Gaetano Trovato

Nino Di Costanzo, Eugenio Boer, Michelino Gioia, Aurora Mazzucchelli, Matteo Lorenzini, Matteo Manzini, Alberto Sparacino, Filippo Saporito, Simone Cipriani, Ivan Ferrara, Alessandro Cozzolino… If one were to make a list of all the chefs who learnt the ropes at Arnolfo's in Colle Val d'Elsa, and then launched their careers, it could well be an endless job. The merit goes to them, of course, because they all had talent; and it also goes to Gaetano Trovato who noticed their talent and helped them to grow.

So Arnolfo is not only a great restaurant, but a cooking school too. With Trovato as the teacher: Sicilian by birth – he was born in 1960 – and Tuscan by adoption, he started to work in his mother's trattoria, established in 1982, which gradually turned into a fine dining place mostly thanks to Trovato, the youngest starred chef in Italy when, in 1986, the first macaron arrived. Four years later, his brother Giovanni, born in 1951, joined Gaetano: one in the kitchen, the other in the dining room, forming a stainless couple.

The other stages are famous: in 1995 they moved to the current location, in a noble palace from the 17th Century, on four floors, always in the village; in 1999 the second star arrived, and never left. This while the future has the Trovatos at work with a new location, always in Colle. Beautiful, scheduled to open in 2021, unless there's some delay. There's also a designated heir, Alice Trovato, the chef's daughter.

When all the pieces will be in place, it will be the perfect accomplishment of an exceptional career. If you ask Gaetano what are the distinctive features and the goals of his work, he will calmly say: «Make our area visible in every dish, and extract the intense flavour of every ingredient I use». Trovato's culinary research is a tenacious and ongoing process toward the glorification of taste, the story of the pleasure of finding the best technique to create persistent and captivating flavours while never changing the intrinsic nature of every food. His iconic dishes? Pigeon from Laura Peri, plums, cinnamon; Underwood; Scampi, goose liver and passion fruit.