In the late 18th-century Kingdom of Naples, the midday meal set two worlds apart, both of which Cardinal Ruffo had traversed. Among the Calabrian people and along the paths of the Sanfedist countryside: a single dish of bread, legumes, and oil, eaten from a common bowl. In the Neapolitan palaces and the court in exile in Palermo: a careful succession — antipasti of cured meats and preserved fish, then a primo of pasta (maccherone, the glory of Naples), sometimes a Lenten fish, and always a wine from the Mezzogiorno to close. Between the two, salting and preserving, an art of survival as much as of pleasure.

Imported from the New World and acclimated in Calabria as early as the 16th century, the small dried red chili had become, by Ruffo's time, the soul of the common table: it stings, it preserves, it warms. It is the spice of the Calabrian peasants who formed the Army of the Holy Faith — the ingredient that connects the cardinal to the land from which he raised his battalions.