Giorgio Locatelli - Made in Italy - Food and Stories

Of course, everyone in Corgeno seems to be some sort of cousin, though none of us can remember exactly how we are related. Six generations of our families are buried in the village graveyard, and the names are etched many times into the war memorial outside the church with the two Roman towers, above the makeshift football pitch where we kids played every day after we had (or hadn’t) done our homework.

Life in the North of Italy is very different from the way it is in the pretty Italy of the South – the idyllic Italy, still a little wild, that you always see in movies. The South fulfils the Mediterranean expectation, whereas the North is the real heart of Europe. Historically we have been under many influences: Spanish, French, Austrian…at home we are only around 20 kilometres from Switzerland, and Milano is the most cosmopolitan city in Italy. In the North I don’t know anyone who hasn’t got a job and everyone comes to the North to find work – the reverse of the way it is in England.

The industrial North of Ferrari and Alessi can be more stark; but somehow I think it has a tougher, more impressive and real kind of beauty than the regions that the English love so much, like Toscano and Umbria. You might not think they are very far down the boot of Italy, but where I come from anything below Bologna is south. In the North, we are famous for designing and making things, things that work properly. Northern Italians always tell jokes against southern Italians, and vice versa. We like to say that, in Roma, if you have to dig a hole in the road it will take eight months; in the North everything will be fixed and running like clockwork in a day. And while most of Italy used to stop for a big break at lunchtime – especially in the South, where it was too hot to work – in Milano and around Lombardia it would be one hour only. The factory whistles would go at 12 noon – the signal for the wives and mothers at home to put in the pasta – and then the road would be full of bicycles and scooters and motorbikes, as everyone shot home to eat and then straight back to work.

In the South, they are used to delicate foods like mozzarella and tomatoes and seafood. In the North, we are proud of our Parmigiano Reggiano and prosciutto di Parma and big warming dishes like polenta and risotto. And if we haven’t used our food to promote our area around the world as strongly as other regions, it is not because it is less important to us, but that we haven’t needed to, because we are known for other things.

Corgeno is a place steeped in history, firstly because of its twin Roman towers and more recently because of its pocket resistance to fascism. On one of the old walls you can see the faded words of one of Mussolini’s slogans that still makes me angry every time I see it, with its call to the youth of Italy to put down their picks and shovels and take up arms. There are many stories in our village of the local men of the resistance who used to hide in the woods where the women would bring them food. One of them, my father’s brother, Nino, was shot on one of his trips, trying to help forty Jewish people to escape over the border into Switzerland.

Below the village is La Cinzianella, only a few steps to the edge of the lake, which I love, especially in autumn, my favourite time of year. Almost tragic isn’t it, autumn? But so beautiful. Early in the morning, you can’t see the lake because it is hiding in a mauve mist, but when it rises the sky is bright blue and the trees around the lake, with their red and gold leaves, stand out clearly against it. And it is so quiet: all you can hear are the birds calling and scudding over the water – and across the lake the faint buzz of motorbikes going at a hundred miles an hour across the superstrada, the straight towards Mercallo, and into the turn, as if they were on a race track.

We are only forty-five minutes drive from the centre of Milano, and right next to the bigger and more famous Lago Maggiore, so now a lot of people from the city come for weekends; they have bought houses, and the village has grown. But when I was growing up, there were only about 2,000 people and everyone knew everyone else: who was just born, who died; it was all-important to our lives.

I remember one of the first new families to move into Corgeno, from Sicilia – the wife worked at la Cinzianella, and we nicknamed one of the kids

Mandarino after the oranges that came from Sicilia. They spoke a dialect that sounded foreign to us, and the father was loud and dramatic when he talked; tragic, comical…so different from my father, who never raised his voice.

Almost everything we ate and drank was produced locally. We even picked up the milk every evening from the window of the house of Napoleone, who kept a few cows. Each family had their own bottles and he would fill them up and leave them for us to collect – in winter outside the window, in summer in the courtyard under a fountain. Later, when I was a young boy and I was working in restaurants abroad, when I came home for the holidays, people would always open their windows to lean out and say hello. They still do. Whenever we go to Corgeno, my wife Plaxy complains that it takes an hour to walk through the village, because someone will always shout, ‘Hey, Giorgio’ – and it always seems to be an ex-girlfriend.

I remember coming back home after one summer when I was a teenager. I stopped in at the tobacconist to buy cigarettes, and by the time I got to our house, my grandmother already knew that I had changed from Camel to Marlboro. That is how small our village was.

My auntie, uncle and my father and mother all worked in the hotel and my uncle ran the restaurant where I worked, too, as soon I was big enough. Later we had a Michelin star, but then we just served good, honest Italian food and on Saturdays we did banqueting and wedding receptions in a big beautiful room at the top of the hotel, looking out over the lake. We used to feed around 180 people and when we were at our busiest, we would make 20 kilos of dough for the gnocchi and everyone, from the waiters to the women who did the rooms, would come into the kitchen to help shape them. In summer, our guests could sit out on the terrace under big umbrellas. If it was raining they gathered inside around a big table in the corridor, and no one ever complained.

There are ten rooms in La Cinzianella, and we would send food to the rooms, too. Every Sunday a well-known gentleman from the village, Luciano, would come to the hotel in his Mercedes, with a woman called Rosetta. Everyone knew that his wife had been ill for a long time and that Rosetta was his mistress. So on Sundays his room would be ready for him from about two o’clock, and by six, six-thirty, he would call us and order a bottle of champagne. I remember my mother would put it on a tray and, of course, somebody had to take it up – all of us young boys wanted to do it, because we wanted to catch a glimpse of Rosetta.