Our November Sagra: Noci (November 4, 2016)

I'm backtracking here to post about a trip we took in early November. I have been wanting to go to a Sagra ever since Brad and I visited Umbria with friends, Gail, Mark, Molly and Glenn in 2014. A Sagra is an Italian food festival that typically highlights a local crop or dish or drink. Some are of ancient origins, some more recent. We just missed an onion festival in Umbria with our friends in 2014, and I was determined to catch one once my knee felt strong enough for the walking and standing. By late October, I was starting to feel more confident, so we picked a Sagra in the little town of Noci in the Puglia region, in the “heel” of Italy. 

Two of our Seattle Italian teachers are from Puglia: Simona, our Dante Alighieri teacher (from Bari) and Valeria, our summer conversation class teacher (from Taranto). It seemed fitting to go to Noci, which is right between those bigger towns. (We also visited the neighboring towns of Alberobello and Locorotundo, as shown in following map.)

The Sagra, a relatively new one, is called Bacco delle Gnostre and celebrates Vino Novello, new red wine from local grapes, and roast chestnuts. "Bacco" obviously covers the wine, but "Gnostre" actually means the long courtyards they have in Noci, like ancient cul de sacs, open on one side to the street. We took the train from Rome’s Termini station on Friday, November 4. Il cielo a Roma rarely disappoints: I took this photo from the city bus on the way to the train station.

I've become a regular coffee drinker now and can get by with just one sugar (instead of the usual 3 or 4 I needed before to mask the taste)! Quite a feat for a little immigrant girl who only had milky Irish tea growing up and was never able to get used to American coffee. The coffee here is better naturalmente!

When we stopped in Bari to transfer to a regional train, I found myself thinking of last summer’s train crash, which killed 25 people.Turns out that was a different rail company on a stretch of track north of Bari. We had no problems. I took lots of photos from the train of farmland, which stretched in every direction, with artichoke, grapevine, greens, and more, plus notably ancient olive trees like these. 

Arriving in Noci, we discovered that the sagra didn't actually start until Saturday night (Italian festival websites are notoriously ambiguous). So we wandered around Noci that afternoon and then had a wonderful meal at a little restaurant called Montegrappa, run by a young husband and wife, both from Noci. Angela, front of house, spoke virtually no English, but she and I managed to have a conversation about her life with Gino and their two small children, about where he had trained (locally), and about food of course. Here she is cutting prosciutto. 




Brad had “strascinata di grano arso.” “Strascinato” means stretched pasta—think of an orrechiette pulled and flattened into a long half-moon shape. “Grano arso” is literally “burned” wheat (think of the English word "arson), leftover when crops were burned in olden days and the fallen kernels collected by poor farmers. The pasta had a green color and a smoky flavor. I had orecchiette “con funghi cardoncelli di bosco” (a local woodland mushroom). Delicious. Normally, we don’t have room for “secondi” and we marvel at all the slender Romans we see eating antipasto, then pasta, then a main course of meat, followed by dolci and caffè. But Angela talked us into grilled meat, which ended up being just a big slice of beef (quite rare, "al sangue") and nothing else. Is was, she assured us, the best: “costata di scottona” with “la scottona” being “il manzo donna” (female beef), “giovane” (young), “che non ha mai partorito” (that has never calfed). It was both tender and chewy and very flavorful! A wonderful evening.