The air is warm and sluggish, as thick as honey, perfumed with wild lemons, myrtle and the scent of rosemary from bushes surrounding the restaurant’s terrace. Above you, vine leaves provide shade for the uneven wooden tables that spill into what the locals call the piazza, but which resembles a dusty car park.

On one side is the church, on the other this little osteria, a restaurant-bar as spare as the building opposite is baroque. Gilt belongs to God: here the sensual treasures are all on the plate, or in the view stretching for miles over the sun-filled valley below. And while the church might be visited once or twice a week, many villagers patronise the osteria almost every day. Come noon, farmers drive in from their absurdly tiny fields; their wives collect the children from school before they stroll chattering down to the piazza; and the priest closes up his confessional and strides across the square. Even the attractive young widow, reputed to be the village prostitute, makes her elegant way to her usual table.

To begin with there is antipasto. Peperoni imbottiti, sweet local peppers filled with capers, olives, breadcrumbs and basil. Mozzarella, made this morning from two buffalo grazing the tennis-court-sized pasture below, so fresh it oozes tears of pungent whey; huge, curiously shaped tomatoes from the owner’s garden, as big as grapefruit; bread so full of holes, it resembles Swiss cheese; and fat green olives. Wine arrives, then tagliolini al limone, pasta tossed in a lemon sauce and garnished with leaves from the trees around the terrace. For many, that is enough, but the working men and farmers also tuck into costata, veal cooked with garlic and oregano. The children eat ice creams; the priest orders grappa.

Others finish their meal with a peach, sliced into the remains of their wine, or bolt down a thimble of coffee. Then, unless you are unfortunate enough to be a schoolchild, prostitute or tourist, it is time to go home for a siesta. Tomorrow they will all return for a different variation on the theme, the ingredients endlessly rearranged.

That restaurant, admittedly, does not exist — I made it up for one of my novels. But it is absolutely typical of hundreds, if not thousands, of restaurants dotted across Italy’s inland hills. ()

WHEN YOU think of Italy, it is probably somewhere on the coast that springs to mind: Venice, Naples, Genoa, Rome. Yet, in fact, three-quarters of the country consists of mountains and highlands. In the north, the Alps and Dolomites stretch from coast to coast like the crossbar of a T, while the downstroke, the Apennines, reaches from Parma down to Puglia.

This topography has had several important effects. Big cities have ended up on the coast — on a clear day, snowcapped peaks are visible from Venice, while Naples is almost crowded into the sea by foothills. Most interestingly of all, for the tourist at least, the sheer difficulty of getting from place to place means each mountain valley has preserved its unique character far more effectively than the coast, with its greater ebb and flow of cultures. And there is no more enjoyable way to appreciate this difference than to eat it. While the ingredients of coastal dishes tend to be much the same wherever you go, the ingredients of each inland valley are a microcosm of the land under your feet.

This is particularly true of wine, of course.

Not for the Italians the dull reliance on four or five standard grape varieties, from cabernet to chardonnay and back again. Italy has an astonishing 2,000 indigenous grapes, most of them only found in one tiny pocket of land.

Often they are further modified by geology: the name Greco di Tufo, for example, describes not only the white grapes from Tufo, in Campania, but the sulphuric stone of the village houses.

This lends its mineral flavour to the wine — you can literally taste the place in every mouthful.

Yet the same can be true even of something as ubiquitous as pork. In the Langhirano valley, near Parma, pigs are fed on the whey left over from making the local Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, and the hams are exposed to salty breezes from the Adriatic as they cure. Some farmers even hang them outside when the weather is mild and then take them in again at night, like washing. The result is pork so creamy it can be spread with a knife, like cheese, which in turn becomes the basis of rich local dishes such as trippa alla parmigiana. Admittedly, prosciutto di Parma is now so famous that it is exported all over the world, but there are local variants, such as culatello, made from the pig’s left buttock (the side it sits on — the right buttock is thus less tender), which are made in such tiny quantities that you have to be on the spot to find them.

Just 60 miles away, in the warmer valleys around Florence, pork is more likely to be served as finocchiona sbriciolona, a salame flavoured with fennel seeds, so soft it crumbles in the fingers, or rigatino, cured pork belly covered in ground black pepper. These more rustic, rural meats are best enjoyed with pane toscano, rough Tuscan bread, and a glass of Montalcino — which just happen to be exactly the condiments to hand.

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