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“Hic sunt leones.” Medieval cartographers would connote unexplored areas of potential danger on a map with this phrase, usually translated into English as the more menacing “here be dragons” rather than the literal “there are lions here.” In any case, the point was the same: Enter this place at your own risk, because we don’t know what’s out there and it’s probably got teeth.
Nestled on the central eastern side of the peninsula, the Italian region of Abruzzo has always been perceived as this kind of off-map, lightly threatening space, held at a distance from the nearby capital of Rome by a particularly severe stretch of the Apennine range. Its geopolitically relevant location meant it was inhabited and invaded by all manner of people, from the Renaissance, when emperors and popes and Sultans all tried their hands at taming it, to the Italian Risorgimento, when parts of Abruzzo resisted unification the longest, gaining a reputation as a dangerous place full of thieves and marauders, known as briganti.
To be fair briganti weren’t “brigands” so much as fierce defenders of their independence (even if, once in a while, they also did some looting), but the reputation stuck. During World War II, Abruzzo was used as a kind of gigantic solitary confinement for political agitators, a practice known as being sent in confino: being forced to go live in a place so far from civilization that any attempt at being politically active would be futile. In a famous essay by Jewish Italian author Natalia Ginzburg, who was sent with her husband in confino to Abruzzo by the fascist regime, she describes her time there as an exile. It was, technically, and yet the town to which they were confined is barely 70 miles from the city nicknamed the “center of the world.”
This reputation for being off-map, metaphorically if not literally, remains a challenge for Abruzzo, even today and even with the amount of media attention that has recently been dedicated to its stunning natural beauty, sophisticated food and, especially of late, to its distinctive, thrilling wines. Anyone serious about Italian wine right now knows how relevant the region is, and even the most casual wine drinker in the U.S. has encountered a bottle of its ultrapopular red made from the Montepulciano d’Abruzzo grape. Nonetheless, most people couldn’t point to the place on a map. To that point, when I took a week to go exploring in January of 2024, I did not come for a scoop. Instead, I came to find out if the wines of Abruzzo were managing to draw the routes of navigation between known and unknown territory—if they were succeeding in expressing their sense of place in a lingua franca.
A ‘light meal’ in Chieti
I also did not come to Abruzzo for a diet. With its vertiginous peaks that collapse onto a gentle, expansive coastline, the region is celebrated for a cuisine equally fluent in fruits of the sea and the land, and like all great dining destinations, for luxuriating in a love of pig fat and deep frying.
And so, when I caught up with my friend Federico De Cerchio in the central Abruzzese town of Chieti on a rainy winter night and he suggested that we grab a pizza, I read it as a gesture of mercy—something light before we got down to the brutal business of eating and drinking for a living. This was a miscalculation, which I should have seen coming, but, luckily, I’m a professional. Over six courses of devastatingly good pizza at the strikingly inventive Fermenta Pizzeria paired with Torre Zambra winery’s stone fruit-dense and salty Cersuolo d’Abruzzo, I started to get the lay of the land.
Fermenta
Fermenta is a pizzeria in the way that Ferragamo is a shoe store. Owned and operated by the Giorgia Santuccione, offerings include seasonally-specific dough fermentations and a dizzying variety of cooking techniques.
Besides making serious, thoughtful wine with the highest sustainability certifications available at his family’s property in the Villamagna DOC, Federico is restoring the tower for which the winery is named and constructing a tasting room, fine dining restaurant and boutique hotel. This is not just because it’s very cool to drink wine in a 15th-century tower (it is), but also because Federico understands that a wine’s ability to transport us to a beautiful place filled with rich culture and history is what makes people want to drink it—but people have to know that place exists in the first place for the math in that equation to work.
Abruzzo is not a Grand Tour stop. It has not gotten the White Lotus treatment and it still lacks a lot of the infrastructure that has guaranteed the success of other previously less visible Italian wine regions. However good the wine is, it can be hard to convince people to take the chance on a new destination, even in the low-risk version that consists in trying what’s in the glass. There may not actually be lions here, but the mere threat of the unknown is a hard foe to vanquish just the same.
Views from Villamagna
The land of the briganti is not afraid of a fight though, and its inhabitants have long understood the profound importance of the connection between territory and identity. Over the next few days here I get treated to a lot of excellent wine and the exact amount of whole fish heads that I require each week (three), but I also see a place and a people with a coherent vision and a keen understanding of the value it has to offer. At the Tinari family’s Villa Maiella restaurant I have a sprawling, languorous lunch of updated Abruzzesi classics with some of the best service I’ve received in any city, let alone a central Italian mountain town. I see ceramics crafted with an acute eye for what hospitality establishments require, executed with traditional expertise but also a playful and forward-looking aesthetic by the Liberati family.
Looking down from the Abbazia San Giovanni in Venere, a 13th-century abbey with miraculously well-maintained high and low relief sculpture and original frescoes, I get a bird’s eye view of the particularly spectacular stretch of Adriatic coastline dotted with “trabocchi”—the pre-industrial fishing structures, some of which now do double-duty serving bracingly fresh fish suspended over the sea.
Villa Maiella
Villa Maiella, a Michelin-starred restaurant tucked into the side of the towering Maiella massif, offers luxury dining experience where the menu is an absolutely joyous ode to Abruzzese “cucina casalinga” and the staff seems genuinely delighted to share their vision with you.
Katia Masci at Valle Martello introduces me to a white grape indigenous to the area called Cococciola, which has that same tension between density of fruit and crisp brine that I tasted in Torre Zambra’s Cerasuolo and brings the double excitement of discovering something completely unexpected. And those fish heads are popped off of the bodies contained in a decadent stew cooked á la minute in front of me by Essenza Cucina di Mare restaurant owner Filippo de Sanctis’s mother, who constructs a mise-en-place in the middle of the dining room and then brings the whole simmering, gorgeous thing to finish cooking on our table as my companions and I devour it.
Essenza Cucina di Mare
If Abruzzo is often remembered for its carnivorous passions, it’s not for lack of elaborate and impossibly delicious pescatarian options. Essenza Cucina di Mare offers a fresh take on coastal classics from the region that follows the freshness of their catch.
In short, I see and do a lot of things, but I also barely leave the Villamagna area, which is impressive, especially because the town of Villamagna itself is so tiny it can’t even be said to have a central piazza exactly. A cathedral in a village like this has no business boasting this level of magnificence, but Santa Maria Maggiore delivers high Baroque exuberance and a bell tower with dazzling views spanning from the Adriatic to the Maiella massif.
Abruzzesi wines have an uncanny ability to be simultaneously thick with brush and herbs, then juicy with fruit and berries, then buoyant with salinity, and from up here, that kind of acrobatics is far easier to understand. It’s a reminder that a place can tell us about a wine just as much as a wine can tell us about a place. Looking out from the tower, there is a sense of the sublime—that quality of the incalculable expanse that makes one feel equal parts hopeful and overwhelmed. It explains the hesitance to get to know somewhere like this, but it also promises the most fabulous rewards to anyone bold enough to make the trip.
This article originally appeared in the August/September 2024 of Wine Enthusiast magazine. Click here to subscribe today!
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