The Tuscan cooking is full of old country savours of several products gathered in this sweet and beautiful land. The excellent local olive oil is a common element for many dishes, giving them a peculiar flavour. This olive oil matches perfectly with vegetables, meat and fish, creating a unique gastronomy.

The typical no-salted bread is perfect with the fragrant finocchina herb and the tasty ham, and also with chopped chicken or pigeon livers and spleen of inviting toasts.

Among the first courses, tasty soups (of cabbage in Lucca, Ribollita soup in Florence and Acquacottain Grosseto) and pasta such as pappardelle with hare sauce in Arezzo stand out.

You may taste a great beef, veal, pork, rabbit and poultry roasted on the spit and also in chine of pork and the superb grilled-T-steak. An excellent cooking become famous.

Fish, not of fresh water, is a speciality of the West part of Tuscany, that faces the Tyrrhenian Sea, where the Cacciucco alla Livornese (spiced fish soup) deserves many quotations at an international gastronomic level.

Serves 6-8

•  200 g. chestnut flour
•  5 spoons of olive oil
•  30 spoons of fresh water
•  a pinch of salt
•  fresh rosemary
•  handful of pine-seeds and soaked sultana

Pour the chestnut flour in a bowl, add salt, 2 spoons of olive oil, mix and add water slowly, always mixing with a wood-spoon until you have a soft dough with no lumps. Oil a low and large pie-tin (26 cm diameter), better if it is in copper and turn the mixture in the prepared tin. Sprinkle the surface with rosemary, pine-seeds and (dried) sultana. Then, pour the cake with the oil left. Bake it in the preheated oven (220°) until it will browned and the surface will get some cracks.