Piantoli countryside
Phone +39 339 5928649
Rooms: four
Hectares: 40 belonging to the owners
Breeding: capons, black pigs from Caserta, cows from Marche, farmyard animals
Agriculture: vines (aglianicone, primitivo from Conca), olive trees, vegetables, fruit
Products: a selection of cheeses, salamis and food preserved in oil

I love those restaurant owners who decide what you will eat. This happens at Berardino Lombardo’s farmhouse, his eyes are like the ones of a Siberian husky and his beard is like the fur of a wolf from Apennines.

In Terre di Conca you will enjoy an intense and invigorating experience. While Berardino was cooking I admired the cats drowsing in the garden, the view over the surrounding countryside, the chestnut trees, the pool, the ripe Indian figs, the olive groves, the fruit trees, the rooms and the dining rooms of this building made with stones and furnished with elegance in the Tuscan style.

Lombardo is very precise and relaxed in the kitchen. He is kind in the room. The kitchen in the open can be seen by the clients who can see Berardino caring for all the details and can glance at boiling pans, full of all the products from the vegetable garden. The secret of his menu is the fact that it includes products of the season. About five years ago Berardino Lombardo and his wife Antonietta moved from the successful Caveja in Pietravairano to this place, 40 hectares within a stone’s throw from the Lazio region, they preferred this land which gives a strong sense of freedom.
 
The specialties of this farmhouse are the home-produced vegetables and meat or the ones coming from the area. He combines the vegetables according to the tradition and his imagination. You will find potatoes with peppers, escarole and beans, potatoes, cabbage and sausage, cauliflower salad, savoury cake with aubergines and pulse and aubergine soup. But there is also the “panzanella” made with bread, tomatoes and celery, the bread soaked in water and sautéed with broccoli, the ham and the bacon obtained from the black pig from Caserta, the “polenta” (a type of ‘bread’ made with cornflour) with tomato sauce and sausages, pork rind and pecorino cheese, pasta with chickpeas with sizzled garlic and a juicy and tender roasted pork which Berardino flavours with chilli pepper, rosemary, fennel and garlic.

Regarding the wine there are not only the local ones. Berardino Lombardo is a wine connoisseur and offers the best wines from his well-stocked cellar to the most faithful guests. I will never forget a Barbaresco Bricco Asili 1985 wine which I tasted two years ago during the dinner on the occasion of the Campania finals of the Vini Buoni d’Italia wine guide.

Monica Piscitelli

2 June 2007. Today it is my birthday, I am 50 years old and so I want to give you a review which should be kept secret, without revealing it to anyone, only to those friends of yours who are able to reach the right balance of mind and taste as the one realized by Bernardino Lombardo. He was a chef anthropologist and has become a farmer and a breeder: he has realized this breathtaking farmhouse with his wife Antonietta. It is located among the chestnut trees of the extinct volcano of Roccamonfina where the Ferrarelle and Lete water springs, just on the border between Lazio and Campania. They set up the Caveja in Pietravairano thanks to a simple and sound method. In that ex shed, which was renovated with wood and stones, it was possible to eat dishes of the peasant tradition. The bread crumbed tomatoes were delicious, they were seasoned with bread crumbs, oil and oregano. He has the same reserved character of Alfonso. Berardino has turned his interests from cuisine to agriculture, from dishes to products. He cares for raw materials a lot and he often argues with the suppliers and refuses the franchising which is easy but wipes away the typicalness of the territory. So Bernardino and his wife Antonietta bought forty hectares of fertile, sandy and black land and moved to the mountain leaving Caveja in 2004. This change has made them drawn away from the attention of mass media: they process “annurche” apples, pears, aglianicone and primitive from Conca vines, the meat obtained form the black pigs from Caserta and the cows from Marche. There are about ten hectares of wood. There is a pool and a patio to eat outdoors: these are the only modern things. Groups can visit the farm but booking is mandatory, it is better that visitors are people who the owners know or introduced by friends according the old rule of word-of-mouth which has always worked well in the country before the arrival of trade guides. The interior balance is due to the countryside cultivated as a garden and to the building made with simple tuff and wood bricks, furnished with fine taste and style, enriched with old and imposing furnishings, a fireplace whose dimensions are the ones of the Middle Age, four rooms and a dining room very cared for as only a woman is able to do, a collection of laces shown to visitors, a well equipped kitchen, a small case containing bottles located at the entrance where also some products are shown. There is no TV to avoid to communicate wrong concepts and you can enjoy the surreal silence of the mountains in the background. 

Here Fabio Rizzari and Giampaolo Gravina come when they have to taste something in Campania for the Espresso, it is the favourite stop of Luigi Cremona and Lorenza Vitale and also Daniel Thomases, who comes here with Teodoro Naddeo, enjoys this place very much. Here you can eat those dishes which were prepared at home in the past and now are very rare like bread crumbed tomatoes, a fresh salad of carrots and peppers, the savoury country cake with pumpkin flowers, the aubergine gratin (it is a delicious sweet taste) and the mafalde pasta with caciocavallo cheese: these are only some dishes of the many recipes prepared. Here you can take part in the agricultural activities, make cuisine courses and having rest thanks to a rural hospitality which is widespread but it is difficult to find such a perfection in other places. Those who come from Northern Italy will experience the revolution from Campania of the last fifteen years, they will understand that many common places aren’t true, they will enter into contact with biodiversity and above all with the tastes of the agricultural tradition of the Italian territory which is great thanks to the soil composition, the weather and the history. Here the Italian cuisine was born. When you go to visit Berardino, he has blue-green eyes typical of people from Sannio like the ones of the Longobards (his surname derives from them), you will understand that young people working in the catering field have to focus on tradition. For example, the team from Cetara offers dishes which are presented in a modern way and are the result of a research but they are not baroque and the recipes of the Oasis are the result of a long study. Too many chefs prepare risottos, they should be prepared in Northern Italy, here rice only means “sartù” and rice balls. You have to prepare dishes of the territory like the tomatoes by Beradino, the Vesuvius by Alfonso or the tuna-fish Genoese: so your dishes will be remembered forever. Only those who really know the raw materials will propose these dishes to you.

Leave the Caianello exit, follow the Casilina towards Roma for eight kilometres, turn left to Conca della Campania and go on as far as the Piantoli hamlet. As soon as you see the traces of man in nature you will be arrived.