Mama's recipes make fresh impact in Italian castle

A New Zealand woman and her husband have big plans for a once-derelict castle they have been restoring in Italy, writes GARRY ARTHUR.

Antonio Gorini has taken his mother's Italian recipes for a trip around the world. Eleven years ago Antonio and his New Zealand wife Justine made a special trip to Italy to steal them, as he puts it, for their Italian restaurant ventures in the South Island.

Now they have taken them back to Italy again, and Justine is practising their secrets in the new kitchen of an Umbrian medieval castle, which Antonio is restoring and turning into holiday apartments.

Antonio comes from Florence. He was always intrigued with New Zealand, and studied everything he could find about the country. At 20 he was encouraged by a New Zealand friend of his father's to set off and see the country for himself.

He worked here as a tiler, and after six years married Justine, daughter of his father's friend.

Together they decided to buy a coffee lounge at Te Anau. "But we could see nothing in it," Antonio says, "so we came home to Italy to steal the recipes of my mother and family, who had a restaurant on the outskirts of Florence during the war."

They renamed the coffee lounge La Toscana and turned it into a pizzeria, which became (and still is) hugely popular, also with European tourists. After two years Antonio and Justine were ready for a new challenge. Leaving La Toscana in the capable hands of the present owners they moved to Dunedin where they renovated and reopened the historic Savoy building as Etrusco at the Savoy, which is today one of Dunedin's most popular eateries.

Perhaps it was all that Italian cooking, or the constant reading of Mama's recipes, but eventually the lure of the old country proved too strong and Antonio and Justine returned to Italy to look for an old castle they could restore.

Everything in Tuscany seemed to be taken, so they looked over the border to Umbria, the green heart of Italy. In 1996 they found their dream ruin in the wooded hills overlooking the Tiber Valley, about an hour's drive north of Assisi.

It might have looked like nothing more than a pile of old stones, but Antonio could see into its future. With new roofs, rebuilt walls, windows and doors, and kitchens and bathrooms for each suite, it would be transformed into a set of holiday apartments.

Travellers could leave their problems behind and find peace on the softly wooded slopes of the Appenine mountains.

"You will be far away from your problems here," Antonio says, surveying the dramatic changes he has made. "It is a retreat, and you will be able to use it as a base to see the historical parts of Tuscany and Umbria, because we are right on the border. A strategic place."

With 1000 sqm of building to work with, Antonio is making at least 10 apartments. Two little separate stone buildings will become studios.

Antonio researched the background of the property in the local archives of the Vatican, and found the Castle of Passano reflects central Italy's turbulent history.

An ancient map shows a fortified building on the site, called the Signoria di Passano, dating back to the 3rd century. At least three waves of invaders have done their share of damage to the buildings. Germanic barbarians known as Longobards, who overran central Italy in the 6th century, built the lookout tower which the other buildings cluster around. After their rule collapsed, the land came under the control of the papal state.

Medieval mercenaries in the pay of the Pope were rewarded with grants of property, and Passano stayed in the hands of the Bettachini family from that time until they finally sold it to Antonio and Justine.

Antonio and his helpers have done a huge amount of restoration work, first on each floor of the main building attached to the tower, and then on the tower, which was just like a chimney with no floors when they first saw it. Now it has four floors and a roof, with windows in the embrasures - narrow slits which open wide enough inside the metre-thick walls to let archers manoeuvre their bows and crossbows.

Gaps in the walls show where the Longobards centuries ago installed central heating, channelling hot air from huge open fires. The new apartments will also have wood-fired central heating.

A barrel-vaulted manger in the base of the tower is to be turned into a big kitchen, while an old bakery has such a beautiful stone oven that Antonio wants to make it a communal bakery for the whole complex.