The story of Corte Mainolda in Sarginesco, north Italy, contains another story, but everything started here, where Angelo and his seven brothers were born. Exactly one hundred years ago.
During the war, Angelo got into a field hospital where he spent his time as a kitchen assistant, making himself so valuable that he spent the whole war there.
Once back home, he worked as a pork-butcher, but also as a farmer when needed, because in those days you had to be able to do many things. All Stuani family was sharecropper in the countryside of Corte Mainolda owners.
Years went by and Angelo and his brother Giuseppe married two sisters.
When his daughter was born, Angelo was milking in the stable. Once he got his child was a girl, he kicked the bucket and spilled the milk. But then there was a special relationship between them and it was perhaps because she always showed a manly soul.
Then, out of the blue, the sharecropping contract was not renewed and eight brothers and their families were out on the street. In the chaos that followed, the family dispersed, each looking for solutions.
There was Pane e Vino (Bread and Wine), a serving of wine and small shop, that two old people were selling in Curtatone, near Mantua. It was 1942, and the two brothers, with their wives and children, made those ten km and started a new life. Giuseppe sold the bread, Teresa cleaned up, Angelo and his sister in law worked in the kitchen; they were good enough to fill the place immediately.
In war time, there was so much hunger and the first customers were the carters, ancestors of the truck drivers who promptly replaced them a few years later.
At school, Lina had been Gregorio's classmate, the only case in history of a pupil being demoted from third to second grade by the teacher, Aunt Rosa, his father's sister.
When she was seventeen, she met him again at a party in Sarginesco, thanks to his gramophone, that she still keeps. Because, at this point in the story, the two guys get married and she moves to Sarginesco. A journey back, paths that repeat themselves. Raffaella and Pier Angelo are born here and Gregorio cultivates other people's land.
But Lina is not a woman to knit by the fireplace and when, due to family events - uncle Giuseppe, perhaps out of jealousy, had taken the kitchen away from his wife and brother to give it to others. Her father called her back to the 4Venti, she did not hesitate and returned to him.
In Sarginesco, the children remain with their father and aunt Rosa, the teacher who also had a painful history behind her.
It had happened that the family of her husband, a wealthy mining engineer and owner of Corte Mainolda, had claimed to manage the wages of the bride - yes, coincidences repeat themselves like a prism. She, independent and proud, had returned to her parents. Now, at the age of sixty, she acts as a mother to her great-grandchildren and later, widowed and heir to the engineer, she will be the one to pass on the property to them.
After inheriting Corte Mainolda from his aunt Rosa, Pier Angelo cultivates the land, works with his father and starts a family: they are united people used to helping each other. When Lina needs help, he improvises as a cook, observes and gradually learns. But it is the work in the fields that takes him around. Years of patient effort to send his children to university. Then the dream: to imagine a restaurant of his own, perhaps flanked by an elegant B&B. The space is there, the manual skills too. Father and son are still allied, as they have been for generations, in restoring, painting and furnishing old spaces with the unmistakable taste of home.
Today, a few years after opening, this family quartet plays in harmony and each one indulges his or her talents to make an unforgettable dinner or stay. What guests don't know is how much love and passion for the cooking and the family have flowed over the last hundred years to achieve this.
Or rather, now you know!
