The Italian home of pesto and pandolce is turning a corner
when it comes to food, with modern dishes sharing the
culinary spotlight with old favourites. Words: Audrey GillanGENOA
Eat
T
here’s a whirring and a juddering,
a clattering cacophony as a 19th-
century confectionery machine spins
around to make a praline paste. The aroma of
hazelnuts hangs heavy in the air as Eugenio
Boccardo scatters chopped nuts into a drum,
where two large granite wheels pound away.
With rubber belts rolling above him and
wheels turning beside him, Eugenio takes
a chocolate scraper and scoops up what has
now become a liquidy puree.
“This is the oil from inside the hazelnuts,”
he explains. This paste will then be reined
in another machine, along with sugar, over
the course of two days. It’s a slow process.
The little factory at Romeo Viganotti, a
classic Genoese chocolatier and confectioner,
sits across ive loors, in what was once a
brothel. Eugenio, whose father owns the
business, leads me to another room where I
meet Adriana, who’s pouring orange liquid
through a metal funnel into vintage moulds
dusted with icing sugar. She’s worked here
for 45 years, Eugenio tells me, and today
she’s making gocce di rosolio. “They’re a
typical candy of Genoa,” he says. “They’reparticularly popular with children, because
the inside remains liquid.”
People still queue to pick their chocolates
at this 153-year-old local institution. “They
take a long time to choose. The waiting is
part of the charm and the beauty,” Eugenio
tells me. “People are old-fashioned in Genoa.”
Romeo Viganotti is one of the city’s
listed botteghe storiche, historic shops and
workshops where tradition is revered. At
another of these wonderful places, Antica
Polleria Aresu (a shop selling chicken
and eggs), an exuberant Matteo Timossi
demonstrates his antiquated device for
determining the freshness of an egg.
Assistants run back and forth to the walk-in
fridge, bringing whole birds or thwacking
breast illets onto the marble counter. The
fourth generation of his family to run the
business, Matteo laughs: “These shops are
like those animal species, like the panda, we
must be preserved or there’ll be nothing let.”
The botteghe storici are the cornerstones
of life in the medieval streets of Genoa
— not only a relic of the past, but a testament
that life in this city is still lived vibrantly. IMAGES: XEDUM; GETTYCLOCKWISE FROM
TOP LEFT: Santa Maria
di Castello; Pietro
Romanengo fu Stefano;
pandolce; handmade
chocolates, Romeo
Viganotti60 nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel