Where to stay

Casale Verde Luna Agriturismo Simple rooms offer stunning views over farmland and have pretty, spacious bathrooms. Spectacular home-cooked food features an array of local produce. From £75 for two per night, including breakfast. Piglio, 00 39 7 75 50 30 51, http://casaleverdeluna.it

Relais Chalons d’Orange Five-star agriturismo with spectacular pool overlooking a fruit orchard and a restaurant serving seasonal, local dishes. Guests can even help with harvesting the produce for their meals. Comfortable rooms are set below the main house, where enormous and elegant breakfasts are served with one of the region’s finest views as a backdrop. Lavender is a major feature of both the menu and hotel backdrop. Doubles from £100 per night. Alvito, 00 39 7 76 51 30 83, http://relaischalonsdorange.it

Sotto Le Stelle A collection of sympathetically renovated apartments in an ancient stone complex adjoining the piazza at Picinisco, a charming and friendly village overlooking the Val Comino. Every home comfort is provided, down to the delivery of morning coffee if required, with full self-catering facilities so you can take advantage of the abundant local produce. From £100 per suite per night. Picinisco, 00 39 3 46 60 27 12, http://sottolestellepicinisco....

Travel Information

Currency is the euro (£1 = €1.17). Italy is one hour ahead of GMT. Ciociaria has a Mediterranean climate. The hottest months are June to September, with average temperatures of 28°C, though peaks can exceed 32°C in July. Temperatures dip in winter from November to March, and can plunge to lows of 1°C. It’s generally milder on the coast and colder in the mountains.

GETTING THERE

Frosinone is about 90 minutes’ drive from Rome.
British Airways (http://ba.com) operates regular flights to Rome Fiumicino from London Heathrow and London Gatwick.
Alitalia (http://alitalia.com) flies to Rome Fiumicino from Heathrow and London City.
Jet2 (http://jet2.com) flies to Rome Fiumicino from Glasgow, Leeds/Bradford, Manchester and Newcastle.

RESOURCES

Italia (HTTP://italia.it) has travel advice on Ciociarian capital Frosinone and its surrounding area, as well as information about the wider Lazio and Abruzzo regions.

FURTHER READING

Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds by Oretta Zanini De Vita (California Studies in Food & Culture, £23.70). This tome traces the history of Rome and Lazio through the region’s food. It includes a chapter on Ciociaria, and plenty of easy-to-follow recipes, some of which date to antiquity.

Where to eat

A Cavut Try polenta with wild mushrooms and a variety of home-made pasta at this great-value, rustic restaurant in an elegant mountain resort. From about £20 per person. Pescasseroli, 00 39 3 33 74 29 10 5

Casa Lawrence Agriturismo serving dinner, including produce of the shepherds who own this house, below Picinisco, which was once frequented by DH Lawrence. From £25 per person by appointment. Picinisco, 00 39 7 76 68 81 83, HTTP://casalawrence.it

Il Barracone Rustic, inexpensive but excellent restaurant in a mountain refuge. Try the snails and the wild mountain greens. £18 per person. Picinisco, 00 39 7 76 66 02 0

La Pesca A gracious rural restaurant with terrace serving the trout for which the nearby lake of Posta Fibreno is famous. £25 per person. Broccostella, 00 39 7 76 89 14 27

Le Colline de Ciociaria This elegant, Michelin-starred restaurant serves local ingredients with a highly eclectic twist. Its signature dishes include egg papardelle with saffron and potato poached in wine and vanilla. Tasting menu £80 per person. Acuto, 00 39 7 75 56 04 9, http://salvatoretassa.it

Pan’Unto Terrific contemporary restaurant built round a huge open grill. Try pear baked in melted pecorino, grilled scamorza cheese and strawberries poached in the dishwasher! About £25 per person. Sant’Elia Fiumerapido, 00 39 3 31 30 55 95 3, http://ristorantepanunto.com

Relais Chalons D’Orange The restaurant at this five-star guest house is sublime, offering fresh, seasonal produce straight from its back garden and such dishes as stuffed guinea fowl, and parmesan and cinnamon pudding. From £20 to £30 per person. (See also ‘Where to Stay’.)

Food Glossary

Amareni/visciole

Sour cherries used for preserves and tart fillings.

Ciambelline

Bracelet-shaped almond biscuits particular to the region of Ciociaria.

Orapi

Wild greens foraged in the Abruzzo mountains.

Pasta reale

Chocolate-covered marzipan.

Pecora

Hard sheep’s cheese served in varying stages of maturity.

Ricotta

Delicate soft cheese made from the whey of sheep, goat, buffalo or cow’s milk.

Torrone

Soft nougat.

Food and Travel Review

Can there really be an incredibly beautiful slice of Italy which, despite an abundance of fine local produce, award-winning wine and proximity to Rome remains a well-kept secret? Well yes, this paradise does exist – but you won’t find it on any map.

Ciociaria (pronounced cho-cha-ree-a) seems to be known only to Italians and the descendents of expats who walked into exile to survive. Thousands emigrated to England, Scotland and South America in the 19th and 20th centuries. Now they’re coming back to this sub-region of central Italy. Its borders have no official definition but, roughly, the area occupies a tranche of Lazio and the tip of Abruzzo, with Frosinone as its capital. Rome caps it in the north, Naples in the south; it’s hemmed in by the Tyrrhenian Sea to the west and, in the east, the Abruzzo mountains.

However vague its geographical borders, Ciociaria has a cultural and culinary identity as distinct as any other Italian region. Here even humble beans and sweet peppers are special enough to get their own DOC, and cherries and wild mountain greens deserve one too. But the area was, nevertheless, emptied by unemployment, brigands and war (the 1944 Battle of Monte Cassino in the province of Frosinone formed the backdrop for the Sophia Loren film Two
Women, aka La Ciociara).

Today, the descendants of the dispossessed are returning. They include Cesidio di Ciacca, who has renovated ancient stone buildings (to rent as townhouses) in which his impoverished ancestors could never have aspired to live. ‘My people were shepherds from the hovels below Picinisco,’ explains Cesidio, whose sister, Mary Contini, married into the Scottish food emporium Valvona & Crolla, and has written books about her grandparents’ hard-but-colourful life and culinary traditions. Cesidio and Mary’s great-aunt never left Picinisco, where the bread ovens in her home remain a lasting legacy. Anna and Rosa, who tended their aunt until her death 40 years ago, creep back into the ruined house every week to bake loaves in wood ovens that have been in continuous use for two centuries. The bread they yield is superb.

Continuity and tradition are all-important in Ciociaria, which may be why the food, while simple, tastes so delicious. There are no fancy sauces here. Ingredients stand on their own merits and are rarely mixed with one another. ‘It’s all about the earth,’ says Salvatore Tassa, the Michelin-starred chef whose parents were among the first returning exiles, bringing him back from Bradford as a baby 58 years ago.

‘This is such a poor region that we make the most of all the ingredients we have,’ he explains. ‘Everything tastes so good because of the soil in which our produce grows and because of what we feed our animals.’

Salvatore’s restaurant, Le Colline di Ciociaria, is in the hamlet of Acuto, less than 90 minutes from Rome but a world away in spirit. It’s near here that we start our Ciociaria odyssey, in a place with no Michelin stars but sublime, simple produce that completely embodies the bounty of this blessed earth.

At the Casale Verde Luna, a farmhouse with rooms set amid vineyards, Lino Nardone puts out not only buffalo mozzarella but the most delicate ricotta made from the beast, to be eaten with a spoonful of his own dense, purple grape jam. It’s a by-product of his Cesanese del Piglio, one of the region’s two DOC wines, a robust, rich red that has won international medals for Nardone.

The antipasto builds with an unusually creamy pecorino and a fine prosciutto served with figs and Nardone’s green-tomato jam. This would be more than enough for a meal, but farmhouse cook Diana Spaziani has other ideas. She sends out sumptuous lamb chops, which she has marinated for two days in olive oil and herbs, and a wonderfully light dish of aubergines steamed and stuffed with mozzarella and tomatoes, but not fried and coated with parmesan as they would be in other parts of Italy. (In fact, we only encounter parmesan once during our week in Ciociaria.)

We will not even see mozzarella again after we head east into the beautiful Val di Comino at the heart of Ciociaria (the region was named for the cioce, the rudimentary sandals worn by local peasants). But first 14,000 buffalo – three times the number of human inhabitants – command our attention in Amasena. Their milk is made not only into mozzarella but that delicate buffalo ricotta, perhaps the best in all Italy. No wonder the Cooperativa Stella sends its cheeses out daily on dozens of vans that deliver door to door.

Ricotta appears at almost every meal in Ciociaria, though in Val di Comino it tends to be made from sheep or goat’s milk. The breathtaking views of this fertile, abundant valley can be enjoyed from the valley floor itself, from the wild mountaintops of Abruzzo, or from the hill villages perched precariously in between.

Manuela and Carlo Chalons d’Orange chose the valley floor when they were seduced away from Naples by the sheer beauty and fecundity of the area. ‘Even before we built a place to live we planted an orchard,’ says Manuela, who grows dozens of different varieties of peaches, cherries, pears and apples. She also keeps 15 families of bees to make her own honey and 100 chickens whose freshly laid eggs are a special delight for guests at breakfast in this most elegant of agriturismos.

The Relais is rural and hands-on – guests are welcome to help harvest the 550 fruit trees – but laid-back Manuela and Carlo also employ a chef to cook lunches and dinners that make the most of the home-grown organic produce.

The difficult sloping plot did not deter the couple, whose elegant house, with its magnificent panoramic views, sits above a dazzling retaining wall of lavender. This turns up for dessert in a delicate crème brûlée; she may employ a chef, but Manuela makes many of her own puddings, as well as the cakes, jams and honey that are sold to visitors. Before the lavender-infused dessert we enjoy more of the region’s renowned baby lamb, enhanced by the addition of cherry preserves to the gravy, and a divine dish of bitter lettuce sautéed with the fabulous, blackcurrant-flavoured little olives from Gaeta, where the Ciociari descend for a taste of beach life.

Alvito, the charming little town overlooking Relais Chalons d’Orange, is a veritable hive of fine food. At one end are the Antica Ciociaria truffle grounds, where the fragrant fungus is being cultivated on a purpose-built plantation as well as gathered wild. In the middle of town is the Pasticceria Macioce, an old chemist’s shop whose owner decided to embark on a different kind of alchemy involving chocolate and pastry. Now she and her family create an enticing array of delights, and it’s hard to think of a better example than her crostata di visciole. This crisp, sweet pastry is stuffed with sharp, Morello-type cherries that are cooked down with sugar to make a tart but sweet filling over which a pastry lattice is delicately draped before baking. The cherries come from the Chalons d’Orange orchard, a welcome sight at breakfast.

Close to Alvito, Cominium’s vineyards sit 700 metres high, inside the boundaries of the National Park of Abruzzo. This is where we first taste Maturano, the winery’s indigenous white that makes a fine partner for a chunk of pecora with mountain herbs. Cabernet sauvignon is the region’s other DOC wine, but I prefer Cominium’s merlot and cabernet blend, created by the sister of winemaker and owner Armando Pinto, who works with him in the business.

Like Manuela and Carlo, the Pintos were also drawn to resettle far from the bustle of Naples by this tranquil place: ‘And I didn’t live in the back streets, but in a beautiful neighbourhood, close to the sea,’ Armando is quick to point out. ‘But I found a better life here, in harmony with nature.’ Despite accolades for Cominium’s vintages, he is modest about their achievements: ‘A good wine is all about a good grape. We don’t improve the wine in our cellars, we just give it a good bed to sleep in for two years.’ Cominium also makes grappa, and there are more digestifsdown the road at Agri Fazio, an organic herb farm that produces fragrant soaps for the Relais and infuses alcohol with rose petals, wild strawberries and other enticing flavours, using recipes picked up from Benedictine monks.

The only reason to leave this idyllic valley is to get closer to the mountains, where the Ciociari sledge in winter and forage for wild greens in summer, undeterred by the dozens of bears and wolves. A strange bitter lettuce with hearts like verdant spiders is the star turn at the mountain refuge Il Barracone. Here the simplest, yet most luscious, rustic feast is set out for our delectation. On the table are mountain prosciutto richer and drier than hams we’ve tasted elsewhere; snails boiled in vinegared water and served in tomato sauce flavoured with mint and mountain thyme; and cannellini beans so fine and creamy they have a DOC of their own. It’s all served warm, flavoured with olive oil, garlic and oregano. The home-made pasta tumbled with pancetta and the wild greens known as orapi is deceptively humble – travel a couple of miles, and the orapi commands £13 per kilo. How do you follow this and the delicious grilled scamorza cheese and local sausage? With, perhaps, the world’s simplest cheesecake: crushed biscuits topped with feather-light ricotta and a generous trickle of cherry preserves. Il Barracone’s mountain cuisine is simply to die for.

Just down the hill, a little bit of heaven is waiting for us. It has a heavenly name, too. Sotto Le Stelle – under the stars – is what Cesidio di Ciacca has called his collection of renovated townhouses that he rents in gorgeous Picinisco. This little hill village enjoys a spectacular view of the valley by day and the star-studded, midnight-blue sky by night. The town is full of Scots like Cesidio who are rediscovering their roots, and other Brits – the local patois now includes an Italianised word for ‘kettle’, which the locals inevitably put on for a cuppa when they’re not gossiping in the cafes.

A little further down, in the ravine, we enjoy a sublime breakfast. Anna and Rosa are pulling bread out of those ovens in their aunt’s abandoned house just for us. We sample pizza rustica, which is all about the sweet, herby tomato rubbed across it, and nothing to do with cheese. We enjoy this with some wonderful meats from Roberto Cedrone, a master butcher who makes his own products from the black pigs he raises. At his Maria Grazia Mazzola butcher’s shop in Casalvieri you can taste fantastic mortadella, pancetta, guanciale (cured pigs’ cheeks) and superb brawn and rillettes; Ciociaria’s strongest food tradition is about using every part of the pig. You might never make it to dinner, as there is also a rotisserie on which Roberto and his mother roast skewers of baby lamb that customers snack on while choosing what to take home.

Roberto, like so many in this area, moonlights. When he’s not raising pigs, making charcuterie and running what may be Italy’s finest butcher’s, he takes charge of the high-tech San Donato olive oil press. It is another moonlighter, the shepherd Loreto Pacitti, who provides one of our most memorable dinners at Casa Lawrence, the house near Picinisco where DH Lawrence once stayed. It is now a rustic agriturismo.

Naturally, there is ricotta in wicker baskets from Loreto’s goats, and week-old pecora – some finely flavoured with herbs – from his sheep. After we try yet more salumi we move on to a raviolo stuffed with mountain orapi and a bruschetta of grilled sweet peppers. Roast pork is served with potatoes mashed with wild garlic, and there is spezzatino, a veal stew layered with potatoes and tomatoes. No wonder Loreto’s sister Romina gave up the law – she cooks like an angel. To digest, we investigate various home-infused liquors: nocino, made from walnuts, which tastes like a sweet Fernet Branca; 100 foglie (100 leaves, based on the bitter cherry plant); and the pungent gentian violet, which is not for the faint-hearted.

Next day we take a brisk walk in the mountains of the national park, where even the rangers, it seems, moonlight as vendors of the local produce. At La Betulla, a ‘gastronomy and nature’ experience in the town of Civitella Alfedena that combines treks with food tastings, we learn from a ranger about both the local bears and the zafferano, or mountain saffron – the ‘gold of Abruzzo’ which sells for £10,000 a kilo. We taste delicious caciocavallo (hard cheese made from raw organic cow’s milk), a fresh ricotta served with grape must, and capocollo, an intense Iberico-like ham.

In a land where unadulterated ingredients are so good, It’s easy to think a Michelin-starred chef will bring little to the party. But then I taste Salvatore Tassa’s egg pappardelle dressed with melted onion, that golden mountain saffron and parmesan. It is an utterly sublime dish that seems to owe everything to that golden onion – and there should be no surprise in that. When we ask about any secret ingredients we may have missed, chef says: ‘I told you – it is all about the earth; that is our magic ingredient.’

Don’t Miss

Alatri A lovely old walled-town in Lazio, famous for its megalithic acropolis and Romanesque fountain. It’s a trove of ancient architecture and is home to a number of medieval churches, some of which date to the fifth century.

Atina Picturesque market town famous for its cannellini beans, available from the La Ferriera winery (00 39 7 76 69 12 26, http://laferriera.it) which also makes a decent cabernet sauvignon under the Atina DOC.

Isola di Liri Small town between two branches of the Liri river, known for its many waterfalls and fortified palace.

Pescasseroli An elegant mountain town worth visiting for the wood-fired bakery, Al Vecchio Forno, and charming little shops. Have dinner at A Cavut.

San Donato Val di Comino Commune known for its olive oil, pressed by the Olearia Valcomino, and a great place to taste ciambelline, the local bracelet-shaped biscuit, notably at the Forno Perella bakery.

Veroli The Abbey of Casamari has a famous library and a shop dispensing liqueurs made by the resident Benedictine monks. A replica of Rome’s famous Santa Scala, or holy stairway, is nearby.

Vicalvi Home to a picturesque castle whose ruins bear a large red cross painted in World War II in the hope of keeping Allied bombs at bay.