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.
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.
In an era when butcher shops were places of community, Martino transforms that small workshop into a reference point for the town.
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.
"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."
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.
"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.
Today, while many ready stoves from the Valle d’Itria and the Tarantino have disappeared, in Crispiano the fire of the Cuccagna – Giro di Vite still burns. "Before, four lambs were consumed a week," says Martino, "today one is enough. Tastes have changed: now customers ask for more steaks and sliced meats, but the fornello remains the heart of the place."
Despite the weather, the passion has never waned. "If I stop, I lose myself," he confesses. And he really has never stopped. For over sixty years, he has continued to light that oven, adjust the embers, and check each spit like a conductor.
The tradition of the ready cooker, a recent study explains, is typical of central Puglia, between the Itria Valley and the Taranto Murgia.
It is a practice that combines craftsmanship and sociality, born after the war and survived thanks to men like our Martino, guardians of knowledge that is passed down through observation and dedication.
Today, in an age of fast cooking and global formats, the slowness of the ready stove becomes almost revolutionary. In San Giorgio Ionico, Luigi Fabbiano, a young restaurateur, has decided to revive tradition by building a new stove with the help of an old master craftsman: a sign that something is moving, that the aroma of the embers continues to attract those who love the truth of meat and the memory of places.
"In my life, I have always worked almost twenty hours a day," concludes Martino, "and I hope that those who come after me won't have to make the same sacrifices I did. The job is beautiful, but it's tough. However, as long as I am here, the fire of Cuccagna will continue to burn for our customers."
And while the stove crackles softly, it really seems that that flame, more than cooking the meat, is cooking time — gilding the memory of a Puglia that still knows the smell of embers, of home, and of heart.
