“‘In Cocconato, the song costs this much: salami, robiola cheese, truffles, and good wine'”: so reads an old sign, now placed on the wall of the Nursery School, to commemorate the quality of local products which, together with the particular microclimate for which the town was given the appellation “Riviera of Monferrato” in the 19th century, are at the origin of Cocconato’s fame as a tourist center.
on which many municipalities are now focusing as a tourist attraction, was for Cocconato a reality as early as the 17th century.
A rich series of letters from the 17th and 18th centuries, preserved in the municipal historical archive, highlight how wine, robiola cheese, truffles, and other products were frequently sent by local administrators to nobles, authorities, and officials to obtain privileges and favors. With a few barrels of good wine, taxation and military lodgings were even avoided. In 1665, a gift of “beautiful fruit” was made to the governor of Verrua, while the abbot of Vercelli was presented with 40 robiola cheeses and truffles. The following year, fifty dozen robiola cheeses were given as a gift to Empress Margaret of Austria during her stop in Acqui, during a journey in the Upper Monferrato. Wine was sent in 1669 to Gabriele of Savoy, for “the exemption from the lodging of the presidial muta” (likely referring to a change or rotation of military personnel). Again, robiola cheeses were the gift made in 1676 to the procurator Belletti, contacted for a case concerning a certain cleric Serra.
born from the fortunate coincidence of the availability of products from local farmhouses and the presence of talented cooks, capable of enhancing their unique qualities, is ancient and evidenced by the flourishing of inns, restaurants, and hotels to welcome the arrival in town of foreigners, attracted by commercial activities and the thriving market.
The prestige acquired such renown as to attract illustrious figures to Cocconato, far from the major communication routes, including Prince Umberto of Savoy, of whom memories and testimonials of affection are still preserved today in the small room of the Cannon d’Oro restaurant (already in the 1830s): His Royal Highness came to Cocconato several times and became friends with the owners, Ernesto and Giovanni Petrino, who also supplied wine to the Royal House.
Silvestro Cavallito was born in Susa in 1865. His father, Giuseppe, from Cocconato, learned the art of cooking at the Cocconato School of Cooks and then moved to Susa where he opened an inn and started a family. From his birth, Silvestro breathed in the “air of the kitchen.”
Once grown, he learned the first secrets of the trade from his father but, at a certain point, driven by passion and the desire to improve professionally, he decided to emigrate to England.
One day he was hired in the kitchen of the Carlton Hotel in London, of which Escoffier was the Director, and from there began his career as a chef and his friendship with the French cook.
Over time, Silvestro achieved success and fame, as well as considerable wealth. At a certain point, he decided to return to Italy and moved to the Maroero hamlet in the Municipality of Cocconato, where he had the current Osteria della Pompa built, which he inaugurated in 1924.
In Maroero, everyone loved Silvestro: he provided resources for the needs of the village, procured medicines and comforts that were not easily available. Silvestro Cavallito ended his life in Maroero in 1944, at the age of 79.
inaugurated in 1912, fostered the development of productive activities in the surrounding area, in addition to gypsum stone processing plants. Between the 1920s and 1930s, industrial-scale wine production became increasingly important, and promotional initiatives were not lacking, such as participation in the grape harvest festivals in Asti with a picturesque float on which the tower, the emblem of the town, was reproduced. In Cocconato, a grape festival was also organized in the same years. The improvement of the road network, together with the railway, contributed in the 1930s to increasing the fame of the Riviera del Monferrato as a tourist center. In the post-World War II period, the progressive transformation of the town, linked to the migratory phenomenon towards Turin, led to the availability of holiday homes and the consequent development of a form of tourism linked to weekends and the summer period, which integrated the daily tourism attracted by the unchanged fame of local restaurants.ranti locali.
also became increasingly renowned Cocconato specialties. The robiola cheeses were judged by De Canis to be those of “the best taste of any other that is bought in the neighboring towns, mainly due to the quality of the herbs on which the cattle and sheep especially feed”: in the mid-nineteenth century, they were exported “to various parts of Piedmont and also to foreign lands” for an annual value of 2000 lire, and at the beginning of the twentieth century, they were the object of “considerable trade.” From a purely family-level production with sheep’s milk, in the 1950s, thanks to the initiative of Osvaldo Veggia’s dairy, there was a shift to artisanal production with cow’s milk, an activity now continued by Caseificio Balzi. Also during the last century, local butcher shops produced “sausages and salami that are exported in quantity.” The cotechino, in particular, gained great notoriety, obtained with a secret recipe passed down from father to son. The production of cured meats continues in the spirit of tradition thanks to Salumificio Ferrero.
of the Riviera del Monferrato has consolidated in recent decades, thanks to the strengthening of folkloric and cultural events and the dynamism of local entrepreneurs, capable of focusing on high-quality products and progressively expanding their national and international market.
Over the centuries, agriculture has been the most important economic source for the entire hilly territory of Piedmont. An economy that remained closed and aimed at self-sufficiency until the threshold of the twentieth century, providing for the primary needs of the local population. The lack of effective communication did not allow for the specialization of crops, and the farmer, to provide for his own sustenance, cultivated a bit of everything: cereals, vineyards, meadows, woods, hemp, etc. The peasant family, in which the father represented the undisputed authority, was organized hierarchically, and each member had their own task and function, based on age and abilities. Significant changes occurred starting from the end of the 18th century, with the expansion of vines and cereal crops, in the face of a progressive reduction of woods and pastures and fallow land. At the end of the 19th century, the increase in small landowning farmers and the development of the road network favored a further expansion of the vine (which also had a significant landscape transformation as a consequence), often cultivated in mixed farming systems, and an increase in cattle, both as a workforce and for the production of milk and meat, as well as the emergence of related activities such as silkworm rearing and hemp cultivation. Alongside the “particolari” (the owners of the farmhouse where they worked), there was a significant presence of tenant farmers and sharecroppers (many of whom were immigrants, especially from Veneto), who continued to operate in a scenario characterized by excessive fragmentation of agricultural property and low crop specialization. The post-phylloxera conversion of the 1920s and 1930s, which took place in a climate of general economic depression, marked a primordial specialization of the vineyard and an intensification of cultivation in the inter-row spaces, accompanied by an improvement in rural buildings, the introduction of chemical fertilizers, and the first forms of mechanization, with the appearance of steam threshing machines.
n the 1950s, hilly agriculture remained anchored to traditional cultivation techniques, with extensive use of family labor and animal power. Only in the following decade was there a progressive mechanization. In those years, the availability of labor also decreased, as young people were attracted to the Turin industry or other occupations that could guarantee better and safer wages. The consequence was the progressive abandonment of land and meadows with steeper slopes, where the use of machines was not possible, and the orientation towards crops that required less manual labor, which led to the reduction of the vineyard area and the growth of uncultivated land. In the mid-eighteenth century in Cocconato, the agricultural area included 71 hectares of arable land, 160 of meadows and pastures, 404 of vineyards, 181 of woods and 115 of fallow land. The general report of the intendant of Asti, Giovan Francesco Balduini di Santa Maria, records, in 1750, a production of 260 carts of ten brente of wine (130,000 liters), to which are added 50 carts (25,000 liters) in Cocconito, at the time an autonomous municipality; however, the quantity produced was not sufficient for the needs of the population, which was estimated at 360 carts for Cocconato and 80 for Cocconito. The agricultural area in 1892 (also including the former municipality of Cocconito) was divided into 300 hectares of arable land, 150 of meadows, 800 of vineyards, 450 of woods.
of 1970 recorded the presence of 456 farms, of which 24 had Utilized Agricultural Area (UAA) of over 10 hectares and only one of over 20 hectares. Of these, 302 owned vineyards covering an area of 149.50 hectares. The subsequent census of 1982 showed a 28% decrease in the number of farms, which fell to 330. Of these, 87 had an area of less than one hectare, only 3 over 10 hectares and 2 over 20. The farms with vines numbered 160, covering an area of 76.23 hectares. In 1990, the number of farms remained stable at 320, of which 53 had no UAA, 107 were under one hectare, 11 were over 10 hectares and 2 were over 50.
The farms with vines numbered 116, covering a total area of 55.45 hectares.
A reversal of this trend only manifested itself at the dawn of the new millennium, thanks to the ability and courage of some local winegrowers who began to plant extensive modern vineyards, aimed at the production of high-quality wines, with the application of cultivation techniques no longer tied to established customs, but dictated by the most modern agronomic guidelines. This allowed for a revival of viticulture, at a time when it risked a sharp contraction due to the disappearance of many older farmers. Today, the vineyard area is about 70 hectares, of which about 60 belong to wine-producing farms and 10 to other farmers.
(text by Franco Zampicinini)