Due passions I share with Enrico Garzia, patron of the turkish: hunting and raw fish.
Great dog lover, careful builder of an excellent bloodline in the large family of setters, which we can define as "the most crowded breed of Italian pointing dogs". Yes Italians, because thanks to many breeders and dog lovers like Enrico, it can be said that in the world the best subjects of this breed, originally created in England, are Italian. Not only that, but it can be said that Italy has the largest number of registrations, more than in the United Kingdom. I too have been a setter for a lifetime and I know what I am saying, so do not be scandalized if I have defined these wonderful runners in the wind as “Italian pointing dogs”, feline in the drive like a cheetah that snares prey. So hunting has made us friends. But I want to wink at other fans: raw fish has strengthened this friendship.
I am of Apulian origins. My family comes from Polignano a Mare where fish has always been eaten raw (and not for a modern fashion) and not because there are no good recipes, but because only in this way you carry the sea in your mouth. My uncle Ciccio, good soul, when I was a kid (and right in Anzio) he taught me to run after crabs there on the semi-submerged ruins of Nero's villa (right where the Turcotto overlooks), to tear off the claws and suck them together with the marine moods imprisoned in the carapace.
So it is there at turkish, almost leaning against the balustrade overlooking the Mare Nostrum, but also on what remains of Nero's villa and on the magic of Arco Muto, which I happily give vent to my greatest gastronomic passion: raw fish. Always varied, always fresh and fragrant, always enriched by the continuous inventions of Enrico who is able to create the most daring combinations of flavors and colors. There is a great choice of wines, but I never betray the Cacchione, a wine of my childhood, always in the memory of my uncle Ciccio who took me to the Anzio and Nettuno fraschette. He made the "fojetta" of Cacchione and for me he ordered the gazzosa with the rubber ball. The oldest remember it. And then the spicy stuffed olives, the red anchovy fillets, the donkey couples. All stuff that burned in the mouth and helped to drink. And you should know that in Neptunese Cacchione is "a bully, vigorous and brazen". The vine grows on the white macco, a soft stone of volcanic origin, which abounds in those countryside, and with which my father and uncle Ciccio traced the paths in the garden. You see how many things the turkish. And these too bind me to Enrico.
And when I go to see him, and he pampers me with raw dishes to make the sign of the cross, I talk to him (because he is much younger than me) about when we guys who were in Anzio on vacation were opening the hunt in Tre Cancelli, towards the Poligono road, between oak woods and vast marshes, in search of croccoloni, or pizzardoni, as the hunters of the Pontine countryside called them. It was immediately after Ferragosto. Then came the openings in the third week of September and the croccoloni came out of my cinegetic imaginary. Who has seen them the most? We thought they were extinct, but instead they just left a month before opening. I met them fifteen years ago in a closed fund at the foot of the Mainarde, rich in water and horse and cow dung. I had brought my last setter there on Easter days, the unforgettable Riva, daughter of Ira, niece and great-granddaughter of Cecilia. The great grandmother was Susi. They are the famous white-reds of Alberto Marinelli. I'll stop if not I'll start crying. I wanted to make her hear the snipe. Not at all, he didn't stop them, he blended them by the dozen. Until, finally, I see her fall still, lying down, belly to the ground like all her wonderful genìa. After two or three crawls, the frullo. It was the first croccolone in fifty years. And then another, and then a whisk, and a croccolone. Those yes, that stopped them. Memories overlap. Blame for Enrico's raw ham and a few more glasses of Cacchione.
Insomma, let's go back to turkish. A few days ago we celebrated the 200th anniversary of the restaurant in Anzio. Two hundred years and it doesn't look like it. There were eight hundred people, friends, clients, people from politics and entertainment. Strong the rate of hunters, who came from all of Italy, but also from Croatia, to celebrate Enrico, the current owner. In his life, Enrico was honored not only as a dog lover but also as a restaurateur. Last year he represented Italian cuisine in Moscow, amid the clatter of pots and the applause of Russians. They didn't want to let him go. Together with the Cacciatori di Nettuno restaurant, the Turcotto was awarded an award dedicated to the best restaurant on the Tyrrhenian coast. At the birthday party there were almost one hundred meters of buffet with many of Turcotto's "ready" specialties. There was also the raw food buffet, where anyone looking for me could find me. Beautiful, warm, friendly party. An atmosphere that, let me say, only hunters know how to create. But also refined, enlivened by a very young string quartet and a guitar and flute duo, all students of the music school of Anzio.
Enrico struggled to sign the 800 copies of the volume celebrating the bicentenary. It is here that we learn the history of the restaurant and of the Garzia family, who came to Italy from Spain in the mid-700s. "My grandfather called him Turcotto for his mania to always wear a Turkish fez". So wrote Giovanni Garzia speaking of Nicola Gaetano Garzia who was the first to open a small hostelry on the west coast, right on the ruins of Nero's villa, immediately frequented by romantic travelers and foreign painters. The doctor Adone Palmieri, author of a static topography of the Papal State, and the great scholar Ferdinando Gregorovius, to whom we owe so much in understanding the history of our country, wrote about it.
IIn short, two hundred years during which many rulers, the greatest personalities of politics, the arts and the professions have looked out over the sea from a table in the turkish. And always, me too.