Southerners are affable and volatile. They love a great feast. Pasta and bread making were and are still to some extent, carried on as social gatherings. Women rolled pasta together, sometimes in the open air of courtyards and markets -- a pasta bee. A simple yeasted dough is another starchy staple of southern cooking. Long-proofed Italian bread is light and crusty. Calzone, pizza, and focaccia are the most common and like many other neutral Italian staples, become the cornerstones of expansive creations. Steer and dairy cows thrive in northern Italy and so, its cuisine is marked by a prevalence of beef and rich butter- and cream-based sauces. Southern Italians are not only poorer than their neighbors but also live in a region which, with its rocky soil, is inhospitable to cows. So, beef, butter, and cream play a much less prominent role. Pigs, though, are a beloved beast and pork is used for cooking fat, sausages like mortadella, bacon or pancetta, ham, and a hundred others things. Southerners, especially Romans, are also justly famous for their spit-roasted abbacchio, or milk-fed baby lamb that has never tasted grass. The soil does nourish the olive tree and so southern cooking is oil-based, her sauces filled with the vegetables and seaood that are always nearby and don`t want heavy creams to cover their flavors. Sardines and anchovies are prominent. Eel, shellfish, and other Mediterranean frutti di mare can be found cooked in wine, grilled over a fire, deep-fried, or tossed on pasta. Cheeses are made from the milks of all types of livestock, pigs excluded. Pecorino and ricotta, mozzarella, caciocavallo, and countless other cheeses are produced in Calabria and the other southern provinces.