I was born in the province of Cuneo, near the Alps, in a village that looks like a still from a 1930’s movie, where women still feel they need to have red lipstick and heels to leave the house and go buy bread, where Sunday is still the day you go to mass at eleven in the morning, then stroll down the portici of the main street, chatting with people and end up at the caffe’ for a San Simone before lunch.

A village where you still see the scars of World War Two, because our valleys have lost a whole generation of men, then, and there is not a single person who does not have a soldier’s story to tell or remember. My village is beautiful and special, but there are many like it in the Cuneo province: it is a village of the Langhe, the rolling hills of good wine, hazelnuts, amazing cheeses and incomparable food, so much so you probably know about them without even realizing it.