Memory
The butcher who took the pitina out of people’s kitchens
For a century and a half the pitina was home food: made in the family, eaten in the family. That you can find it today in a delicatessen or on a restaurant menu is largely down to a butcher from Tramonti di Sopra who died at forty-three.
Where the pitina was born
The pitina was born in Frassaneit, a hamlet of Tramonti di Sopra, in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was not born as a delicacy: it was born as the answer to a problem. In a valley where meat was scarce and the winter long, the ewe that went lame or the chamois you managed to take had to be preserved at once — and without a casing, because the casing was for the pig, when there was a pig.
Lean mutton, goat or game was chopped and worked with salt, pepper and wild fennel, bound with a little pork fat, shaped into a ball, rolled in maize flour and hung in the chimney. The smoke did the rest, and the flour was the crust that protected it.
Of Frassaneit there remain today two clusters of houses, lived in until the 1950s and then left: half a century ago more than a hundred people lived there. The old school has been turned into a mountain shelter, on the path that leads into the Friulian Dolomites Nature Park.
On the date the sources do not entirely agree. The first half of the nineteenth century is the period given by food-history studies; the producers’ association, however, points out that there is no written evidence earlier than 1960. The place, on the other hand, is not in doubt.
Mattia Trivelli, 1949–1992
Mattia Trivelli was the butcher of Tramonti di Sopra. In the 1980s he was the first to think that this poor food, born of necessity and kept within families, might interest someone outside the valley. He began producing it in his shop on a craft scale and taking it to the region’s fairs.
What changed things was vacuum packing: once packed, the pitina could travel and sit on a shelf. A 1989 tourist guide already names it as his — «la Pitina di Mattia Trivelli, made with smoked mutton».
On 4 April 1989 he filed an application with the Italian Patent and Trademark Office to register the trademark «Pitina». He died in 1992, at the age of forty-three.
The prize that bears his name
Twenty years after his death the Premio Mattia Trivelli was established, for restaurateurs who put the pitina on their menus; a competition for producers of Pitina PGI (IGP) was added later. It is organised by the Lis Aganis Regional Ecomuseum of the Friulian Dolomites, the Pitina producers’ association, the UTI delle Valli e delle Dolomiti Friulane and the Italian Academy of Cuisine.
After him: the Slow Food Presidium and the PGI
The road Trivelli opened led a long way: first the Slow Food Presidium, the first in Friuli Venezia Giulia, then European recognition. The regulation registering the Pitina among Protected Geographical Indications (IGP) is dated 19 June 2018 and was published in the Official Journal of the European Union on 2 July of the same year.
The product specification limits production to twelve municipalities: Andreis, Barcis, Cavasso Nuovo, Cimolais, Claut, Erto e Casso, Frisanco, Maniago, Meduno, Montereale Valcellina, Tramonti di Sopra and Tramonti di Sotto.