Lucia and Il Borghetto: A Story That Began on a Chair
Even before it had a name, a kitchen, or rooms to welcome guests, Il Borghetto was a chair.
It was the chair that Lucia, at four or five years old, had to climb onto and kneel on to reach her grandmother’s kitchen table. From there, she watched the hands kneading dough, listened to the voices of her family, and learned that welcoming someone meant getting to work: taking what was there, transforming it, and bringing it to the table.
In that position—small but already part of the adult world—Lucia unconsciously began to shape her own identity. Not just as a cook, but as a woman capable of preserving a memory and transforming it into hospitality.
Il Borghetto would come many years later. Yet its foundation was already all there: in a little girl who watched, tried, made mistakes, and started over; in a kitchen open to family and guests; in knowledge passed from one hand to another without needing to be written down.
There was no preschool in those parts. Before school came home, family, and the warm oven. And a kitchen where one learned by doing.
Her grandmother had seven children and cooked every day for a large family, often expanded to include unexpected guests. When someone arrived, there was never a problem about having something ready. You took whatever was there: a chicken, a rabbit—whatever the home and the countryside had to offer.
“Stay for dinner,” she would say.
And she would get to work.
It was within this natural spirit of hospitality that Lucia grew up. Perhaps, without even realizing it, the first agritourism experience of her life was already there.
Grandma’s Lesson
There was a story Grandma loved to tell her.
When she was a child, she, too, was so small she couldn’t reach the table and had to use a chair. The first time her father let her make pasta, she made a bit of a mess. The dough was so hard she could barely roll it out, and once it was cooked, it looked like it was made of shoelaces. It never cooked through.
But her father didn’t scold her.
He told her not to worry. It would go better next time.
And in fact, it did go better. Then even better, until she finally got the hang of it.
When she told her granddaughter that story, Grandma wasn’t just teaching her how to make pasta. She was passing on something much more important: “…don’t worry if you don’t get it right away. Keep trying. Little by little, you’ll learn.”
Lucia did exactly that.
She remembers the bread prepared for the oven and the focaccia that went with it; the simple summer cakes, made with water, flour, and zucchini, and the winter ones with onions.
And then the apples.
When they were in season, trays of apples were always in the oven. While they were baking, her grandmother would add a splash of grappa and sugar, which, with the heat, formed that sweet, crunchy crust that Lucia still remembers today.
They are flavors, certainly. But even more than that, they are images, scents, and gestures.
They are memories preserved in her hands.
A story that begins with the land
The family’s history, however, has roots that go back even further.
The company’s origins date back to the early 20th century, when grapes, fruit trees, and vegetables were grown on these lands, relying primarily on manual labor and the favor of the seasons.
The work was hard, and resources were scarce. People would sow their seeds, wait for the sun, fear the rain when it came at the wrong time, and long for it when the earth became too dry.
The rest, as they used to say, “was left to the Almighty.”
It was a world shaped by harvests and the seasons, in which concepts we now call “short supply chains,” “sustainability,” or “respect for nature’s rhythms” were simply part of everyday life.
Then that world changed.
With the end of sharecropping and after many long years of work and savings, in 1974 the Pelitti family purchased the land along with the house and the barn.
Lucia was still a little girl.
That barn was part of the landscape of her childhood. No one could have imagined that many years later, that very space—built to support the family’s farming work—would become the heart of her project.
Cooking Becomes a Career
At fourteen, Lucia started working.
Her first job was at a restaurant, and fate seemed to know exactly where to send her: into the kitchen.
And almost naturally, they put her right away in charge of the pasta.
On Sundays, they made baked lasagna, and it was Lucia’s job to roll out the dough for the entire restaurant.
Other experiences followed, still in kitchens, because that’s where she wanted to be. She also worked in Sarzana, continuing to learn, handling pasta as well as meat and game. Whenever there were celebrations or someone needed a hand, Lucia was there.
What she’d begun to learn sitting on her grandmother’s chair became a profession.
But she never lost sight of her roots.
Cooking is no longer just something Lucia knows how to do.
It has become her language.
That name found in the past
Then comes Il Borghetto.
Even the name, however, has deep roots.
One day, Lucia stumbles upon an old document regarding the first motorized cultivator the family purchased. On the sheet of paper appears a name: Agricola Il Borghetto.
Those words stay with her.
She thought that if she ever opened a place of her own, she would use that very name.
And so it happened.
But before the restaurant, the guest rooms, and the guests, there was still an old barn attached to the house.
The roof, the reeds, the sheet metal. A small wooden bridge through which the bales of hay were brought in. Spaces born of a farming life made up of animals, seasons, and daily work.
In 1999, the transformation began.
Renovating that barn wasn’t simply about restoring a building. It meant taking a piece of family history and allowing it to continue living in a different form.
Piece by piece, what had housed hay for years began to prepare itself to welcome people.
The following year, the work was completed.
On December 2, 2000, Lucia officially opened her agritourism business.
She named it, naturally, “Il Borghetto.”
A name that didn’t stem from a business decision, but from family memory.
Il Borghetto, after all, wasn’t truly born in 2000. In 2000, a story that had begun nearly a century earlier simply took on a new form.
Water, flour, and yeast
More than twenty-five years have passed since then. The location has changed, guests have come and gone, and the business has grown.
But the principle that started it all has remained intact.
Just listen to Lucia as she talks about her sgabei.
What’s the secret? The answer seems almost too simple: “Water, flour, and yeast. That’s all.
No oil in the dough, no baking soda, no unnecessary additions.”
It’s the hands and the time that make the difference.
The dough, Lucia explains, “needs to be watched.” You have to recognize the exact moment it’s ready to rise, because if you let it go too long, the sgabeo won’t be the same. And adding unnecessary ingredients risks making the dough heavier and causing it to absorb too much oil during frying.
Lucia also always sets aside a small piece from the previous batch—a sort of starter that’s passed down from one batch of dough to the next.
A small piece is set aside so that something may continue.
It’s hard to imagine a more fitting metaphor for her story.
Because Lucia, too, received something from those who came before her and carried it forward.
But she didn’t just preserve it.
From Student to Teacher
Over the years, Lucia has taught others in turn.
Women who worked alongside her learned to cook, to make pasta and ravioli, and to recognize textures and timing. Some then went their own way, taking what they had learned elsewhere.
And so the tradition continues.
From her grandmother to Lucia. From Lucia to other hands.
The little girl who needed a stool to reach the table has become the woman from whom others now learn.
It is perhaps here that one truly understands what Il Borghetto is all about.
Not just a farmstay. Not simply a place to eat or spend a few days in the countryside.
It is the result of continuity.
A cuisine that follows the seasons
That continuity is also present on the table every day.
There are savory pies, homemade pasta, and ravioli stuffed with vegetables harvested from the garden. There are tagliatelle, rolled out strictly by hand and served with different sauces depending on the season and the availability of ingredients.
Then there are the roasts, the suckling pig, and meats prepared with care and served alongside fresh vegetables.
Among the most beloved dishes is the mixed farmyard fry with vegetables, which over time has become one of the most recognizable hallmarks of Il Borghetto’s cuisine.
But here, the menu is not meant to be restrictive.
Lucia prepares meals by reservation and crafts the menu in collaboration with her guests, explaining what she can prepare at that moment and letting the season, the garden, and the availability of ingredients suggest the rest.
The exceptions are major holidays—Christmas, Easter, and New Year’s Eve dinner—when a set menu is offered, always rooted in home-style cooking and the very nature of the agritourism experience.
“ Handmade cappelletti, one by one, stuffed chicken, and much more…”
Otherwise, they go with whatever’s available.
After all, it’s the same principle as Grandma’s cooking.
When someone came over, she’d see what the house had to offer and prepare a meal.
That same simplicity is found in the apple juice from their own harvest: just pressed fruit, with nothing else added.
When the raw ingredients are good, Lucia seems to say, the most important thing is to treat them with respect.
Staying at Il Borghetto
Il Borghetto, however, isn’t just about the food.
The agritourism also features three rooms furnished in the “arte povera” style—simple, functional spaces for those who wish to extend their stay after dinner or treat themselves to a few days immersed in the tranquility of the countryside.
Here, too, there is no pursuit of excess.
The simplicity of the spaces is consistent with the place’s identity: offering a warm welcome without turning hospitality into a performance.
Eating, relaxing, sleeping, waking up in the countryside.
Slowing down.
Perhaps this is precisely one of the small privileges that places like Il Borghetto still manage to offer.
The Chair
Today we’re used to calling all of this tradition, authenticity, a return to our roots.
For Lucia, there was no return.
Because she never left those roots in the first place.
She carried them with her when, at fourteen, she stepped into a restaurant kitchen. When she rolled out hundreds of sheets of pasta for lasagna. When she learned new dishes. When she transformed an old barn into a welcoming place.
She carried them into the ravioli, the sgabei, the hand-rolled tagliatelle, the timing of the rising process. Into the juice of the apples from her homeland. Into the people she taught what she knew.
And above all, she carried them into her way of welcoming guests.
Decades have passed since a little girl knelt on a chair to reach her grandmother’s table.
In the meantime, the world has changed.
The sharecropping system is over. The land now belongs to the family. The old barn no longer stores bales of hay; it has become a bed-and-breakfast. Guests, staff, rooms, lunches, dinners, and thousands of batches of dough have come and gone.
And yet, when Lucia still places her fingers on the dough today to see if it’s ready, that kitchen from so many years ago comes back to life.
Her grandmother is there.
The oven is lit.
There’s bread, apples, grappa, and sugar.
Someone arrives unexpectedly, and a voice says, “Stay for dinner.”
And then there’s that chair.
It’s not just the place where the story began.
It’s the symbolic place where Lucia learned to observe, to experiment, to make mistakes, and to start over.
Today, she no longer has to climb up there to reach the table.
But, in some way, she continues to cook from there.
