Casu ré pecóra del Matese is a sheep’s-milk cheese tied, in Regione Campania’s account, to the mountain country of the Matese in the province of Caserta. What makes it worth a closer look is not a single flavour but three named styles—among them the fresh cheeses called Fresco and Friscu—built on a paste that stays soft yet compact, with eyes so scarce they barely interrupt the slice. The animals are described as grazing, with extra feed from local mountain cereals and forages, so the cheese reads as a highland dairy rather than a generic pecorino.
Making follows a sequence of working stages. After roughly half an hour the curd is broken; later the wheels are dressed with olive oil. They take a cylindrical shape, faces almost flat, the sides a little convex, and the diameter runs from ten to fifteen centimetres—small enough to feel like a table cheese, large enough to show a proper rind.
Taste shifts with age. Fresh, the interior is white, gentle and sweet, immediately recognisable as a young cheese. Semi-aged, the paste turns almost creamy, a light straw colour, still sweet in a character of its own. Left drier, it firms into a compact body of straw yellow, the flavour decided and inclined toward heat. That arc—from milky softness to a sharper, oil-sheened wheel—is the story the product actually tells.
A practical way to meet it is to ask which of the three types is in front of you: the pale, sweet fresh wheel or the compact, more pungent dry one. Keep the geography exact—Matese uplands, Caserta, as Campania records it—and you have a clear path into neighbouring mountain cheeses without treating this name as a stand-in for every sheep cheese in the south.