Swoon over Naples

It was rush hour on a Friday night, and my husband, Tom, and I — and four of our family members from Ohio — were settling in on the patio at Da Pasqualino in Naples, feeling as if we were about to have dinner in the middle of a traffic jam.

Exhaust fumes from cars and motorbikes mixed with the smell of olive oil and garlic, and red and green Christmas lights flashed near a wall menu decorated with a picture of a woman diving into a pizza, hung like a mozzarella and tomato moon over a sparkling blue bay.

We started to ask a few questions about the food, but our waiter motioned for us to follow him into the kitchen. Easier for us to eyeball the trays of food than talk over all of the traffic noise.

The patio was packed with neighborhood regulars. Couples and families with kids were digging into plates of roasted vegetables and platters of pasta with tomato sauce, and filling their glasses from bottles of the $5 house red. No one seemed to mind shoving a few tables around to make room for six foreigners. In fact, no one really seemed to notice us at all. Which was perfect.

This was the start of a three-week trip through southern Italy, and we were having a blast.

"Why Naples?" asked the Italian woman sitting next to me on the train from Venice earlier in the day. More importantly, "Why the south?" It's a remote part of Italy stereotyped as poor, dangerous and, given earthquake damage over the years, not much to look at.

What was it that I liked about "Il sud," she wanted to know.

I thought for a second. The food, of course. If you grew up next door to a southern Italian family in the United States, or if you were raised around Italian relatives, as my husband and I were, you remember the smell of tomato sauce cooking all day on your grandmother's stovetop, the clam spaghetti on Fridays, and the bowls of vegetable and bean soup called pasta fagioli — pronounced by my grandfather without the 'i' on the end.

Then there's the scenery. Southern Italy is beautiful, full of mountains, rolling farmland and ancient hill towns topped with cathedrals and castles.

"But what I really love about southern Italy," I told her, " is the way the people seem to enjoy life."

And, I thought to myself later that evening as we ate at Da Pasqualino: "Not being treated like a tourist even though I am one."

Unspoiled discoveries

Eighty percent of Italian Americans have their roots in the south, but few travelers spend much time south of Rome. When they do, it's usually in Pompeii, Capri and the resort towns along the Amalfi Coast.

The regions of the Mezzogiorno — Campania, Abruzzo, Molise, Basilicata, Apulia and Calabria — aren't names that roll of the tongues of most travelers with the same ease as Tuscany or the Veneto.

Understandable, I suppose, given that most guidebooks haven't caught up with how this part of Italy is changing.

Naples, for example, is being retooled into a clean and safe city with good public transportation, wonderful little restaurants, B&Bs and boutique hotels, like the 17th century Pinto-Storey (www.pintostorey.it) in the elegant Chiaia district, where we stayed for four nights. Within walking distance of the waterfront and historical center, it's also across the street from a funicular that zipped us up the hill to Vomero for dinner at Osteria Donna Teresa, where the Sorvino family fed us a three-course dinner with wine for $13 a head.

Rick Steves' Italy 2006 book devotes 43 pages to the tourist-clogged fishing villages of the Cinque Terre in northern Italy, but there is no information on the ancient sassi or cave dwellings of Matera in Basilicata, a UNESCO site that's drawing attention from historians and archeologists all over the world. Nor is there anything about Apulia, a region on the southern Adriatic coast, and towns such as Martina Franca, with its beautifully restored medieval core.

This could be considered good news for those who like to get off the beaten track. Southern Italy still lags behind economically, but a cultural backwater it's not.

Meandering the Mezzogiorno

All over the south, sons and daughters are transforming their family's old farmhouses into handsome agriturismo inns, with rooms and meals costing much less than in Tuscany.

They're running third-generation wineries, opening art galleries and cooking schools, and taking over family-owned restaurants.

Curious to know more? Carla Capalbo's new "Food and Wine Guide to Naples and Campania" will whet your appetite, and David Yeadon's ''Seasons in Basilicata" will encourage you to explore the area that the Mussolini government considered worse than prison when it exiled Italian author and anti-fascist activist Carlo Levi to live there in 1935.

Better yet, grab a cup of coffee and come along with me over the next few days as I flip through my notebook, gather up some pictures and recall some highlights from a trip through the Mezzogiorno. It all began with a plan to take my husband's brother and sister, and their spouses, to the villages in Molise where their grandparents were born.

Andiamo!

Next: A meandering meal in Molise