Food
Beans that need no soaking, pecorino from mountain pastures, pasta rolled by hand. In the Comino Valley home cooking has not turned into folklore: people still eat this way.
A local variety grown in a handful of towns in the valley, along the Melfa river. Its skin is so thin that it needs no soaking before cooking. It is sown between late June and mid-July, right after the wheat harvest. After decades of neglect it was saved by the PDO, recognised by the European Union in 2010.
A cheese made from the sheep's and goat's milk of flocks that graze in the Comino Valley for at least eight months a year. It tastes of mountain grass. The production area includes Posta Fibreno. In August Picinisco celebrates it with the Pastorizia in Festival.
At the table
Atina produces designation-of-origin wines from Cabernet and Semillon, a legacy of French grape varieties that reached the valley in the 19th century. Around Picinisco people drink a white wine made from Maturano, a local grape.
The Fibreno trout is a protected species that lives only in the lake: it is neither fished nor eaten. The local freshwater cooking uses farmed trout.
Do you have your grandmother's recipe notebook, or only remember the dialect name of a dish? We can arrange a morning with a local cook to make it together, and shopping at the valley's producers.
Two equipped kitchens and the porch for eating outdoors on summer evenings.