Sergio's story
Sergio Bensi was born in Montevitozzo in 1940. At the age of six he moved with his parents and sister to Umbria, where his father had been offered work as a farm manager through his sister, who had connections with the administration of an estate purchased by King Victor Emmanuel III near Todi, in the hamlet of Fiore. Around the estate stretched numerous tenant farms where farming families lived.
Their home was located within the main farmhouse complex. Below were the cellars, above was the owner’s floor, which remained empty because the administrator never came, and on the top floor was the flat where they lived. The house had a bathroom and even a bathtub, something quite unusual at the time.
In 1946, when Sergio was in his first year of primary school, a young teacher arrived from San Miniato. She had nowhere to stay and was advised to ask at the estate. Sergio’s father spoke to the administrator and she was given a flat without being charged anything. Throughout his years at primary school, the family hosted a different teacher each year because none of them held permanent posts. Sergio remembers feeling very fortunate and retains happy memories of those years.
The tenant farmers, although almost all of them were Communists, were also deeply religious, and the church was always full. Sergio’s mother cooked for the family, but he spent much of his time with the farmers’ children. Early in the morning he would watch the women rolling out fresh pasta dough. He often ate with them and remembers occasionally sleeping in the hayloft alongside the other children.
Food was closely tied to rural life: homemade pasta, a little meat, and seasonal vegetables. The traditional sweets were those of Tuscany, such as Easter bread and sfratto at Christmas. Each farm produced large quantities of wheat—five or six hundred quintals—and half of the harvest went to the estate, which gradually invested in increasingly modern machinery.
In the venue where they organize the Prosecco Festival.
In 1951 Sergio entered a seminary with the intention of becoming a priest. He remained there for three years, during his middle-school education. Meals were eaten in silence while someone read from the Psalms. One of the boys at his table barely ate anything. To prevent him from being punished, Sergio and another classmate secretly helped by eating part of his meals.
The boy’s parents regularly sent him enormous mortadellas. At afternoon break, when everyone was given a bread roll with a small processed cheese spread, he would share slices of mortadella with Sergio and his friend. This arrangement continued for three years.
One day a nun came back with a pot of vegetable soup and noticed that the boy’s plate was already empty. Assuming he had enjoyed it, she served him another helping. Sergio and his friend could not manage the extra portion by themselves and had to recruit two more classmates to help finish it.
After leaving the seminary, Sergio attended a technical institute in Terni, specialising in electronics. He later found work in a factory producing agricultural machinery, which was also beginning to manufacture television sets. Through a friend who had trained as a pilot, he learned about a recruitment competition for the Italian Air Force and successfully gained entry.
He was only eighteen when he met Franca. While waiting to be called up for training at Caserta, he spent a month in Montevitozzo with his parents, who had by then left the royal estate and returned to the village. During Carnival, dances were held every evening at the local social club, and it was there that Sergio and Franca first met.
In the meantime Sergio’s father had taken over the management of a bar, where Franca helped out. Because of military regulations, Sergio had to wait until he was twenty-seven before he could marry. He was first posted to Padua and later to Bovolone, in the province of Verona. After the wedding, both his wife and his father—who had meanwhile become widowed—moved with him.
They gradually settled into life in Veneto, but during the thirty-five years they lived there the family always continued to cook in the Tuscan style. Sergio has always loved pasta and has never been particularly fond of meat. One Venetian dish they grew accustomed to, and which Franca learned to cook, was risotto.
Over the years they made many friends, both within and outside the Air Force. Their Venetian friends particularly enjoyed the lamb, cheeses and cured meats that Sergio and Franca brought back from Tuscany.
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In his garage
In 1961 Sergio was sent to the United States for missile training, first to El Paso, Texas, and then to the desert of New Mexico. He remembers that American meals were remarkably consistent: vegetable soup, boiled beef with sweetcorn, salad dressed with yoghurt, and either water or milk to drink. The milk, he recalls, was exceptionally good. In the evenings they often ate hot dogs and other fast-food meals.
After returning to Montevitozzo, Sergio became heavily involved in community life. For twenty years he served as president of the association I Sarrabani. The association’s name comes from a nickname once used mockingly by the inhabitants of Castell’Azzara for the people of Montevitozzo, who were called sarrabanacci because they kept donkeys.
Under Sergio’s leadership the association organised dinners, dances, coach trips and a living Nativity scene. They restored the old school building, added a kitchen, built community facilities and created events aimed at bringing life back to the village. It was also through the association that the annual Prosecco Festival, held every June, was established.
The story began when a friend from Veneto brought Sergio several bottles of Prosecco. He liked it so much that he began purchasing it together with a group of friends. What started as ten demijohns gradually grew to thirty. At first, friends who travelled north for work collected the wine with company lorries. Later, as demand increased, they hired vans to fetch it.
Eventually the quantities became so large that they arranged deliveries by tanker. Eight hundred litres at a time would arrive at Sergio’s house. Everyone gathered for breakfast together before sharing a large lunch while the wine was distributed. They continued this tradition for three years.
Before the pandemic, in 2019, they organised the first Prosecco Festival. Following an interruption, the event resumed in 2021. Today the wine arrives in large wine boxes and is bottled locally in March. It is then enjoyed during the warmer months, from May to July, when it is at its best.
The sweets Sergio most associates with his childhood are Easter bread and sfratti. During his years in Bovolone he also discovered Offella, a traditional local leavened cake, as well as a frozen mascarpone dessert known as stracchino.
Today, having returned to Montevitozzo nearly thirty years ago, Sergio spends his days surrounded by family. His wife prepares lunch every day for children and grandchildren: pasta all’amatriciana, carbonara, or simply pasta with tomatoes and mozzarella. For Sergio, pasta remains the constant thread running through a life that has taken him from rural Umbria to military bases in America and back again to the village where it all began.
Holding a bottle of Prosecco