Every August, a village in the deep heel of Italy performs a small miracle of arithmetic; we are talking about Cannole, in Salento, a village home to about 1,500 people for fifty weeks of the year where, over five days in the middle of the summer, something close to 100,000 visitors pour in.
They come for a snail, not a metaphorical one, but the actual local land snail, the municeddha, gathered after the rains and cooked here three ways, alla cannolese with onion and wine, in a red sauce, or simply roasted over the coals.
