Why da Amerigo, in a village of 5,000 above Bologna, has been full every Friday since 1934.
The village of Savigno sits in the Apennines south of Bologna at an altitude that keeps it cool in summer and fog-covered from October to March. It has 5,000 residents, one main street, and a trattoria that has been run by the same family since 1934. The trattoria is called da Amerigo. It has a Michelin star. It is booked weeks in advance.
Alberto Bettini is the fourth generation of his family to run it. He grew up here, trained elsewhere, and came back. The menu changes with what the hills and the valleys below produce: truffles and porcini in autumn, asparagus in spring, tortellini in broth every winter. The tortellini are made by hand by women in the kitchen who have been doing it for decades. Nothing is written down.
The dining room seats forty people. There is a bottega next door where you can buy the same pasta, the same cured meats, the same wine the kitchen uses. Above the trattoria is a locanda — a small inn — for the guests who come from outside and do not want to drive back down the hill after the second bottle of Pignoletto.
For Italian-American readers, da Amerigo represents something specific: a glimpse of the northern Italian table before emigration. The families who left Emilia-Romagna for New York and Chicago in the 1890s and 1900s carried these flavours with them — the mortadella, the tagliatelle, the custard-filled pastries that became corrupted and sweetened and loved in a new country. At da Amerigo, they are still being made the original way, by people who never left.
Alberto does not treat this as a burden. He treats it as luck. “We know exactly what we are,” he said in a recent interview. “That makes everything easier.”
The drive up from Bologna takes forty minutes, through towns that look the same as they did in the 1950s. In October, the roadside shops sell truffles from baskets. In January, the village is quiet and the dining room is warm and full. There is no other reason to be in Savigno. That is the point.
da Amerigo — Via Marconi 14–16, 40053 Valsamoggia loc. Savigno (Bo). www.amerigo1934.it. Feature provided by Synpro Media.
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