Sea bass, or branzino or spigola in Italian, is found on menus everywhere around Argentario and Orbetello – the main reason is the lagoon situated between these two places, which is the source of Italy’s most famous and best-regarded farmed sea bass. The lagoon is also the source of sea bream, eels and grey mullet, which are used in a number of traditional dishes.
Farming fish has been a tradition in these parts since ancient Roman times. Just minutes away, off Giannella, the sandbar that blocks off Orbetello’s lagoon to the sea to the north, there is a small beach known as Bagni di Domiziano, where you can find the ruins of a Roman villa that date to 36 BC. During low tide, you can just make out the partially submerged ruins of the stone pools used to raise sea bass and grey mullet. According to The Twelve Caesars – the famous biographies of twelve Roman emperors, written in AD 121 by Suetonius – the Roman Emperor Nero spent childhood summers at this villa, tending to the fish, which were fed a diet of prawns (shrimp), mussels, crabs, corbezzoli (fruit from the strawberry tree) and figs, to make them exceptionally tasty. Nero’s was a family of noble bankers, who owned the whole of Monte Argentario – the promontory probably takes its name from this history, as argentario was the name for ‘money lenders’.
Bavette are a typical Ligurian pasta shape – flat, narrow but thick. You can use any pasta with this, but it is nice with something long and thin like square-cut or regular spaghetti or tagliolini.