As promised last time we're starting at home, our Tuscany, our hearth. Home, it turns out, has an address.
It's called the Casentino — the upper valley of the Arno, before the river has decided what kind of river it wants to be, still narrow and cold and running through chestnut forest instead of the Tuscany of postcards. Cypress and gold hills are an hour south of here. Up here it's beech, fir, wild boar trails, monasteries tucked into rock faces, and villages so small that everyone in them is, in some practical sense, related to the recipe they're known for. This is the territory where the first ANIVA movement opens its doors: Ethnogastronomy, the home of Remember — the stage of the journey where we do the plainest, most necessary work there is. We go and listen, and we write down what we're told, the way they'd want it kept.
We didn't choose the Casentino because it was easy. We chose it because it's the kind of place where a dish can survive for centuries by being almost too small to notice: no port, no grand trade route, no reason for the wider world to come looking. But small isn't the same as still. These slopes were crossed on foot for generations, and what the walkers carried stayed because someone always stayed behind to keep it.
Our first story from here comes from a hamlet called Corezzo, tucked into the forested ridge that marks the border between Tuscany and Romagna, high enough that the air changes and the cooking changes with it. Corezzo's name travels exactly as far as one dish carries it: the tortello alla lastra, a pocket of pasta stuffed and cooked not in a pot but on a slab of hot stone — a lastra — set over the fire. It's a method that gives away its own history if you know how to read it: this is food built for people who moved with the seasons, who couldn't be burdened by pots and boiling water, and who found that a hot stone, carried or found, would do the job of a whole kitchen. Shepherds on transhumance are supposed to have eaten something close to this centuries ago, moving flocks between the mountain and the lowland, and the shape of the dish never really forgot it.
What's inside it — potato, most often, worked with a vegetable ragù whose exact proportions are, by all accounts, still guarded rather than published — is almost beside the point next to the fact that the whole village still makes it together, once a year, by hand, for a festival that exists for no other reason than to keep the technique alive in enough pairs of hands that it can't quietly disappear. That's the kind of heritage we came here for: not a recipe rescued from a drawer, but one still being cooked in public, argued over, and taught on purpose.
This story deserves more room than a journal entry, and it deserves to live where Ethnogastronomy actually lives. So the full account of Corezzo and its tortello — where it comes from, who still makes it, and the recipe itself, written down the way it was given to us — is going up on the Ethnogastronomy site next. ANIVA isn't one project but several, each built around a different way of living inside a foodway — some about place, some about skill, some about staying. Ethnogastronomy is where it all starts — the remembering, before anything is explored, received, or protected.
We'll leave you with the same door we left open last time. If Corezzo, or a hamlet like it, means something to you — if your own family has a version of a dish cooked on stone, or a technique that only makes sense once you've felt the climate it came from — tell us. This valley in eastern Tuscany is the first territory. It won't be the last, and it was never meant to be ours alone.
— ANIVA