Evelina Scarpa
Stories of bread

Evelina Scarpa has been married for about 70 years and has lived between Gioi, Cilento and Switzerland. His story is all about flour and its different uses. It starts with fusilli, those made by rolling the dough around an underwire to spin and which, from Cilento, have conquered the world. Today those fusilli – he tells us – are no longer handed down from generation to generation as in the past and they are no longer even the exclusive prerogative of women, until a few decades ago the only holders of knowledge.

Evelina knows how to make bread at home, she had to learn how to do it because as a child, with a mother who gave birth to a new child every two years, there was not enough money to buy food. A peasant aunt (and for this reason more affluent, says Evelina) gave her family two more cards, a sort of citizenship income born at the time of the fascist dictatorship, but even these were not enough. So often we went to collect wild herbs on the side of the road for the remaining days of the month when there was no food.

For Evelina, the Mediterranean Diet “is all here”, in memory of her mother (the container in which the bread was kneaded) and her mother, Adelina, who shared her ration of bread among her many children, as she no longer had anything of to eat.