San Miniato | The Truffle I Couldn't Taste
The white-truffle capital of Italy, the festival economy, and what depth actually costs
The first thing San Miniato gives you, before any truffle, is the climb. We left the car in the lower town, where the station and the leather warehouses sit on the flat by the Arno, and walked up, and the road kept turning back on itself the way roads do when a town has decided to live on a hill and let the valley fend for itself. By the time we reached the top, my calves had an opinion and the whole lower Valdarno had opened up behind us, the river a grey seam, the Apennines a smudge, and above everything the rebuilt German tower standing where Federico II put one eight hundred years ago and where the retreating Wehrmacht blew it to rubble one night in July 1944. The townspeople put it back brick by brick. They could not stand to look at the sky where it had been.
I will tell you now that I do not like truffle. Any of it. White, black, shaved, infused, it doesn’t matter. It belongs to that small family of foods built almost entirely out of one insistent smell, like very old cheese, which I also leave on the plate. I will eat anchovies until someone takes the tin away. I love Gentleman’s Relish, I love everything that comes out of cold water and tastes of the bottom of it. But truffle does nothing for me except announce itself. Sophia is the opposite. She loves the stuff so completely that there is truffle salt in our kitchen, a small, obscene jar of it, and she will tell you, because I cannot, that the white one is more pungent, closer to garlic, better raw, while the black holds up to heat and wants to be cooked into something. I take her word for all of it. I came to the truffle capital of Italy as a man who cannot taste the thing the capital is built on, which turns out to be a useful position from which to watch.
Because San Miniato is built on it, and you understand this inside five minutes of reaching the top. We came in winter, deliberately after the festival rather than during, because we don’t like crowds and we reasoned the prices in the shops would settle once the November weekends were over, and the buses stopped running. The town runs three weekends of the Mostra Mercato Nazionale del Tartufo Bianco every November, fifty-some years deep now, and during those weekends you cannot even drive up: they close the hill and put you on a shuttle from the bottom, which tells you everything about the scale of the thing. We had missed all that. And still, walking the spine of the centro storico past the Duomo and into the small squares, the entire place announced one product. Truffle in the windows, truffle on the chalkboards, truffle in the names of shops, the whole borgo organized like a reliquary around a smell I can’t stand.
I want to be careful here, because the easy move is contempt, and contempt would be wrong. There is nothing dishonest about a town leaning on its one thing. This is simply how towns survive, in Italy and everywhere else. Strip San Miniato of the truffle and you have a genuinely good Tuscan town, walkable, set on its hills, sitting somewhere above a small borgo and well below a finished city like Siena, worth an afternoon and a long lunch with the countryside laid out below you. But every town needs its thing or it disappears into the general green pleasantness of the region, becomes one more place you drive through on the way to a place you’ve heard of. The truffle is San Miniato’s answer to that problem. The town found the one card it could not be beaten on, and it has played that card for a century.
And it is a strong card. The white truffle, Tuber magnatum, is genuinely rare in a way that almost nothing else in the food world still manages to be. It cannot be farmed. People have tried for decades, and it refuses, growing only where it decides to grow, in a narrow band of calcareous Italian hillside, found by men who walk the woods at night with trained dogs and tell no one their spots. The black truffle is hard enough, hand-dug, a craft of its own, and grows across Umbria and Lazio and Abruzzo and can at least be coaxed into a managed orchard. The white one will not be coaxed. So the scarcity is real, not invented, and the price follows: a kilo of white truffle moves between fifteen hundred and five thousand euros depending on the year and the size of the lump, and in a thin season it has cleared six thousand. When a restaurant shaves truffle over your pasta with great ceremony, that’s almost always the black. The white is the one you read about and rarely eat.
San Miniato’s claim to it is old and a little improbable, and the town keeps a monument to the most improbable part: in 1954 a hunter named Arturo Gallerini, known to everyone as Bego, went into the woods at Balconevisi just outside town with his dog Parigi and pulled out a single white truffle weighing over two and a half kilos. They sent it to Dwight Eisenhower. There is now an ironwork statue of the man and the dog standing in town, the two of them cast in metal forever on the strength of one absurd lucky night in the trees, and I stood in front of it for a while thinking that this is exactly how a place becomes what it is. Not by plan. By one accident large enough to build a story on, and then a century of people agreeing to keep telling it.
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We had lunch at Pepenero, on the Piazza del Duomo, the kind of place that sits a notch above a trattoria without quite tipping into ceremony. The room opens onto a terrace, and the terrace overlooks the whole valley, and we took a table where Sophia could look at Tuscany, and I could look at Sophia looking at it. We ate the truffle, of course (at least she did). Bottoni, the pasta named for buttons, little stuffed coins of pasta with meat and tomato inside and the truffle grated over the top in front of us. Sophia went quiet the way she does when something is very good. We bought a few jars of truffle things on the way out (obviously), the way you do, the way everyone does, the small purchase that lets you carry the day home with you.
And then time passed, which is the part the town doesn’t tell you about, because the town only sees you on the day. The jars sat in the cupboard. We are not people who keep proper white truffle at home; almost nobody is. But we do buy black truffle now and then, and we don’t buy it on a hill behind a closed road. We buy it from a man named Marco who runs a food truck in a supermarket parking lot down on the Marina near us. He digs some of it himself and sells the rest for the farmers around him, and there is no shuttle bus. We go to truffle festivals too, but not that one. We go to the small ones, up in the mountain villages, and a truffle festival up there is two or four tables in a piazza, maybe a nonna with a folding chair and some jars, somebody selling porcini alongside. The buyers are not wealthy. The buyers are Giovanni from the next village over, who likes truffles when they're in season and can afford a little. There is no event. There is no Instagram. Often there is no announcement at all, just talk in the bar that something will happen at the end of the month, a weekend, nobody quite sure which day or what time, only that it will happen here, and then Marco or whoever sets a table in the square with ten truffles and maybe a price written on a scrap of paper. And because it works this way, with no buses and no closed roads and no festival to feed, it is also far cheaper.
This is the difference I kept turning over in my head on the drive home, and it has almost nothing to do with mushrooms. San Miniato sells you the truffle as an occasion. The mountain village hands it to you as a Tuesday. One has built a hundred-year machine around the smell and runs the buses to prove it; the other doesn’t bother to tell you it’s open. Both are real. The festival truffle is the same fungus as the parking-lot truffle. But the festival has to charge you for the festival, and the village charges you for the truffle, and somewhere in that gap is everything I think about when I think about why we left the wheel and came to live in a place like this.
I never did taste it. We drove down off the hill in the last of the light, the rebuilt tower going dark behind us, Sophia smelling faintly of garlic and pleased with the world, the jars rattling in the bag at her feet.
