The Beautiful View - life on an ancient trading path in Northern Italy

Truffle woods one way, vineyards the other, the sea straight ahead over the mountains - Occitano, Langhe, Riviera

Thank you for joining this blog… you will see in this series, under the headings of Occitano, Langhe and Riviera, what life was like for us when we lived on an ancient trade route in the Langhe, Northern Italy. The Langhe is shouldered by the Occitan Valleys to the north and the Italian Riviera to the south. The roads and footpaths between them were, as all trade routes are, a way to move goods, meet people, exchange ideas and our life along it trod a similar path.

We lived there when we weren’t living somewhere else. That makes it sound more peripatetic than it was - our home, Costabella, was a happy base which we dipped in and out of for more than a decade, we were often there for a few years at a time, long enough to keep chickens and discover truffles, to make friends and know the area well. We only left after the death of my beloved husband in 2021.

It is my way of remembering the years that made us so happy and gave our children such a good grounding. But also a chance to ponder how I used food as a compass in a strange land -a means of anchoring our family whilst teaching myself about new cultures. I want to share this knowledge with you, so you too will learn about the dishes of this little-known, very non touristy part of Italy.

We lived, my husband, myself, our 4 children and various dogs, cats, chickens and geese , in a ramshackle farmouse in the heart of the Italian Langhe - the middle section of an ancient salt route that runs from the Occitano to the North of Costabella, our home, and southwards to the coast and the Italian Riviera.

We used this route as surely footedly and commonly as it has always been used, though at the time we were quite unaware of it. We only knew that it seemed a fairly straightforward journey bewteen the skifields of the Occitano, with names like Artesina and Limone, to the coastal resorts of Noli, Varigotti and Varezze, where our children spent the summers paddleboarding and cliffjumping.

Costabella, (which means Beautiful View) overlooked the mountains and was nestled in hills filled with truffled woodlands one way and rolling vineyards the other. It was, and remains, the place where we have been the happiest, despite sometimes not having electricty and never installing heating or wifi. Well.. it had heating if you wanted to load fires and keep the woodburning oven in the kitchen well stocked for hot water and for cooking.

We lived by firelight and candlelight in the winter and in the summer we were never indoors, so the hardship was not as much as you might imagine. We also only lived at Costabella when we weren’t living elsewhere - my husbands job took us to lots of different countries and on many adventures, so surviving without heating or wifi was never not a long term prospect.

Life in Costabella remained perfect - sometimes challenging, sometimes infuriating but fulfilling. We skipped between Italy and France for my husband’s work, then Italy and Switzerland, the children barefoot and feral and running around the world with us, happy as clams. And then one day in early January, when snow lay thick upon the ground, my husband died.

It’s hard to write about this, so I won’t. Suffice to say I lost the love of my life, the children their beloved father. A huge, larger than life, booming, laughing presence. It’s still impossible to believe he’s gone but the silence in our new house, and the definate dull ache of missing our life in Costabella confirms it. So, I write these words to honour what we had there, as a record for our children and a way to keep our perfect-for-us life going a little longer.

Also, just as importantly, to maybe show you how you too can move from a stuck and sad place to rebuild with confidence and joy. I learnt to reach back into our life together and pull from the arsenal of skills and experiences we had. Cooking became a solace and then an income, - the same with talking to people. I reached out to ask for help and to build a new community and I am reaching up to grab life and new opportunities that have come from those first steps in rebuilding. Maybe you will find something in this that will help you if you are stuck.