The red gold

A vegetable brought from the Americas changed the landscape, the diet and the identity of a village. At Altino they have made a museum of it.

Altino is a village gathered on a rocky spur that looks out over both the Aventino and the Sangro valleys. From the top you can see the Maiella, the valley of the Rio Secco with the hamlet of Mandrelle among the olive groves, the historic centre of Casoli under its castle, and the bends of the Aventino on their way to meet the Sangro.

But what it is known for is a pepper. Small, horn-shaped, deep red, called in dialect “a cocce capammonte”: head up, because it grows pointing towards the sky.

The serta

Once ripe, the peppers are picked and threaded through the stalk with a needle and thick thread until they form a long necklace: a “crollo”, or a “serta”. They are left to dry in the air for days and then, once every trace of moisture has gone, they are toasted in the oven and crushed in a mortar known here as a “penele”.

The powder that comes out of it dresses pasta, goes into cured meats and colours bread. It is the main element in the seasoning of ventricina. And it gave its name to a recipe that has become a byword: “pizze e foje”.

A museum about a vegetable

The first certain record of this vegetable being grown in Abruzzo dates from 1748. Its origin is tied to the discovery of the Americas, but perhaps also to eastern Europe: to the paprika brought from the Balkans by Slav populations who settled in the province of Chieti in the 15th century.

In the historic centre, at Palazzo Rossetti, there is a documentation centre that deals with all this: with how the landscape of Abruzzo was transformed between the 18th and 19th centuries by the arrival of American crops, with how diets changed, with how a forgotten product can today offer young people an identity — and a job.

There are listening posts with the sayings and proverbs of the farming world and the accounts of the market gardeners; video screenings of the stages of cultivation; touch screens with the old recipes and today's, ready to be tried.

And the oil

The other product of Altino is oil. In the outlying hamlets a few of the machines built in the 18th and 19th centuries for pressing still survive: beam presses, the frantoi “a trabocco”. A long beam of pedunculate oak, a great stone tied to one end by a screw of service-tree wood, and the weight that squeezes the pressing mats until the oil comes out together with the water, both collected in a pit under the floor. The miller separates them with the “mappa”, a kind of large flat spoon.