“Bacchus amat colles, as the Romans observed, so the wine god must adore the Abruzzi,” wrote Burton Anderson in The Simon and Schuster Pocket Guide to Italian Wines in 1982. “Between the Adriatic Sea and the Apennines, which reach their highest point in the snow-capped Gran Sasso range above the regional capital of L'Aquila, there is little else but hills.”

The slopes run that land quickly westward from the long Adriatic coastline “so narrow that even today only one important city of the region is established on it, Pescara,” wrote Waverly Root in the 1992 edition of his Food of Italy. Roaming those beloved colli between shore and slopes, sheep, goats and a concentrated array of climates: mediterranean, continental, alpine. Palm trees in close view of white stony peaks, forested patches of mineral-rich soils that yield their secrets through agricultural place-richness; wheat, say, or potatoes, more deeply themselves in flavor and smell. Though located in central Italy, Abruzzo is by topography and history the furthest reaches of both south and east and, unsurprisingly once you find out, a celebrated grower of saffron. “Rugged mountains, difficult roads, isolated towns have made Abruzzi a tough inward-looking land,” wrote Victor Hazan in 1982’s Italian Wine. “Civilization after civilization have slid around it, stopping elsewhere to deposit its glories.”