There is a fire that has never gone out, in Crispiano, the land of a hundred farmhouses. It is the one that burns in the heart and in the oven of Martino Marsella, born in 1942, the last witness of an ancient tradition: the ready stove, a popular and gastronomic ritual that has transformed Apulian butcher shops into small village grills.
In an era when butcher shops were places of community, Martino transforms that small workshop into a reference point for the town.
Everything begins in the late 1950s, when a very young Martino — not yet eighteen — takes over a small butcher shop in the center of Crispiano. "I couldn't even register the license in my name," he proudly recounts, "but the trade was in the family: my mother was the daughter of butchers, my brother Pasqualino taught me everything." His story reflects a generation that learned the trade with their hands, sweat, and charcoal.
From the workshop, little by little, the ready stove is born: a masonry oven, covered with refractory bricks, with a round dome, built to retain heat and roast meat “the good way,” as it used to be done in the past. The meats — lamb, liver, sausage, bombette — are threaded onto long vertical skewers, placed to the side or in front of the live embers. The fat drips slowly, never touching the charcoal, and the aroma fills the room like an ancient promise.
In the '70s and '80s, while many colleagues are closing or modernizing, Martino resists. From a simple takeaway butcher shop, his place evolves into a restaurant: La Cuccagna.
"The stove breathes," explains Marsella, "it is lit with a bit of fat, a piece of paper, and good coal, the kind from back in the day, cooked in the Murgia. The flame is regulated with the door: you close it and it calms down, you open it and it comes back to life." It is a form of cooking that requires experience, a keen eye, and respect for time: "There’s no thermometer that can measure it; you see the cooking point by the color of the meat."
"There were about forty covers at the beginning," he recalls, "now we have eighty. But the stove is still the same." La Cuccagna — the name was chosen by his son Gianni, who was then a student in Bari — is born as a declaration of love for abundance and conviviality: “When he arrived from university friends with packages full of meat and homemade sweets, his friends would say: ‘the cuccagna has arrived!’”.
Over time, the restaurant is joined by the wine shop Giro di Vite, opened in 2001, a product of the new generation. The name, explains Paola, Gianni's wife, "represents the vine shoot but also a passage of life, our 'twist of fate' as a couple and as a business." It is proof that tradition can renew itself without losing its soul.
