Salty seas in Puglia

“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.” Isak Dinesan

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to visit the largest salt flats in Europe, second biggest in the world, located on the east coast of southern Italy at Margherita di Savoia in Puglia. More than 3000 years old and located on the very salty Adriatic sea, these privately owned salt flats cover 4000 hectares, which is almost 10,000 acres.

The Adriatic is noticeably saltier than the Mediterannean, which is saltier than the Atlantic Ocean. You taste it when you swim and see it on your skin after you dry off, a fine dusting of white salt. That may be the reason there are so many places on the Adriatic coastline here where they make salt by evaporating sea water. In addition to Puglia, there are salt flats farther north in Slovenia as well as in Cervia, just south of the Italian city of Ravenna, both on the Adriatic Sea. read that blog here

The salt flats on the east coast of Italy aren’t nearly as beautiful as those in Trapani, Sicily, but then again not much is as gorgeous as the island of Sicily itself. Location, location.

I’m fond of sea salt and love to visit the places where they make it, picking up momentos of the visit that I can use later in the kitchen. So when I planned a visit to Puglia, an incredibly beautiful region in southern Italy that you really must consider for your next Italian vacation, I knew my trip would center around getting to the salt flats.

Even though Margherita di Savoia is a beach resort area, I found the salt flats rather deserted, which gave me license to walk around and take pictures. Finally coming across some men who worked there, I asked where one could purchase the salt, thinking perhaps there was a small store on site. They looked at me like it was a trick question and answered “at the grocery store?” In fact, the excellent salt they produce is widely available all over the region. You find it in any grocery store or food shop. It doesn’t come in a fancy expensive package, no one buys it as a momento or gift. It comes in a 1 kilo, brown cardboard box with one ingredient listed: whole sea salt.

So much that is incredibly good and delicious and wholesome in Italy is such a natural part of life that it almost seems taken for granted. Excellent wine, bread and olive oil are all found for relatively little money and wholesome natural sea salt is no exception. Whereas in America whole sea salt has become a gourmet product which sells for considerably more than processed, adulterated table and kosher salt, in Italy regionally produced, unprocessed sea salt retails for as little as 40 cents a kilo. That’s less than 50 cents on the US dollar for over 2 lbs of sea salt.

Now tell me you can’t afford to salt everything you eat with that!

In a store the other day I saw three different boxes of salt, all unprocessed sea salt from Margherita di Savoia. One box was sale grosso, or big kernels for tossing in pasta water; another sale fino, fine for regular use; and the third sale iodato, where they’d added iodine. The most expensive was the one with iodine. In America it’s just the reverse.

I’m working on getting some of this excellent inexpensive salt imported to a store near you and will keep you posted!