Meet Adelaide Funghi
Adelaide Funghi was born in 1945 and is now nearly eighty-one. She is the youngest of eight children—four brothers and three sisters. Her parents came from Elmo, where her grandfather, Biagio Biagetti, had built the family house.
Her childhood was divided between Pitigliano and a succession of sharecropped farms in southern Tuscany: Vallerana, near Manciano, and Casaglia, near Capalbio. Like many rural families of the period, they lived under the mezzadria system, sharing the proceeds of their labour with the landowner. Daily life revolved around agricultural work, caring for livestock and running the household.
Family life followed a strongly patriarchal structure, with several generations often living under the same roof. In the house in Pitigliano, seven people shared a small space. There were two bedrooms, a small kitchen and a room used for both eating and sitting. Not everyone had a bed of their own: a single bed in the main room, covered with a decorative bedspread during the day, doubled as a sofa.
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Adelaide in her home
One of the most important events of the year for Adelaide was the day they killed the family pig, which took place between January and February. She remembers it as a genuine celebration.
The dinner on that day was called l’osso della bona cena, probably because her mother prepared tagliatini with a sauce made from the fresh meat of the newly slaughtered animal—fresh meat being a rarity at the time.
From the pig they made prosciutto, fegatelli, capocollo, lombo and sausages, foods that Adelaide says have no modern equivalent.
To preserve the sausages, her mother packed them into wooden boxes, layering them with semolina, and stored them in the cellar, known locally as the caciaia. They were taken out in August, during the threshing season, to be eaten by the workers. Adelaide remembers sneaking them whenever she could—they were simply too good to resist.
The fegatelli were fried in lard and preserved in jars, sealed with a layer of solidified fat. When eaten, they were reheated. The pig intestines were carefully washed, flavoured with fennel and hung by the fireplace to dry. Known as busicchi, they are today expensive and, in her view, inferior to those of the past.
The family usually slaughtered two pigs a year. Because of its size, Adelaide’s household received one and a quarter pigs, with the remainder going to the landowner. Although the standard allocation was one pig per family, their landlord was considered fair and adjusted shares according to need. Adelaide’s brothers were particularly skilled at processing pork and were often called upon by neighbouring farmers. This work was done in a spirit of mutual aid: when help was needed, people helped one another.
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Adelaide looking through some old photos.
Meals were simple but carefully prepared. The family often ate soup made with favetta, an old variety of dried fava bean. Adelaide’s mother made fresh egg pasta every day—tagliolini, tagliatelle, tortelli and pici—cut according to the dish required. Adelaide learned to cook early, initially by watching rather than by doing.
Every two weeks a trader from Capalbio arrived with cheese and household goods. Payment was rarely in cash, which was scarce outside the threshing season; instead, people bartered bread, eggs or cheese.
Cheese-making was another domestic skill. Sheep’s milk was slowly heated until it curdled. Before moulding the cheese, Adelaide’s mother would squeeze a small portion of fresh curd and offer it to her, calling it il topo. Adelaide ate it warm. The whey (scotta), though considered tasty, was forbidden to children because of its laxative effect and was instead fed to the pigs.
Her mother also baked bread, pizza and Easter focaccia. Leftover dough was rolled out, cut into triangles and sprinkled with either sugar or salt—Adelaide always chose sugar.
After the harvest, in September, came another important moment known as the stacco: three metres of fabric allocated for men’s winter clothing. Adelaide’s mother, who was also a seamstress, used it to make flannel trousers and shirts, as the men spent long hours outdoors. When the older children were small, she even made shoes from corn leaves. Adelaide never needed them; by the time she was born, circumstances had already begun to change.
Antonello's family pictures
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Adelaide in 1963
In the early 1960s, family life began to fragment. One sister married, another went to work in Grosseto, and a brother moved into a converted storeroom before taking on another farm near Pitigliano. The Casaglia holding was large—thirty-two cows, over a hundred sheep, pigs, horses and donkeys—and became unmanageable once the extended family dispersed. When her parents left Casaglia, they moved to Rome and worked at the city’s wholesale markets, supplying vegetables grown in the vast market gardens just outside the city to Piazza Vittorio, one of Rome’s largest produce markets.
Adelaide divided her childhood between Pitigliano—where she lived with her eldest sister in the house she still occupies today—and the countryside with her parents. After leaving Casaglia, she spent six years in Rome before returning to Pitigliano.
As a young woman in Rome, she worked as a nanny and lived in the Monteverde area. Later, back in Tuscany, she began cooking professionally. Together with her partner, the father of her children, she ran a campsite restaurant called Holiday for two seasons, and later La Taverna in Orbetello, which operated for four to five years. In the 1980s she ran the bar at the hospital in Pitigliano and later worked in an agriturismo in Manciano, as well as in seaside establishments between Orbetello and Ansedonia.
She does not consider herself a specialist in fish, but is confident with meat and pasta: ragù, gnocchi, fresh pasta, baked dishes and buglione. Her daughter-in-law confirms her reputation. Good cooking, Adelaide observes, is widespread in Sorano, Manciano and Pitigliano—it requires no pretension.
Ragù is the dish she most enjoys preparing. She begins with a soffritto, adds the meat, deglazes with wine, then uses both tomato passata and sauce, cooking everything slowly over a low flame for a long time. She is also fond of buglione, made with wild boar or lamb. For wild boar, she first browns the meat on its own—sometimes repeating the process two or three times—to release excess liquid and reduce the gamey flavour. She then adds sage, rosemary, bay leaf, juniper and garlic, deglazes with red wine, and once the wine has reduced, adds tomato paste, which must cook until it darkens. Only then does she add hot water—never cold, which would toughen the meat—and lets it simmer gently.
She once tried preserving meat in oil herself, but it spoiled. The meat, she says, simply isn’t what it used to be.
For many years Adelaide cooked exclusively on a wood-burning stove. Now that she no longer has one, she says with a touch of melancholy that modern conveniences may be practical, but they cannot reproduce the flavour food had then.
Among desserts, her speciality is sfratti, a traditional sweet of Jewish origin typical of this area of Tuscany. Her closely guarded recipe was given to her many years ago by an elderly neighbour. She still makes them every Christmas, despite pain in her hands, producing around twenty-five at a time to give to family and friends.
Today Adelaide drinks ginseng coffee, keeps chocolates at home for friends who come to play cards, and prefers staying in. As a girl she drank coffee with milk, ricotta and toasted bread; as a child, barley coffee—brands she remembers by name, Leone and La Vecchina. Money was scarce, and barter was common. Now she drinks coffee with lactose-free milk and eats wholemeal biscuits.
In her youth she was a majorette in the town band, raced go-karts competitively—winning several championships—and frequented taverns to play cards. She describes herself as a tomboy. She never married, choosing instead to live with her partner.
Quick-witted, ironic and endlessly curious, Adelaide has a deep interest in food and art. When visiting her son in the Marche, she buys Carpegna prosciutto and seeks out cheeses from southern Italy; she favours products from Norcia and San Gimignano and delights in discovering new variations, such as mozzarella filled with ricotta. Cheese, in all its forms, remains one of her greatest pleasures.
Adelaide in her youth