The unipasta topped with fresh sea urchin at Ricciolandia restaurant in Torre Canne, washed down with a Peroni, is “truly one of the greatest things on Earth,” Anthony Bourdain says in his Parts Unknown sojourn through Puglia and southern Italy, ‘the Heel of the Boot’ — only to be outdone by the homemade priecchiette served with a tomato and red pepper sauce at Nonna Maria’s in Lecce. Oh, yes, and a conversation with Apocalypse Now filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, too. Coppola’s family is from the area. Pass the fine wine.
It’s hard to single out a more divisive episode of Tony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown than Southern Italy: The Heel of the Boot — just check out those comments on Reddit — which closed the series’ landmark 10th season on 26 Nov 2017. It was Parts Unknown’s ’s 80th episode overall. Only two seasons would remain, and as we all know now, one of those seasons was interrupted after barely getting started. Other divisive episodes include Rome and, in Parts Unknown’s 11th season, Hong Kong, and they all had one thing in common.
Today, when looking back over Bourdain’s considerable body of work in Parts Unknown and No Reservations, it’s probably best to focus on the episodes themselves — the locales, the food, the cinematography (cameraman Zach Zamboni, the visual stylist behind so many of Parts Unknown finest outings, and prominently so on Heel of the Boot), the background music (Mike Ruffino, again), and the things Bourdain said — his observations, witticisms, deeply held beliefs, and his philosophical ruminations on a society’s place in time and history, from the local lore to its trial and tribulations, and, most importantly, hopes and dreams for a better future.
It’s best to leave other distractions — and in Rome, Heel of the Boot, and Hong Kong, there is one very big distraction — to the viewer’s gut feeling and personal opinion. Nobody really knows what happened in the end, or why, and gossip is easy enough to find — in “tell-all” tabloid TV shows, allegedly “all-encompassing” documentary films with Bugs Bunny-like titles, and bad books penned by freelance writers looking to turn a quick buck on sudden scandal — that it makes more sense to focus on the shows themselves.
So.
Heel of the Boot opens with Bourdain sitting down to some fine wine and a large, sumptuous meal with the legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. The conversation is lively — how could it not be — and the auteur behind The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, One from the Heart and other generational films has a lot to say about life, philosophy, and Southern Italy, everything from the unique light — that special shade of blue one finds in southern Italy by the sea, like nowhere else — and the people who more or less live away from the harsh glare of conspicuous consumerism and the rat race of northern cities Italian cities like Milano, Roma, Torino, Firenze, “far from the madding crowd,” as the 18th-century poet Thomas Hardy put it.
Coppola has not missed too many meals since his Godfather days — clearly — but that’s perfectly apt for an artist who has gone all in on locally sourcing his own food and pursuing the family business in winemaking, both in Italy and in California’s Napa Valley. (The Coppola family brand of wine is rightly renowned, and possibly tariff-free, depending on which side of the Atlantic you’re imbibing on; these days, who the hell knows what is going on with these tariffs, especially where food and wine are concerned. Today it’s one thing, tomorrow morning it could be something completely different.
Coppola is larger than life, and the creative artist behind The Godfather trilogy of films is in fine fettle when looking back on Shakespearean-level family chronicles: Italian Alzheimer’s, he says, is where you forget everything but the grudge. Bourdain laughs; he hasn’t heard that one before, and he finds it genuinely funny. It’s good to see him looking so relaxed and at ease, but that’s what good company and good food can do for one.
Coppola goes over old family history — “Someone got the sister pregnant and they killed him, and then they became [phonetic] briganti, and so they were one step ahead of the law … they settled down and became labourers in olive fields. “That’s really the origins of the Coppola family. … Because the south was so oppressed by the north, it stayed the same.
“They haven’t had a thousand years of cheap jip tourism. You come and you can walk out in the street and you’re in a real Italian town where (even though) the people don’t anything about you they’ll invite you to their house for dinner here quite innocently. How long that will last, I don’t know.”
This is how Bourdain found himself, he admitted in his Field Notes at the time, after a year of thinking of doing a show in Puglia and Basilicata, on the proverbial ‘heel of Italy’s boot,’ with Zamboni and his long-time producer-director colleague Tom Vitale. (Earlier, I made a snide reference to bad books looking to cash in on sudden scandal; Vitale’s 2022 book In the Weeds: Around the World and Behind the Scenes with Anthony Bourdain is decidedly not that; it is quite simply, bar none, the finest book about Bourdain ever conceived — candid, well-written, all-encompassing, and honest to a fault.)
“Sometimes you don’t know what the show you are making is really about until it’s done,” Bourdain wrote at the time, “until all that raw footage has been whittled down in a dark room—shaped, pulled apart, reshaped. The writing, which I do during the editing process, steers, corrects, and reacts to every cut. What we might have intended when we set out with our cameras, heads filled with possible themes and the best intentions, recedes as other forces, new realities, reveal themselves. What lies beneath bubbles to the surface.”
Which — neither here nor there, I suppose — is exactly how Terrence Malick, one of my favourite filmmakers, makes his films.
Bourdain again: “[This] is how I found myself a year later—with our biggest crew, the heaviest, most expensive camera equipment we’d ever used, and an inflated ambition to make one of the most beautiful shows we’d ever done—in a quiet garden in the hilltop town of Bernalda, talking to one of the greatest filmmakers in history.
“He treated me to (this) spectacular lunch at the home he’d converted into a boutique hotel, and we talked at first about the region and his family’s history there. I had long ago been told that Francis didn’t like talking about The Godfather, his biggest success and a film with which he will always be associated. So I didn’t. But at one point, as you’ll see, I talked to him about the fact that the big manor house he’d bought and turned into a hotel had once belonged to the heads of the local fascist party—the onetime oppressors and overlords of his people—back when his ancestors still toiled in the fields. Did he feel, I asked, any satisfaction, any sense of vengeance or historical correction in coming back and buying this property?”
Spoiler warning: I was half expecting a car bomb to go off in the background at this point. Doesn’t happen.
Now you know.
The lampascioni and braciole di cotenna don’t look too bad, either.
Supplementary reading:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AnthonyBourdain/comments/1dxazta/bourdain_and_francis_ford_coppola/
https://eatlikebourdain.com/anthony-bourdain-in-puglia/
https://explorepartsunknown.com/southern-italy/where-to-eat-and-drink-in-puglia/
Supplementary viewing:
CNN