work with Livia de Giovanni, my Granny-Finder in Italy, who persuades friends and friends of friends to introduce us to their elderly female relatives. Connections are what matter in Italy. So naturally I found Livia herself through friends of friends.

We record the pasta making in live-time in one session, and I prepare a voice-over afterwards with the help of an editor. This is necessary so that the recipes can be followed by someone at home. Grannies tend not to work in scientific recipe-book quantities. When you ask, ‘How much flour?’, they usually say, ‘Quanto basta’ – as much as you need.

 Naturally, we retain a lot of Granny chat and their stories. The Grannies often talk about their own childhoods, and in many cases about the food privations they endured.

 Can you describe a few Pasta Grannies?

Vanda is 88 years old and continues to work in her family’s restaurant. This was the family home and it gradually evolved, becoming a village shop where you could mend your bikes, have a haircut and buy a snack – each of these services being provided by a different member of the family. I like that there are three generations of women working in the kitchen – her daughter, Maria Grazia and granddaughter Elettra. Vanda’s recipe is for Tagliolini with a local shrimp.
 https://youtu.be/dLMFkmGa-JM

While we were filming her gnocchi-making, gentle Selvina suddenly started talking about her experiences of being a ‘mondina’, a female rice paddy worker. She found it hugely traumatic, working in bare feet with the rats and snakes in the mud, having to go outside the dormitory to go to the loo. The pay was terrible too, and was always partly in rice. This experience contrasted with an interview I’d done a couple of years previously with a rice producer who recalled his father thinking the influx of thousands of women to their tiny village as a kind of heaven. Automation and pesticides has consigned the role of the ‘mondina’ to the past – but a 1949 film called Bitter Rice (Riso Amaro) by director Giuseppe de Santis dramatises it well.
 https://youtu.be/umzZS_ouDDw

Nonna Selvina and her family

Nonne Maria and Peppina with Su Succu

One time I teamed up with a whole group of women who were willing to share their pasta skills. It became a kind of ‘food as theatre’ afternoon. We met Maria and Peppina in a little town called Busachi. Here around 80 women continue to wear traditional costume made in exactly the same way as the clothes displayed in the town’s museum. Busachi’s speciality dish is called ‘Su Succu’ – a pasta cooked in a saffron flavoured mutton stock. And the women put on a show for us.

 https://youtu.be/yYbDgDncnJ0

Concetta is 93 years old, a widow, and still making pasta, although we filmed her making a typical flatbread from Modena called crescente. She doesn’t go shopping. Instead, she operates a kind of barter system where she makes pasta and mends clothes. In return, neighbours supply company and cooking ingredients. Her home was once the local post office and an osteria – the phone that was once the only one in the village is still on her dining room wall. Her husband, with whom she ran the osteria, was in the Resistance during WW2 and their home is just below the site of the old German line. Montese, the area, was eventually liberated by the Brazilians. It’s a fascinating part of Italy where what happened during the war still looms large.
https://youtu.be/rbXXavIAYjY

It’s not just Grannies. You have some Pasta Grandpas too, don’t you?

Yes. Traditionally, men have not been the cooks in the Italian family. But I have met a number of widowed men who have taken over in the kitchen. And they are included in this project. For example, there is Roberto Ferretti who makes ‘Tajuli Pelusi’, Hairy Tagliatelle with foraged wild herbs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTdUk1ybgIQ

Occasionally, we have also filmed Future Grannies, young women – who have been taught their skills by their grandmother, and who have developed a fierce enthusiasm of their own. If nothing else, I hope that Pasta Grannies fosters more of this handing down of kitchen secrets, not just in Italy but in the Italian diaspora. I have filmed Italian Grannies in the UK and other places. I have recently been told of a Pasta Granny in Australia who has a special dish to share.

 What is the place of pasta in the Italian home? Can you give a little of the history of pasta?

Today even dogs eat pasta for lunch in Italy, but it’s only in the last 70 years or so that pasta has become properly Italian in a national sense. The notion of Italian food was popularised by cookery writers like Ada Boni, but food on the peninsular was and remains very regional. So, traditionally in the north of Italy, polenta (made from maize) and rice are staple carbohydrates. Dried pasta has now joined them at the table, thanks in part to workers from the south coming to work in the northern cities.

The origins of pasta remain a mystery. A Greek writer called Athenaeus in the second century AD described a first century recipe for ‘lagana’, which involved thin layers of dough made with wheat flour, lettuce juice and spices and then deep fried in oil; so it was a forebear of lasagna. Then it’s another 400 years before an early archbishop, Isidore of Seville, in the early seventh century mentions boiling sheets of dough in water.

In fact, Sicily is probably birthplace of handmade dried pasta as we know it today. An Arab geographer called Idrisi in the 12th century was impressed by the ‘great quantities made and exported to other Muslim and Christian lands’

pasta making in the 15th century

Dried pasta used to be sold loose, by weight, and it was something only the middle classes could afford to eat regularly. You needed the disposable income to buy it.

To make fresh pasta, housewives needed access wheat flour. But, if you were a farmer, then most of your crop went to your landlord, or else you had to have the money to buy it. Hence the local pasta was often made with other cheaper or more easily found flours like barley in southern Italy. In central Italy, an essential ingredient is eggs to mix with the lower gluten, soft wheat flours found there. But frugal housewives sold their eggs if they could. So pasta for centuries was a high days and holidays food for working class folk – not an everyday staple as it is today.

The reality is that, for everyday sustenance, the really poor people relied on pulses and foraged greens.

What is the origin of the popularity of Italian food in Britain?

Italians have been coming to live in Britain since the Ancient Romans invaded. Ever since then, there have been waves of immigration. Glasgow has an Italian community partly thanks to the Italians from Lucca selling plaster figurines of saints to the local Catholics in the 19th century. The mining boom in Wales attracted large numbers – mostly from a single village called Bardi in Emilia Romagna. The London Brick Company in Bedford even had a recruitment office in Naples to encourage workers over to the UK after the war.

 But most Italians settled in Clerkenwell in London (St Peters is the Italian church) and, apart from producing musical instruments and spectacles, often went into the catering and hospitality – delivering blocks of ice to restaurants is one example I’ve come across. So when Brits started eating out, it was often at Italian-run cafes and restaurants.

Why do Brits still love pasta? It is quick, easy and the ultimate comfort food. It also plays into a general assumption that Italian really know how to live, and how to eat, and how to enjoy family life. Don’t we all want to be like Italians?

What are the pastas and the Grannies that remain elusive?
 Bigoli are a kind of thick spaghetti made domestically using a bigolaro – a pasta extruder which looks like a pump. There must be someone in the Veneto region still using one … I’d love to film it.

 Vincisgrassi is a lasagne special to Le Marche. These days cooks do not differentiate between this one and the lasagne al ragù in the style of Emilia Romagna. But a true vincisgrassi is ‘al bianco’ – it doesn’t use tomatoes, and the ragù includes chicken livers. This dish used to be served to harvest workers. It’s on my list.

Lorighittas are a Sardinian pasta in the shape of braided hoops. They’re jolly difficult to make. Sardinians are wonderfully hospitable but wary in the first instance. We haven’t been successful in persuading someone to let us into their kitchen - so far.

I love the strange names of some pastas, like strozzapreti (priest strangler). You must have collected some amusing ones in your researches? 
There’s Filindeu – from Sardinia. That’s dialect for ‘the yarns of God’. They are in fact fiendishly difficult to make.

And Creste di Galli – ruffled semicircular pasta like a chicken’s crest.

The one that always raises a laugh is Minchiedereddi – which means male sexual organs, on the small side. Beatrice and her daughter Antonella made them for me in Puglia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wknDr_6_yPM

 How many recipes have you filmed and compiled?
I am close to 120 now, and I have been nearly all over Italy. I still have a few places to do, including Calabria and Piedmont. Of course, I have been documenting the recipes as I go along, so the manuscript of my book is keeping pace with the videos.

Thank you so much, Vicky. And please remember that anyone can be a Granny-Finder! So, if anyone knows any Italian Pasta Grannies they’d be willing to share with Vicky, please do contact her via the website: http://www.pastagrannies.com

Michelle Lovric's website
And here's a post she wrote about pasta for another place.

Cabinet of Curiosities by Katherine Webb

My first ever offering to the Cabinet of Curiosities are these very plain, rather dented pewter jugs:

The largest stands at 10cm tall, the smallest at a mere 6cm; or, more importantly, stamped onto the handles are the volumes they hold: 1 deciliter, 1/2 deciliter and 2 centiliter. Any guesses as to what they were for?

I bought these jugs in Italy while I was there researching The Night Falling a few years ago, from an old lady in the town of Gioia del Colle in the far south of the country. I had just been to look around a wonderful private museum called the Museo Della Civilta' Contadina - or Museum of Rural Life. This vast, private collection has been put together and is run by a man called Vito Santoiemma, and fills several huge warehouses in what used to be the family's sawmill in the town. It holds an astonishing array of objects related to every aspect of rural life in that part of Italy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and I got lost in it for hours.

Inside the museum. The jars on the floor with the wooden lids are called prisor, and are what most families would have had as their only toilet. It had to be carried out and emptied daily, into a slops barrel which was then dragged out of town and used to fertilise the fields. Disease, unsurprisingly, was rife.

At the end of my visit, I asked if there was any small thing I could buy to take back with me, and was told that an old lady (I never did get her name!) might have something to sell. These jugs appeared, and I was asked how much I was willing to pay for them - always a tricky question when you have absolutely no idea of an item's worth - both materially and to the person selling it! She seemed both delighted and bemused by my offer of Euro20, and so I had a piece of history to bring home with me.

The smallest jug, with 2 centiliter stamped onto the handle.

I've written before about the shocking living conditions experienced by the vast majority of people in Southern Italy in the first half of the twentieth century. A few wealthy, often absent, landlords owned all the land and all the housing, and the peasants - some 80% of the rest of the population - had no means to live but to pay for the rent on tiny, inadequate apartments by selling their labour in the fields for a daily rate. They were exhausted, hungry, angry, and powerless, and when they rose up in 1921 and 1922, in a broadly socialist movement, they were crushed again by the rise of fascism.

The milkman's bicycle in Vito Santoiemma's museum, and other dairy-related items.

My jugs date from the years immediately after this, after Mussolini came to power in 1922. These jugs were given out as part of a new system of rationing intended to alleviate the problem of the poor simply starving to death in years of drought and bad harvest - and also to conserve produce that was desperately scarce all over Italy after the First World War. It seems impossible to imagine Italy being short of olive oil, but that is what the jugs were for - the rationing of olive oil. How many calories does the 2 centiliter jug represent? I estimate maybe about 100. I don't know how many people that was supposed to feed, but I do know that this was a weekly ration, not a daily one. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of women selling their bodies to corrupt officials for an increase in the ration for their family.

So perhaps my piece of portable history is a bit dark in nature, and links directly back to dire times for one particular family. But there is always something so emotive and powerful about actually holding an object from a time that has now passed out of reach, and I kept the jugs on the shelf by my desk as I wrote my novel.

Devotion by Louisa Young

Photo credit: Sarah Lee

It seems strange to welcome Louisa Young as our June guest. Until very recently and from the beginning she has been a full time History Girls and has only recently stepped back a bit to the role of Reserve, so we shall hear from her again.

Louisa Young is the author of My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (HarperCollins), set between 1908 and 1919, a story of love, death and the origins of maxillo-facial reconstructive surgery in World War One. The sequel, The Heroes' Return, was published by Borough Press in 2014. She has also written The Book of the Heart (Flamingo), a cultural history of that most emblematic organ, and A Great Task of Happiness (republished 2012), a biography of her grandmother the sculptor Kathleen Scott, widow of Captain Scott of the Antarctic. Her first novel, Babylove, was listed for the Orange Prize.
  As half of Zizou Corder she has co-written five children's novels with her daughter, including the Lionboy trilogy, which is published in 36 languages.
 
She read history at Trinity College, Cambridge, and lives in London, where she has written the second sequel to My Dear I Wanted to Tell You. Called Devotion, it deals with a long neglected aspect of WW2 in Italy and is another highly recommended read.


Welcome "back," Louisa!

A long long time ago I sat with an American friend of my dad’s, a photographer and art historian, who has lived in Rome since the late 1940s. When I was a child he lived in a house on the Tiber Island, which to me, then and now, was and is the most romantic place in the world. Now, it is all rather well-organised:

 When I first went, it wasn’t quite like this: 

with boats and mud, so that you could believe the legend of it being built on the bones of Tarquin the Superb, the tyrant whose body was thrown into the river in 510BC. The shape, boat-like, was first re-inforced in the First Century: slabs of marble gave it a prow and a stern, commemorating the boat which brought a statue of the healing god Aesculapius and one of his holy snakes from Greece, after an outbreak of plague in 293 BC. The snake apparently leapt off the boat and swam to the island, which was seen as a sign that this was the best place to build Aesculapius's temple, and after that came the hospitals which are still there. Of course an island is always a good place for a hospital, specially when diseases are infectious. A carving of the Aesculapian rod and snake are still visible on the rock at the prow.

The stairs in our friend’s house were made of white marble, and if you looked out the window at the back the river tumbled and rushed below. We ate fried artichokes, and the grownups drank gin and It (Italian vermouth i.e. martini) and we could nip and talk to the strange post with four heads on it, or try to climb into the hospital grounds so we could do a proper circumnavigation of the island. Alas he moved, later, to a flat in a palazzo in Sant’Angelo, known as Piazza Tartaruga, Piazza Turtle, because of the little turtles balanced on the bowl of its central fountain. But that was a lovely flat too.

Someone - my father? - pointed out to me in a neighbouring street - via della Reginella - how the building behind the palazzo, thought the same height, contained five floors, where the palazzo had three. The apartments in that building had lower ceilings, smaller windows, more occupants. This, I learned, was where the edge of the Jewish Ghetto had been. Big-roomed palazzo outside the gate; many-floored lodgings inside. It is too narrow a street to photograph this, but here is the street in 1944:

And here is the street now, four cobbles replaced and named in honour of Grazia di Segni, born 1889
Giuditta Spizzichino, born 1922, Ada Spizzichino born 1915, and Rossana Calò, who was two years old. They were all arrested on October 16 1943,  deported and murdered in Auschwitz.

Our friend the photographer told me a story about a room in a flat just outside where the ghetto walls had been, a room with no windows, discovered by a new tenant in the 1960s. The tenant asked the landlord about it, what it was, and after some trouble and pursuit of the matter received the answer that ‘This was where the Jews hid during the Nazi occupation’. He was surprised, as he knew the family concerned had been devoted Fascists. Why would they have been hiding Jewish people?

‘Oh, they were hiding the Fascist Jews.’

Like many people, I have had a tendency to look at history from where I am, rather than from where people were at the time. 'Fascist Jews’, in the 21st century, seems a nonsense, impossible. But from 1920 there were Fascist Jews: immigrants from eastern Europe determined to prove their nationalistic loyalty to their new home country, communities in the west and the south who had been in Italy for hundreds of years but still felt it best in the interests of self-preservation to go along with the flow of public opinion, and in Rome a community which was there before Julius Caesar, before Christianity, before the split of Jewry into Sephardi and Ashkenazi even. It is the oldest Jewish community in the diaspora.

Remember what a  mess Italy was after WW1? Remember the Russian Revolution, and how utterly terrifying that was? Remember D’Annunzio and his lances, and how useless the government was? Remember how Italy as a country was not yet fifty years old, and how the walls of the Roman Ghetto only came down in 1888 - not even thirty years earlier?  Now, we know exactly why Mussolini was a terrible, terrible idea. Then, they didn’t know. And Jewish families had no special gift of seeing the future, and all the more historical reasons to be nervous.

Which all added up, for me, to the setting for a novel.

It’s called Devotion, and it’s out on June 2, published  by Borough Press. It continues the story that started in WW1 in My Dear I Wanted to Tell You, moving things on to the next generation. Tom, the English boy, loves his Roman Jewish cousin Nenna. Nenna loves her father, Aldo. And Aldo loves Mussolini. The moral? Be careful what you devote yourself to.

Travelling in the Past by Katherine Webb

The fashion for ‘vintage’ seems to grow all the time - clothes and home decor and hobbies that either are or have been made to look old. As someone who has always loved old buildings and old things and old stories, and the sense of something having its own personal history, I can quite understand the appeal. For others, this harking back is a reaction to today's instant, throwaway culture - the hurried transience that seems to afflict every aspect of our daily lives. The permanence and ‘authenticity’ of things that were ‘built to last’, in an era we can look back upon through the rose-tint of nostalgia, can be comforting. I noticed this happening everywhere I looked in Puglia, in the southern ‘heel’ of Italy, when I visited to research my novel, The Night Falling.

Peasant wedding in Alberobello, 1920

It’s well known that the economy in the south of Italy suffers in comparison to the more affluent north - it has for generations. I’d had no idea before I began my research just how poor the south had been, until very recently. But, today, tourism is helping to change things. Puglia’s climate is hot and dry; it has miles and miles of dramatic coastline, riddled with caves and long expanses of beach where the waters of the Adriatic are crystal clear. It has white-washed medieval towns clustered on the high ground inland; it has fantastic food and wine. Basically, it has everything it needs to tempt sun-starved northerners to visit. What was most interesting to me, as I explored and learnt, was how the remnants of Puglia’s hard, violent history have been incorporated into this new tourist expansion. And have, in their own way, been white-washed.

The same street in Alberobello today

The Night Falling is set in 1921, at a time when Puglia still suffered a repressive system of land ownership called latifundism. This basically meant that a single wealthy land owner - who often lived away in Rome or Paris - owned huge tracts of land, divided into farms that were run by tenant farmers - often also outsiders with no incentive to improve the land. The vast majority of Puglia’s population, the braccianti, had no opportunity to acquire land of their own. They lived in squalid towns and sold their labour for a daily rate, walking miles to wherever there was work before the day had even begun. The same landowners they worked for owned their apartments and rooms, and charged outrageous rents for even the dankest of cellars. In the town of Matera, huge numbers of people simply lived in caves. Even water had to be bought. In years of poor harvest - of which hard, bone-dry Puglia had many - large numbers of these peasant poor simply starved to death.

In the aftermath of the First World War,  the same socialist movement that rocked much of Europe made tentative inroads into Puglia. For a short while there were workers’ registers, rosters, and fixed wages. However, almost immediately, the fledgling Fascist movement rose up in response, and crushed it. The armed brute squads with which the landlords had always intimidated upstart peasants now had official sanction, black shirts and emblems. Political corruption was so rife, and the police so partisan, that the peasant movement stood no real chance in Puglia. It fared slightly better elsewhere in Italy, but, by 1922, Mussolini was in supreme command.

A ruined trullo, used to house the poor, to shelter animals, or the guards who watched the crops

Once you know a bit about this history you can see traces of it everywhere. Puglia is riddled with trulli - the conical stone houses which served for the secure storage of grain and animals, as guards huts out in the fields, and also as housing for some of the poorest people. Now, they are being converted into holiday homes; and in Alberobello, which has the highest concentration of trulli, they have been quite literally white-washed, with many now selling souvenirs. At the other end of the property ladder are the masserie - the huge, imposing farmhouses of the tenant farmers and landowners. These are typically fortified, with high, impenetrable walls around an inner courtyard, where people and produce could be protected. Some of them look like castles. Why so fortified? Because they were built to withstand attack from generations of starving, desperate, despairing men. While I was there, I met several men whose grandparents and parents had spoken of the infamous Massacre at Marzagaglia, when unarmed peasants demanding to be paid were shot down by guards from behind the masseria walls. It was an outrage so heinous that it lives on in the oral history of an area overladen with outrages. 

The formidable walls of a masseria

Puglia’s food, for which it is also developing a reputation, leans heavily towards the organic, the slow food movement, and the revival of peasant food. Black pasta - made from burnt wheat - is very popular. Why burn the wheat? The chefs I spoke to talked about the nutty, smoky taste it gives, but it dates back to when the poor would make flour from the charred grains they were allowed to scour the ground for once the stubble had been burnt. Chicory and beans is another favourite - beans being the only protein the poor could generally get, and chicory - or any other dark, bitter greens - that could be pulled up wild around the fields. Weeds, essentially. The peasants had no land to grow vegetables, and no money to buy from the market. Their food was scraped together, scavenged, desperately inadequate. One common meal so very meagre that it hasn’t been up-cycled by today’s restaurants is aqua sale - water, with a little salt and either a dash of olive oil or some chunks of stale bread in it. It would have astonished those peasants, I'm sure, that wealthy travellers would ever choose to eat such fare.

Burnt wheat pasta, upcycled

So, while I heartily approve of traditional cooking and recipes making a resurgence, and of old buildings being brought back to life, part of me also wishes that more was known of their origins, and their past. But then, it is a hard and dark history. Perhaps the people living there, the descendants of those who survived such times, are content to watch things moving on. And enjoying a trip to Puglia - or anywhere - does not, of course, rely on knowing anything at all about its history. But for me, it hugely enriches the experience of any travel.