BFT23 - Bari

 

We saw and did a great many wonderful things on this trip, but when we planned the BFT each of us had a certain number of things that were Required Elements above and beyond the rest. As far as I could tell we got to all of them, and that’s just one more reason why we had such a lovely time.

By the time we left for Europe, I had three.

I wanted to go to Ruoti. I wanted to walk across the Charles Bridge in Prague. And I wanted to meet up with Anita in Bari.

I’d gotten to know Anita on a professional level as we worked on a long-term project together (more on that as it nears completion in the coming months), but over time I have come to consider her a friend. I always enjoy hearing from her and sharing stories. Once it was clear that we were in fact going to Italy again I checked to see if it would be possible for us all to meet in person. And it was! In the end we agreed to meet in Bari, where she would show us around the city.

Win!

Bari is a port city on the Adriatic that has been there for at least two thousand years, and it has an odd reputation in Italy from what I could tell. Every time we would mention that we were going there people would get this concerned look on their faces and tell us to be careful. We’d tell them that we were going to be there with an Italian friend and they’d look sort of but not entirely reassured and then they’d tell us to be careful again. On the one hand I suppose I get it – cities often have areas where the unwary should not go and port cities are perhaps more susceptible to this than most, and we did walk by at least one very loud bit of street drama in our time there. But you’d find this sort of thing in most cities really and I’m not sure why Bari gets singled out the way it seems to be. In the end it was a lovely place, at least the parts we visited, and we had a very good time there with Anita.

We drove out of Irsina fairly early one morning, turned right at the fork to go down the mountain, and headed toward Bari, a bit over an hour’s drive away.

Anita suggested we meet at a particular coffee shop which was easy enough to find, though as always in European cities trying to locate a parking place nearby was challenging. Kim and I dropped Oliver and Lauren off at the coffee shop in case Anita got there before we found one, and then we headed out on our mission. We thought we’d scored fairly quickly only to realize as we got out of the car that it was a bus stop, so we got back in – the only time I ever managed to sit in the front seat of the Speck – and eventually found a spot a only block or two from where we needed to be. We carefully checked all of the nearby signs to make sure that we could in fact legally park there – a complex task requiring us to parse out several Zones of possibilities – and then discovered that in order to pay for the spot I’d need to download an app onto my phone and spend several minutes entering all sorts of information into it. I still have the app, though, so if we ever get back to Bari we’ll be set.

A short walk later we settled in to our seats at the coffeeshop, and a minute or two after that Anita arrived! There were coffees, pastries, introductions and stories all around.

Our initial plan was simply to walk down to the harbor, a couple of blocks away, and just see what there was there. Like all of the days we spent in Italy it was hot and sunny with bright cloudless skies, and the waterfront was sparkling.

When we got to the pier we ran into these guys, who were cleaning fresh-caught seafood. The guy in the lighter blue shirt with the dark blue stripe greeted us with a gravelly and enthusiastic “Buon GIORRRRRNOOOO!” that seemed to echo for a full minute, and really what else could we do but go over and see what he had to sell? Neither Oliver nor I are really seafood people but for a couple of euros the guy opened up an oyster each for Kim and Lauren and they agreed that it was worth the price.

Sticking mostly to the shade whenever we could, we walked over into the old part of Bari to look around. This piazza is built on top of an ancient road, apparently, and at one point someone dug out a part of it so you could see the original stones underneath. I’m always amazed that anything gets built at all in Italy, because everything there is built in layers, each one further back in time as you dig down, and how do you disturb any of it to make anything else? It’s a place that has been inhabited for a long time. People figure out a way, though.

It was a gloriously aimless day without too much in the way of specific plans – the best way to get to know a city, I think, especially in good company – and mostly we wandered around just seeing what there was to see. The old section of Bari is lovely and not very crowded with tourists, though we were hardly the only ones there. But you could move at whatever pace you wished to move and stop whenever things looked interesting. I was often at the back of the group, which is why you see the back of everyone’s heads so often in the pictures I suppose.

This particular photo, taken by Oliver, seemed to capture a lot of the place – the sun and shadows, the random shrine, the resting man, the living city with its laundry and machinery. It’s good to remember that people actually live here and you’re just visiting.

Apparently these little Nativity sets are fairly common, though not so much in the hotter weather. It was just there, in a little alcove. Anita explained some of the background to it, and we watched it for a while. The whole thing was maybe a two meters across, and it was kind of peaceful in a way.

We stopped at the Basilica of St. Nicholas, which is dedicated to St. Nicholas of Myra – an early Christian bishop in Asia Minor (what is now Turkey) who is perhaps best known these days for being the inspiration for the modern character of Santa Claus. He was neither fat nor jolly, did not live near the North Pole, and likely never saw a reindeer, so some liberties have been taken with the story in the intervening centuries, but they’re hardly out of line with the oddities of his actual life and afterlife when you get right down to it. One legend says he was briefly defrocked for slapping the heretic Arius. Another says he resurrected three children who had been murdered and pickled in brine by a butcher who hoped to sell them as pork. You have to respect the chutzpah behind both of those things. Also, in actual recorded history, about 750 years after he died a group of merchants from Bari broke into his sarcophagus in Myra and stole most of his bones but not all of them. The ones they stole ended up at the Basilica of St. Nicholas where we were. The others ended up in Venice somehow. How the merchants decided which bones to take and which to leave behind is not recorded.

At some point we got hungry and Anita led us to lunch at a place called Osteria le Arpie, which had marvelous food though we did have to wait a bit for it. It was very handy having an Italian friend with us to ask them about when our food would arrive, as I suspect they took Anita a lot more seriously than they would have taken us trying to ask about it in English. On the other hand the wait did mean we had more time to sit and talk together, so I can’t say I was bothered by it. It is a lovely thing to share stories over a good meal, and in anticipation of one.

Bari is apparently known for orecchiette, a kind of pasta distinctive to the Puglia region where Bari sits. It’s shaped like little ears – thus the name – and I figured “when in Bari,” and all that so that’s what I had. My lunch also came with several small braciole. This word apparently refers to a number of dishes depending on where you are in Italy, but in southern Italy and Sicily (i.e. the regions of Italy where my family came from and also where we were in Bari) it usually means thin slices of meat covered in a cheese and breadcrumb mixture and then rolled up and either pinned with toothpicks or tied with string and then browned. My grandmother would make these and then let them simmer in with the gravy (spaghetti sauce for the non-Italian-Americans out there) until they were done, but this was not a dish my mother would make so I’d never had them before. I have to say they were really good. I will have to figure out how to make them myself.

Bari loves its orecchiette, to the point where there is kind of a grey market for the stuff. We’d be walking along the narrow streets of the old city and here and there we’d see these tables with bags and bags full of orecchiette as well as other stuff. Invariably inside the house there would be women rolling out the orecchiette by hand to put out on the tables. This is not really legal, but nobody seems to get all that bothered by it (it’s pasta, what harm can it do?) so these tables are pretty much everywhere. We ended up buying a couple of bags to take home. Lauren has already made hers, but the rest of us still have to get on that sometime soon.

Bari is not just the old city. There’s the modern city as well, which is full of shopping, eateries, and public art. We did a fair amount of walking through the streets and poking into shops here and there, taking it all in. At one point we stopped to get something to drink and find a restroom we could use, and while waiting in line I ended up talking to an Italian guy who not only was a member of the carabinieri and could therefore confirm what we’d been discussing among ourselves earlier about what the differences were between the various types of police forces that we saw while we were in Italy – who has what jurisdiction where, and all that – but had family in Wisconsin as well. You can’t get away from Wisconsin no matter how far you go.

Our time in Bari came to an end around 6pm as Anita had to leave to pick up a friend from the airport and we needed to get back to Irsina in time for Lauren to have a Zoom interview for a job for the fall, so we said our goodbyes and headed off, though perhaps we will see each other again sometime soon. That would be lovely.

It was a nice drive back to Irsina – we’d gotten used to the ride by now and didn’t end up getting routed through the middle of cities on the way back the way we randomly had done on other returns to Irsina (Google Maps works in mysterious ways, sometimes) – and we arrived while it was still light out. We pulled into the little parking area by our apartment and were greeted by the downstairs neighbor’s dog, who seemed happy to see us.

Lauren eventually did get the job, by the way.