In many ways for me, driving into the small hilltop town of Mierato was like driving into a family legend. This is the town of my grandmother’s father. When I was in college, I used to enjoy spending parts of my winter and summer breaks at my grandmother’s house in Western PA. Some times at my special request, often without, she would make one of her favorite dishes, which was Swiss chard fried with pieces of Italian bread, a grated hard cheese and an ample amount of crushed red pepper. During one of my summer visits, she got up early, cut come chard from her garden and cooked the dish for breakfast. She was well into her 80’s at the time. As we were eating, she told me that her dad, who had passed away some 50 years before, used to love having chard for breakfast--fried up the same way. She said she wanted to make it that day because she really missed him. She told me the stories that had been passed down to her about her father, who came from a well-to-do family “with olive trees” from Maierato, who wanted to come to the US for an adventure. He ended up meeting a girl from a then-bustling mill town and--despite a visit from an older brother who came from Mierato to fetch him--he never returned to Italy.
Even after building up the town in my mind to near fairy tale quality, the little town did not disappoint. The town sits atop a hill on a high plateau that rises up from the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea just 10 miles away. The buildings--showing more signs of age than their perfectly maintained central Italian counterparts--would otherwise fit right it. To my untrained eye, the town was surprising in that it looked like a little piece of central Italy misplaced in the deep south.
We chatted with some people, but, unlike Altomonte that was eager for the world to see the hidden gem, we got the impression that Maierato was perfectly fine to keep its stunning views and picturesque streetscapes to itself.
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