As I’m waiting for our holiday to start in May, nostalgia made me think of holidays from past. I specifically remembered my holiday of 2013 in Southern Italy. Back then I hadn’t met Stephanie yet, so I was traveling alone and hanging out with CouchSurfing hosts. My best memories are from my time with Michele in Apulia. Because we shared our interest in historical and archeological sites we had a great time together.
One thing which struck me when I was in Apulia was the quality of its regional cuisine and how it differed from other Italian regions. I was eating all kinds of dishes in restaurants that I had never seen in Italian restaurants in the Netherlands. To learn more about this regional cuisine, my first resort was Wikipedia. To my disappointment the English Wikipedia had no article on Apulian cuisine. Even the one on the Italian Wikipedia is very limited. Disgrace! I couldn’t stand it that such a fine cuisine had no Wikipedia article, so I resolved to write one myself.
In the years after my holiday I gathered some English cookbooks on Apulian cuisine to eventually write this article, but due to a lack of time I never got around to it. Until a week ago, when my combination of nostalgia and free time finally moved me to action. I was so driven that I was working for hours continuously on this article, almost losing sense of time. On 6 April I finished the article on Apulian cuisine, after probably more than fifteen hours of work. I consider this article and my article on Sybaris as the best articles I’ve written so far.
I’m always a bit wary of other Wikipedia editors who might change articles I started in negative ways. For example by adding content without citing sources. Or even worse, those who vandalize articles. Since most of the articles I work on are not very popular, they barely see undesirable or vandalistic edits. In fact, most other editors I see working on articles I’ve started or edited are intelligent and reasonable people who improve them. It will be interesting to see what will happen to the article.
During the research for this article in all the cookbooks I discovered many more Apulian dishes which I haven’t tasted yet. This gives me even more desire to visit Apulia again and meet with Michele (the last time we met was in 2016). I don’t see this happening next year though. The train voyage would be unpractical with my daughter, who is just six months old now.
In the future I would also like to write or improve the articles on the other regional cuisines of Italy. More specifically, I want to write articles for Calabria and Liguria and vastly improve the article for Sicily. I already have a boatload of cookbooks lying around for those cuisines. As for the cookbooks I used to write the article on Apulian cuisine, read my next post for recommendations.