As I'm sure you already know, during the month of August, the Lido Mannarino remained open in Milan, providing its faithful with watermelons and bombettes throughout the summer. The fact that the Mannarini can work tirelessly without ever stopping, however, is not a common occurrence, but due above all to their boundless love of meat.
The rest of ordinary people clearly need to unplug a bit and recharge their batteries at least once a year. That is why returning from holiday is often a traumatic experience.
The first days without sea are always the most difficult.
One wakes up in a panic dreaming that one is still lying under a beach umbrella, in the underground one has strange visions of Coccovendoli, and the office becomes as crowded as the beach at Gallipoli on August bank holiday.
Even our trusty butchers, who suffer perpetually from PCN, Chronic Apulian Nostalgia, know this well.
In the course of time, however, the Mannarini have found a solution to combat the disease that tends to occur every year at the close of August.
The secret to surviving the grey Milan and not being overwhelmed by the melancholy of the sea, sun and beaches?
Keeping a jug of Primitivo Pugliese chilled to go with bowler hammers and trotters!
Primitivo del Mannarino: potion against the return melancholy!
This is a historical remedy that is also certified by Nonna Mannarina and has been handed down throughout Italy by generations and generations of Apulian butchers.
The origins of Primitivo, on the other hand, are lost in ancient times and it is almost taken for granted that each glass brings with it remedies for life's ills.
Primitivo Pugliese is a black berry wine whose origins are truly shrouded in mystery.
It seems that the cultivation of this wine appeared in Apulia as far back as 7th BC thanks to the Mannarini of Magna Graecia. What is certain is that the first actual historical evidence of Primitivo dates back to 1700 when a clergyman from Gioia del Colle noticed that among his vines there was a variety of grape that was very dark, very sweet and ripened already in August, ready to be harvested. It was precisely because of this last characteristic that the churchman named his wine Primitivo, from the Latin Primitivus meaning precocious.
Since then, it has been a succession of successes for Primitivo, which, cup after cup, has conquered the wineskins first all over Italy and then the world.
Primitivo is a fundamental part of Apulian culture and a compelling source of energy for every self-respecting Mannarino!
Trying is believing.
Until 4 September free of charge for online dinner reservations in the butcher's shop there will be a complimentary litre of fresh primitivo waiting for them on the table!
A litre of Primitivo a day keeps the nostalgia away!
