Where the mountains meet the sea
Cath Urquhart discovers the picturesque hill towns of Abruzzo
OLGA brought plate after groaning plate to the table: hot bread
cooked with small pieces of ham, fried garlic stalks, borlotti bean
stew, artichoke hearts, salami, ravioli, roast chicken with broad beans,
and finally walnut tart. By 10pm we were groaning too, loosening belts
and sitting back contentedly with yet another glass of the farm’s
hearty red wine.
It was our first night at Le Magnolie, a farmhouse down a remote track
outside the town of Loreto Aprutino in Abruzzo, a region known to few
British holidaymakers. Abruzzo occupies a large chunk of central Italy
to the east of Rome, encompassing the Gran Sasso mountain range, the
wild Abruzzo National Park where wolves and bears still live, and a
stretch of the Adriatic coast from Giulianova to Termoli. It’s
so little visited that the Lonely Planet guide to Italy devotes just
nine pages to Abruzzo, compared with 72 for Tuscany.
I suspected that Mario Tortella, our host, rather liked living in a
well-kept secret. He pulled a chair up to the long wooden table where
all his guests dine together, and told us something of the region.
“Abruzzo is the green region of Italy,” he said. “In
the Gran Sasso there are glaciers, the most southerly in Europe. There’s
a very strong relationship with nature here. We do not use spices because
the food is powerful — we really taste what we eat! In Tuscany
they use more spices as the food is not so rich. The food here comes
from the sea and the mountains.”
Mario and his wife Gabriella bought Le Magnolie 20 years ago and worked
hard to develop their main crop, olives: their organic olive oil now
wins awards. What I had thought was a vineyard in front of the farmhouse
turned out to be a plantation of kiwi fruit, which also grows well here,
said Mario: “All they need is water and sun, and we get rain here
in spring and autumn because of the mountains.”
And we have a glorious view of these mountains from the farm. Mario
opened his agri-tourism operation eight years ago, gradually adding
small apartments to the 16th-century core of the farmhouse, so he can
now take up to 26 guests. My friend Catherine and I had taken one of
the apartments for the first three nights of our three-centre tour of
Abruzzo. The star feature at Le Magnolie (after the food) is Mario’s
new swimming pool. Clear and blue, a good 15m (50ft) long, it was set
in a manicured garden near the kiwi plantation and had an amazing view
of the Gran Sasso range — snow still visible on the mountain tops
even in June.
Lazy days by the pool were popular with the guests, who included Anthony
Duffy and his daughters Eleanor, 14, and Bethan, nine, from Sheffield.
They had stayed at Le Magnolie the previous year and had liked it so
much that they had returned. “That’s a recommendation from
us, because we never usually go back to the same place,” said
Anthony, a lawyer, whose wife Jill had stayed at home to help their
daughter, Hannah, 17, with her exams. “We’ve never seen
a swimming pool with such a landscape. Our children have enjoyed everything
here, all the food.”
The following day we tore ourselves away from the pool to visit some
of the hilltop towns near by. Doree Loschiavo, an American guest at
Le Magnolie, had told us the previous evening that the towns “look
as if they’re in heaven already” and I couldn’t think
of a better way to describe these picturebook communities of ochre-coloured
buildings, which sit on rounded hills above grey-green olive groves
and red poppy fields.
Atri gave us an introduction to the characteristic architecture of
these towns, where narrow streets are bridged with extended balconies
that link homes to each other. As in other small towns that we visited,
such as Loreto Aprutino, Penne and Guardiagrele, we did not find the
vast wealth of artistic treasures that you will find in, say, Tuscany
— but those we did stumble across were more satisfying for being
less expected.
In the duomo (cathedral) at Atri, for example, we discovered the 15th-century
frescoes of one Andrea Delitio. He brought a touch of domestic realism
to some of his scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary here, such as
her giving baby Jesus a bath: the frescoes were painted high above the
altar and we strained in the cathedral gloom to see them clearly, standing
on the glass panels that protected the remains of Roman baths over which
the cathedral was built. Several days later, in Celano, we greeted Delitio
again like an old friend when we found more of his frescoes in the church
of San Giovanni.
Abruzzo is far less busy than Tuscany or Umbria, something we appreciated
when we drove south towards the coast near Ortona and our second base,
Azienda Agriverde. From this working organic winery, where we spent
two nights, we drove down the coast to Vasto, where, in the blazing
sun of early June, we joined a handful of sun-worshippers hiring deckchairs
at €2 a day on the long, clean, sand beach at Vasto Marina. Admittedly
it was not high season, but the weather in early June was great —
hot enough to sunbathe, but fresh and clear.
When our stomachs rumbled we drove back up the SS16 coast road to Villa
Vignola, one of the region’s best-known fish restaurants (with
five rooms attached) and praised in the Rough Guide — yet we had
no difficulty getting a table without a reservation. Once again we enjoyed
superb food that reflected Mario’s description of “the sea
meeting the mountains” — prawns with green beans in olive
oil; monkfish with tomato and rocket — and then spent a leisurely
afternoon sitting on Villa Vignola’s terrace, drinking coffee
and listening to the waves lapping on the shore at the end of the garden,
which was thick with lemon and olive trees, honeysuckle and amaryllis.
From the sea to the mountains and to our third base, the Hotel Le Gole
in Celano. Hotel Le Gole was a real find: open for just four years,
it has beautiful rooms with dark-wood furniture, set around a courtyard,
and its Ristorante da Guerrinuccio served the best spaghetti alla vongole
(spaghetti with clams) that I can remember, for a modest €4.
Celano, a small town with steep hills rising behind it and dominated
by a fairytale castle, was our base for forays into the Abruzzo National
Park. We drove first to Opi, a small hillside village. We picked up
a walking map in the small tourist office and drove on to start our
gentle, three-hour walk beyond Pescasseroli.
Walking up the valley felt like being in a child’s storybook:
we passed bushy, bright green trees and clean cows with chiming bells
munching grass by a tumbling brook, under a clear blue sky.
Our favourite expedition was to the towns of Sulmona and Scanno, near
Celano, which both have a prosperous air and were the prettiest towns
we saw. Sulmona, the larger of the two, is known for its sugared almonds.
But the most relaxing part of the trip was the three days we spent
at Le Magnolie, eating the gorgeous food whipped up by Olga, Mario’s
mother-in-law, and lazing by that terrific pool. The peace was only
shattered when a police helicopter whirled over the kiwi plantation,
briefly bringing up to date the sweeping view of the Gran Sasso which
had changed little for centuries.
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