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When people ask me how many years I’ve worked in New York City’s Little Italy, where my family has owned an Italian-food shop for 104 years, I usually ask them to guess. “I’m going to give you one clue,” I say to them, “I am sixty-one years old.” The real answer, I eventually tell them, is sixty-two. I’ve been behind the counter since before I was born. My mother worked at Di Palo’s until the day she went to the hospital to give birth to me.
 
For as long as I can remember, I’ve sold Italian food, made mozzarella, and cut sixty-pound wheels of Pecorino Romano from behind the counters at Di Palo’s just as my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather did. I don’t work seven days a week from dawn to dusk for the money, nor does my brother, Sal, or my sister Marie. We could have worked half as hard in many other careers, but we wouldn’t be as happy. This is the life we chose, the business we love.
 
This book is not only about my six decades behind the counter, or the story of my family’s store. It is also about the history behind the foods of Italy, and the traditions we love.
 
I first went to Italy in 1973. I was twenty-two and on my honeymoon. Connie and I traveled from Sicily to Lombardia, stopping along the way in the rural region of Basilicata, where my paternal family came from. I would wake Connie up early to visit the places where our products were made, and the shops like ours that sold them. This trip changed everything for me: it opened my eyes to what I didn’t know. Since then I have gone to Italy often to meet the people who make what we sell, to learn about the products firsthand and bring new ones back to our store in Little Italy.
 
I wasn’t interested in visiting only the factories that made the cheese or the pasta, or a frantoia, where the olives are pressed into oil, though those visits are essential to understanding these products and explaining them to our customers. I wanted to take it a step further: I wanted to meet the cowherds marching the cows up the mountains, the wheat growers in the plains, the olive growers in the hot southern hills; I wanted to witness the traditions of all the foods that Di Palo’s sells. My mission was to discover the world my great-grandfather Savino Di Palo left behind in Basilicata in 1903, when he came to the United States and eventually opened the first Di Palo’s.
 
Though my family is all from Southern Italy—the regions of Basilicata and Sicily—I made it a point to visit all twenty regions of Italy and every province within them. I went to Italy to meet the small farmers and learn how the products were made hundreds of years ago, as well as how the process is automated today. And then, and only then, could I come home and say that I know what I’m talking about.
 
I learned about products we sell by going to the source, and literally breaking bread with those who made these foods for generations. These people are more than my business associates: I spend days with them, share their meals, and meet their parents and grandparents. They tell me the old stories about how things came to be. Are they all true? Maybe not, but they areworth hearing, and it helps me understand the traditions. I am still learning, every trip I make.
 
In this book, I hope to give you a sense of what it’s like to travel through Italy, though this is not a culinary travel guide. I hope to show you how to identify a good piece of Parmigiano-Reggiano or prosciutto crudo—but this book is not an encyclopedia with every little fact about every cheese or cured meat. Instead I have tried to capture the stories behind what you’ll find at Di Palo’s, just as if you came into the store in Little Italy. I want to tell you about the affinatore who wraps his cheese in sweet Alpine hay before he ages it. I want to describe the contessa with the magical olive groves in Sicily, the seventeenth generation of vinegar makers with a petrified chunk of 300-year-old vinegar in Modena, the old Parmigiano-Reggiano cheesemaker in Reggio-Emilia who likes to dangle his elbow in the warm leftover whey, as a cure-all for his arthritis. I want to tell you about the aroma of prosciutto and how to savor that long-lasting flavor. (Don’t cut off the fat! It’s one of God’s gifts.) Hold a full slice up to your face and smell the country breezes of the hills of Langhirano, just as I have.
 
I don’t just sell the food in my store—I live it. This book is about living it.
 
—LOU DI PALO
 
A Century in Little Italy
 
Before I tell you about the food at Di Palo’s, let me begin with a little Italian-American history, and the mass migration of Italians to America between 1880 and 1920. My paternal great-grandfather, Savino Di Palo, was among them, and like so many others, New York City’s Little Italy was where he landed. By the time he arrived in 1903, the neighborhood was essentially one large open-air market, the cobblestoned streets crowded with pushcarts and lined with shops run by Italian immigrants. You heard no English—only Italian, and mostly dialect Italian. Little Italy was as segmented as Italy itself: Sicilians on Elizabeth Street, Italians from Naples and Campania on Mulberry Street, and on Mott Street, where my great-grandfather lived and eventually opened his store, a blend of immigrants from the regions of Puglia, Calabria, and Basilicata.
 
Basilicata, where my great-grandfather came from, was then part of a larger territory in Southern Italy that the ancient Romans called Lucania, or “the land of the wolves.” Savino grew up in a small mountain farming town called Montemilone, where his family kept dairy cows and made fresh cheese. Life was hard in Basilicata, where the terrain was very difficult to farm. It has some of the tallest mountain ranges in Southern Italy, and in the nineteenth century most people spent their entire life on their particular mountain. Some still do. Even though the towns are geographically close together, they tend to be on the mountaintops, so it takes a long time to travel between them. It took Great-grandfather Savino a day just to get down the mountain to the main road.
 
On a recent trip to the region, I went to meet a farmer outside the town of Stigliano who still lived in the mountains much as my great-grandfather had. His name is Mario Vaccaro—vaccaro is Italian for cowboy—and his melodious, singsong Basilicata accent sounds exactly like my great-aunt Nancy’s. Mario is a shepherd and a cowherd who keeps sheep, goats, and podolica cows, which are found only in Basilicata and give rich, buttery milk. He cures his own sausages, bakes his own bread, grows some vegetables, and produces a little mozzarella, caciocavallo, and ricotta— just as my great-grandfather did before he moved to Little Italy. Mario still heats his milk in a big cauldron over a wood fire; he still cleans his wooden tools with whey, and hangs his cheeses to age in the old curve of an ancient cave under his house where he lives with his wife and three children. He makes cheese by hand, often hunched over the pot of curds and whey on a little stool that must be twice as old as I am.
 
Today this craftsmanship is rare, even in Italy. But Basilicata is still the most rural, dispersed region in the country, home to just 450,000 people and some of Italy’s biggest mountain forests, some of which recently became pristine state parks. Imagine the culture shock for Savino to leave his mountain town and go to the most crowded part of one of the world’s biggest cities, leaving his family behind—a wife and six children. He wouldn’t see them again until they journeyed to Little Italy eleven years later, in 1914.
 
Opportunity, however, was not really what brought my great-grandfather to New York. Like many other immigrants, he’d been told that there was “gold in the streets of New York City.” But the real gold was the ability to make money, to find work, which was then scarce in Italy. In my great-grandfather’s case, he was in a feud with the noble landowners in his region. He was a poor subsistence farmer, a contadino, and from the nobles’ point of view, if a farmer grew three oranges, two of them belonged to the noble. My great-grandfather couldn’t stomach this: he was a difficult man with a very short temper. But since the nobles held the power, Savino decided to join the migration to America.
 
(Today my oldest daughter, Allegra, who married into a noble Italian family a hundred years after my great-grandfather left Italy, is now a contessa, and my two grandsons are counts. My great-grandfather is either laughing, or spinning in his grave.)
 
It was probably a good thing that Savino was a tough man, because New York’s Lower East Side, of which Little Italy is a part, was a tough place to be at the turn of the twentieth century. By 1910 he was living on Mott Street and had saved enough money working for a relative to rent a very small storefront half a block down in the heart of the overcrowded neighborhood. At this point, Italians were still one of the most discriminated-against groups in the country. It was hard for them to find jobs, so they created their own opportunities. Savino decided to do what he knew best, making and selling cheese. He opened a small latteria—a dairy—in between Grand and Hester streets.
 
Milk was delivered daily in old-fashioned metal milk pails from the dairy farms that operated in upper Manhattan. Customers would come in with their own pitchers, and my great-grandfather would pull down the pail from the shelf and ladle out the milk. With the leftovers, he made ricotta, as he had done in Basilicata. He would also make mozzarella from fresh cow’s milk and rounds of caciotta, a soft fresh cheese aged just a few days, the same way we do in our store today.
 
In 1914, Savino had saved enough money to bring his family to New York. He had an ulterior motive, the family joke goes: he needed the free labor. My grandmother Concetta, then fourteen, was immediately put to work alongside her father in the store with her brothers and sisters. By age twenty Concetta was married; she knew her husband—my grandfather Luigi Santomauro, my namesake—before she got here. Luigi was from the city of Potenza, and they arrived on the same ship in 1914. Luigi first worked as a barber, but once he married Concetta, an already skilled cheese-maker, he decided he was going to open up a latteria on East Eighty-Sixth Street in Yorkville in upper Manhattan, where there was no competition. The store was large and rent was cheap, but Luigi’s shop lasted all of five months. Yorkville was a German enclave, and not many Germans wanted fresh mozzarella. So now my grandfather was out of work, and had a child—my uncle Michael, who was almost two. My grandmother Concetta was pregnant with my father.