It’s Tramonti, a village in the province of Salerno composed of different hamlets inside the Monti Lattari Regional Park, overlooking the gulf of Amalfi. Here, since the Middle Ages, families of farmers used to prepare a panella with different cereals, seasoned with spices and lard.

This tradition continued over the centuries and even in the 20th century there was the habit of cooking some focaccias in the almost extinguished oven fire, after baking bread. They were made with whole-wheat (the one commonly used, milled at home) and seasoned with wild fennel.

These are still the characteristics of Tramonti’s pizza, which since the Fifties has been spreading around the world, following the emigration routes of local families in search of fortune. Among these, there was also that of Carmine Nasti, owner of pizzeria Da Nasti in Bergamo – who in his sign still recalls Pizzeria Capri, opened by his father in Busto Arsizio in 1965 – and president of the renewed Corporation of Pizzaioli di Tramonti.

«Tramonti has always been a farmers’ village – says Nasti – people would make pizza with what they had at home: whole-wheat, wild fennel, pecorino, seasonal vegetables, anchovies or perhaps fiordilatte. It was like a large biscuit-bread cooked with a shovel in the oven at a temperature significantly lower than the one necessary for Neapolitan pizza, and they’d eat it all together to celebrate». 

Today Pizza di Tramonti is guaranteed by a De.Co and a special regulation that indicates its pillars, such as the use of whole-wheat flour, of ingredients that are typical of the Amalfi Coast, and the cooking at a temperature of around 250-320°C, instead of the over 400 of Neapolitan pizza.

Born already in 1990, the association – which includes most of the over 2000 Tramonti pizzerias around the world, even though some numbers are missing for now – found a new impulse thanks also to Nasti, who for over 10 years now has found that Molino Quaglia whole-wheat flours are an essential ingredient in order to continue the true tradition of Tramonti.

«Pizza was once made like this, before the spreading of industrial flour. It is important for us to safeguard our tradition, and differentiate it from that of Naples. Not because it is less valid, but they are two different things and the story of the pizza from Tramonti is certainly more ancient».


Luciana Squadrilli
source: http://newsletter.identitagolose.it/email.php?id=561

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