There's a flour that comes from a medieval castle. And from grains Italy had almost forgotten.

On the Via Francigena, a few kilometres from Pienza, there is a medieval castle. It's called Spedaletto. And that's where the flour we use at Trombicche comes from.

Castello di Spedaletto sits in the Val d'Orcia, a UNESCO World Heritage landscape and one of the most intact farming plains in Italy. It's not a place you stumble upon: you get there knowing where you're going. The Grappi family knows the way well — they've worked it since 1992.

Grains Italy had almost forgotten

After the war, Italian agriculture chose quantity. Modern wheats — bred for yield, resistance, industrial convenience — took the place of the old ones. Varieties grown for centuries all but vanished from the fields. All but.

The Grappis went the other way. In the nineties, before it was fashionable, they started growing the varieties the big producers no longer wanted: low-yield grains, tall-standing, with a flavour impossible to standardise.

• Senatore Cappelli — the durum wheat of the South that resisted modernisation
• Verna — a Tuscan soft wheat, nearly extinct, now protected
• Einkorn farro — the oldest cultivated cereal, remarkably digestible
• Emmer farro — the farro of Tuscan farming tradition

Stone milling, bronze dies

Stone milling is not an aesthetic detail. When the millstone turns slowly, the kernel breaks differently: the germ stays whole, the heat doesn't burn off the aroma, the flour keeps the fine bran that keeps it alive. It behaves differently — absorbs water differently, kneads differently, cooks differently.

Bronze dies do the same for pasta. Bronze is rough: it leaves the surface porous, so it holds the sauce, absorbs the dressing, doesn't let it slide off. Teflon dies — big industry's choice — give you pasta that is smooth, uniform, perfect for photography. And that's all.

From the Mulino Val d'Orcia — the Grappi family's project — come flours and pasta with a history, a variety and a territory written inside. It isn't marketing. It's agronomy.

Trombicche's open kitchen

At Trombicche there is no fixed list of pastas. There is whatever makes sense with the flour that arrives from the castle. Sometimes it's the fusilloni, sometimes something simpler — pasta, water, grain, and a sauce with a history as long as the road to Spedaletto. The gnocchi we make ourselves; the fusilloni are the mill's.