Joy of Cooking at the Correani Farm

A nourishing combination of art, food, and family.

Our student writers and professors from Pacific University have had the joy over the last four years of cooking classes and dreamy afternoons lingering over our delectable creations with the Correani family, owners of the Agriturismo Podere Somigli.

When we hike up to the Correani farm from the piazza in Greve in Chianti, a 4 kilometer (2.5 mile) trek, we get the full dose of Tuscan landscape. Wine trellises span the hills as far as we can see. The dirt road is lined by olive trees. We stop often on our climb to catch our breaths and inhale the beauty.

Once a monastery founded 900 years ago, the Correani family house and adjacent buildings were converted during the 20th century into a home and thriving winery and olive oil business.

First timers among our students usually making this pilgrimage in late May will likely remark that the glimpse of a distant castle on one side of the road and the little walled village of Montefioralle (population 100) on the other makes it seem as if we are walking through a fairy tale.

When we arrive at Loretta and Alfredo Correani’s house, situated at a sharp bend in the road right across from the elegant Villa Bordoni, the fairy tale unfolds further. Once a monastery founded 900 years ago, the Correani family house and adjacent buildings were converted during the 20th century into a home and thriving winery and olive oil business.

Stone carving on the wall of the farm by Alfredo Correani.

We are met in the courtyard by Alfredo and Loretta and their daughter-in-law, Elena, who speaks to us in a warm, energetic English about our plans for this visit. She runs the front-end of most of the family’s business and organizes with Loretta the cooking lessons. Alfredo welcomes us with hugs and sincere delight.

Loretta stands back to take us all in with her usual gentle smile. Sylph-like in frame and quietly attentive, she runs the cooking lessons, offering the instructions in Italian with Elena’s translation. As always, we are drawn toward Loretta when we have the opportunity to cook here. We believe she would be the perfect Italian auntie for us, if we were so lucky as to have one.

As always, we are drawn toward Loretta when we have the opportunity to cook here. We believe she would be the perfect Italian auntie for us, if we were so lucky as to have one.

A fourth host, Lorenzo, arrives briefly, sweating from hard work in the sun, to say buona sera (good afternoon). Lorenzo, married to Elena, is Alfredo and Loretta’s son. He tends the farm, which includes over 1000 olive trees and several hectares of the sangiovese grapes used for making chianti classico wines. The family's vines cascade down the encompassing valley below the house.

We are reminded as Lorenzo heads back to the olive trees and vineyards that the environment we savor this afternoon demands hours of labor each day and many generations to build. The Correani family has expanded into the next generation with the more recent additions of Elena and Lorenzo's two young children.

Alfredo works in watercolor, acrylic, oil and ceramics. We have become collectors.

Before we enter the ancient house and start our pizza education, we get a glimpse of Alfredo’s modest studio. His paintings done on wood, canvas, and paper vibrate with life and story. Displayed thoughtfully inside and outside the villa, his creations capture the character of Tuscany from Alfredo’s vivid and unique perspective. He also makes terracotta sculptures that are playful and intricate. Many peek out from the stone walls and the expansive garden.

Visitors can buy Alfredo's work—we regularly leave with a treasured painting or etching—as well as the family’s fine olive oil and wine. It is all irresistibly good. The products of the farm can be purchased only on site, which makes a visit–or several for a lucky traveler–a must during our time in Greve.

For the next half hour we get sticky with flour, olive oil, water, and yeast inside the ancient farmhouse, which features both a modern kitchen and the stone sink where for centuries the monks who lived here washed their hands–and where we can rinse ours as well.

After finding our places around the expansive wooden table in the kitchen and donning our striped Podere Somigli aprons, we are more than ready to get started. The Correani family manages a wonderful balance of teaching the skills of food preparation with play.

For the next hour we get sticky with flour, olive oil, water, and yeast inside the ancient farmhouse, which features both a modern kitchen and the stone sink where for centuries the monks who lived here washed their hands–and where we can rinse ours as well.

At times Loretta takes pity on us with our dough making and steps in to get us back on track.

After we master the art of making dough, Elena and Loretta remove our not-bad efforts and bring out buckets of dough, already risen, they have spent hours hand mixing for us the night before. Then we knead and press out the springy goo into pans—with guidance from an amused Loretta and thoughtful Elena—before slathering our dodgy results with homemade tomato sauce.

Of course we get creative with the numerous toppings Elena has set about the table. Some of us sneak shavings of fine mozzarella.

Loretta, with her keen eye, steps in at each moment of confusion or debacle and gently corrects, fixes and then pats a grateful student on the back with a warm laugh that forgives clumsiness and spills. She speaks rarely because, it seems, she does not need to. We watch her closely, and she watches us.

The results are culinary achievements–at least we think so!--displayed on flat metal pans that we parade together out to the terracotta oven burning with chopped oak branches that have been poked and prodded to the right temperature by Alfredo. He takes each pan and slides it carefully among the embers.

“I'm afraid it will be a long time before I experience another day as perfect as this one.”

It’s easy to get hypnotized by the baking process, but Alfredo directs us to the garden to wait and take in the abundant valley that surrounds the farm until the pizzas are ready. We gather at long tables with the incredibly verdant Chianti landscape before us like a staged dream.

When the baking is complete, Elena brings us plates towering with slices of hot, fluffy pizza made to our expectations–one even gluten free! Under the grape arbor Alfredo pours us glasses of their own chianti classico or cold rosé and explains the hand made love that goes into each glass.

Elena coaches us on how to use various toppings. Our question: Can there ever be too many?

Then we eat, drink, breathe deep, and realize we move altogether too fast in our regular lives.

As one student, Jacob, put it after biting into his pizza: “I'm afraid it will be a long time before I experience another day as perfect as this one.”

We rise to the challenge of a multi-course meal!

The pizza making class is the usual plan for our students at the Podere Somigli, however the family offers more challenging instruction for the ambitious cook-in-training.

A few weeks after the pizza making fun, two of us Pacific University students–Wren and Cryptid–leap at the Correani's family offer of intensive study followed by an intimate conversation with the family.

We have been serving as interns at the nearby international artists residency program at La Macina di San Cresci, located a short walk from to Podere Somigli. For today's training, we happily join four American tourists we’ve just met for the more sophisticated class with the Correanis.

Cryptid Parke, La Macina di San Cresci and Pacific University intern, at work on pasta al citarra.

This will be a full meal with multiple dishes. On the menu: Peposo with mashed potatoes, pasta al citarra with eggplant, bruschetta, and tiramasu. In order to help with our focus, we each start with glass of the family’s chianti classico, so dark and rich that when we hold it up to the window no light breaks through the ruby redness.

For the next two hours we knead dough for citarra, take turns stirring the sauce, and learn the challenging art of pressing the juice from eggplants–much more difficult than it looks.

Plate by plate we savor every dish we’ve made, pausing to breathe in the heavy, earthy scent of the grape vines that surround us.

We make the bruschetta last, so it’s perfectly fresh, and then take it out to the garden, where we will eat it first. Plate by plate we savor every dish we’ve made, pausing to breathe in the heavy, earthy scent of the grape vines that surround us. To be eating like this on a breezy June day Greve in Chianti is like a dream.

After the other Americans have left, sated and happy, for more wine tasting down the road, the two of us (Wren and Cryptid) and our Canadian guide and translator Elizabeth collect with Elena and Loretta for a chat in a small courtyard tucked between the house in the winery. The door beside us is open to Alfredo’s compact gallery and studio.

An Artful Life Is a Thinking Life. Pay Attention.

We have questions about the history of the farm, specifically Loretta’s history, as the property has been in her family for generations.

The Podere Somigli olive oil comes from trees, a few over 200 years old, on the farm. Each tree is carefully tended by Alfredo and his son Lorenzo. The extra virgin oil is used with care in Loretta and Elena's cooking classes.

Loretta tells us she has only lived on the farm for the past forty years, having been born and spent much of her young life in Florence where she worked as a seamstress. As a child, the podere was a place for her to visit, not a place she was from. She moved here with Alfredo to settle down and have a family and to make sure Alfredo had a space to make his art.

As we write this, the memories of the details of that day and the Correani family come back to us with a treasured brightness. We think about the way time shifted for a little while and how we were allowed a sense of connection not possible for most outsiders.

We ask Loretta how the farm itself and the town of Greve in Chianti in general have changed over the years. Her first response is many things are not so different now.

Elena considers Loretta's answer and then clarifies. The property has gone through several changes and upgrades.

The winery, a quaint and solid building that includes the stainless steel vessels for aging wine, a tasting room, and the winery shop, used to be a roofless, uninsulated building where residents stored cars—and then only if you had a tarp. The kitchen has also very recently been updated for the cooking classes.

The label design of each bottle of wine, made from their own grapes, is painted by Alfredo Correani. The monks who lived here in previous centuries probably made their wine here as well.

And that's not the only room in the house that’s been renovated. Even the picturesque, stone wall that wraps around the entrance drive to the property was over the years built up with bricks and embedded with ceramic art made by Alfredo.

“The main house where the monks once lived is much the same and still as lovely,” Elena confirms.

Greve, we learn from the two women, has changed too over the last generation. There’s been a steady shift towards comfort, modernity, and a tourist-based economy.

We’re told Greve was once much more agricultural—an odd thing to hear as we sit surrounded by miles of grape trellises and olive trees on every side. The land was farmed by sharecroppers. This fairy tale we are admiring required for centuries the devotion of poorly paid labor.

The feudal properties have since been divided into smaller parcels and are for the most part owned by the people who farm them, but that’s not the biggest change.

We’re told Greve was once much more agricultural—an odd thing to hear as we sit surrounded by miles of grape trellises and olive trees on every side.

Hiking the road to Greve gives any traveler a bevy of options for wine tasting, cooking lessons, or other forms of agriturismo (a farm that offers lodging and or meals) that have become the community’s lifeblood. Tourism has exerted its influence.

“The first swimming pool was installed in town twenty years ago,” Lorretta mentions. That simple statement solidifies for us the way Greve and the Chianti region have changed. This place feels timeless to visitors, but for those who people who lived here even fifty years ago the shifts in culture must be tangible.

We ask Elena and Loretta which do they think would be a better life, the community before the arrival of tourists and the pretty pools or now. Oh, not an easy question to answer! The two time periods each have benefits. How would they choose? It is important to be grateful for what they have today.

Alfredo Correani's most recent series of paintings are on the lives of immigrants and the suffering many endure to reach a safe homeland. His provocative paintings exhibit in Florence and other locations.

Alfredo takes a break from painting and ambles over. While much of his art seems closely tied to the land and shows his keen awareness of the Tuscan culture, he also confronts painful and urgent realities in his work.

It might be tempting to see only the joyful and attractive in what he creates, in part because of his kind outward demeanor, but a closer look at his recent paintings reveals an unsettling use of color and imagery intended to capture the price immigrants are forced to pay in the pursuit of a safe home for their families in a hostile world.

“Observe carefully whatever is close to you while you are here and wherever you go,” Alfredo tells us. “That is most important.”

We ask Alfredo his thoughts on living in such a beautiful space as this one, where there is time to grow, make, and eat. How we can better understand it?

“Observe carefully whatever is close to you while you are here and wherever you go,” Alfredo tells us. “That is most important.”

As we write this, the memories of the details of that day and the Correani family come back to us with a treasured brightness. We think about the way time shifted for a little while and how we were allowed a sense of connection not possible for most outsiders.

We left the farm walking at a slow, easy pace down the dirt road thinking about the real lives of the people who call this place home.

By Wren Bonham and Cryptid Parke, with contributions by Elizabeth Sargeant, Kathlene Postma, and the Pacific University writing class students.

Walking along the Slow Road from the Correani farm down to Greve in Chianti.