Castelletto di Pedeguarda sits in a serene enclave of trees in Veneto’s Prosecco hills, the fertile wine-producing region that marks the transition between the vast lowlands surrounding the Venetian lagoon and the icepick peaks of the Dolomites. A sturdy, stone fortress dotted with red wooden shutters that peer down into a cobblestone courtyard, it was built in the 14th century as a defensive post for nearby Castelbrando, the ancestral seat of the Brandolini family, whose descendants still inhabit the village today. Clementina Viezzer, Clemi to all who know her, arrived on the steps of Castelletto di Pedeguarda as a young teenager. It was the early 1960s and she had been hired as a nanny for the noble Arrivabene Valenti Gonzaga family’s young children.
‘It was a different time back then,’ recounts Vera Arrivabene, who was just a baby when Clemi came to take care of her and her siblings. ‘Her father was my grandmother’s gardener, so she came to work for my family.’ According to Vera, Clemi quickly made herself indispensable. ‘She became my second mother,’ she adds. ‘I still call her every night.’ Clemi spent several years caring for the children, but it was clear her passion lay elsewhere. ‘She took care of me when I was a little girl, and then suddenly after a few years she announced she wanted to cook. So my mother agreed to put her in the kitchen.’ Together, Clemi, alongside Vera’s mother, the Countess Maria delle Grazie Brandolini d’Adda, would sift through the family’s old cookbooks, gradually developing her craft. ‘My mother loved cooking, so they would do it together,’ she says. ‘It started with simple family recipes, but slowly she started doing more sophisticated things.’
When Vera’s father, Count Leonardo Arrivabene Valenti Gonzaga, died in 1971 the entire family left Veneto for Rome. Clemi, unhappy living in the capital, asked to return to her home village after only a few years. ‘She didn’t like living in Rome,’ Vera remembers. ‘Clemi is a character. She’s not easy at all. If she doesn’t like something she doesn’t pretend.’ But since she was still eager to follow her passion for cooking, the family gifted Clemi a small outbuilding at the bottom of the hill leading to the main house, an ancient former inn built in the early 1600s for passing travellers and their horses. In 1977 it officially became Al Castelletto dalla Clemi, her own restaurant, which still operates in nearly the same manner today.
In the 45 years since she opened its doors, Al Castelletto has become a place of gastronomic pilgrimage, where patrons visit as much for Clemi as they do her cooking. Indeed, the lore around the septuagenarian chef is almost as potent as her food. ‘Once, eons ago, I took Clemi to New York, where my sister lived at the time,’ recalls Vera. ‘I was visiting the Twin Towers and somebody came up to us and said: “Clemi, what are you doing here?” It’s amazing, she’s known all over the world.’ Even today, the chef still holds court over the dining room most days of the week. Making her rounds among the tables, greeting some with incomparable warmth, others with a suspicious eye. ‘If she doesn’t like you, you’ll know,’ jokes Vera, ‘because you’ll be eating on the veranda.’
No matter where you’re assigned to sit, the food remains the real draw. ‘She prepares very simple, very traditional food,’ explains her nephew, Nicolò Bof, who has worked alongside Clemi in running their family restaurant for the past nine years. ‘The dishes follow the seasons. Right now in the autumn, we have mushrooms tagliatelle and pumpkin risotto. In the winter, we use radicchio.’ But the centrepiece of the menu, and in fact, of the entire restaurant, is the spit-roasted meat, cooked on an open flame grill – known as a fogher in Venetian dialect – that sits in the middle of the dining room.
According to Nicolò, a fogher is a common sight in local restaurants. And in fact, much of Al Castelletto’s furnishings have been collected from the local area. The thick red stripes painted on the walls are the very same as those in the dining room at the top of the hill. The floral-printed ceramic dishes were picked up in the nearby town of Nove de Bassano, while the dainty-coloured glassware was sourced in Murano. The table linens, meanwhile, come from Mussolente, a village in Veneto prized for its textiles. ‘We make the tablecloths ourselves,’ says Nicolò, who even had a local seamstress craft the napkin-like pendant lamps that illuminate the dining room. ‘On Tuesdays when the restaurant is closed Clemi and I go to Mussolente to buy fabrics.’ And without fail, each table comes adorned with vases bursting with cut blooms. ‘Clemi’s father, on his deathbed, wanted her to become either a cook or a florist,’ adds Nicolò. ‘For this reason, every week we prepare fresh bouquets of flowers.’
Even now at 78 years old, Clemi remains dedicated to her craft, with no signs of slowing down. ‘I’m worried because she’s getting old. I tell her to please rest and stop cooking,’ frets Vera. ‘But it’s her life – and she loves it.’
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