Gala Dinner

Born in Guardiagrele in 1985, he grew up at the stoves of the family trattoria, Villa Maiella, holder of a Michelin star since 2009. After studying food science, in 2009 he founded his own farm to give the kitchen a short supply chain and first-rate produce. Three years as chef de partie with Michel Bras in Laguiole refined his technique and creativity. Today he leads the kitchen of Villa Maiella with a philosophy that joins memory, territory and innovation: the most genuine Abruzzo, told on the plate.

Born in Polesine Parmense in 1958, he learned to cook beside his aunt Emilia. A teacher at the Salsomaggiore hotel school at just 22, he has taken Italian cuisine to many countries, working even with Prince Charles. One of the leading figures in protecting Culatello di Zibello PDO, since 2010 he has expressed his “gastrofluvial” cooking at Antica Corte Pallavicina, bound to the Po and its produce: a Michelin star since 2011. Commendatore of the Italian Republic, and since 2019 mayor of Polesine Zibello.

Raised in Sarzana, in Lunigiana — the border country between Liguria, Tuscany and Emilia — he trained at Angelo Paracucchi’s Locanda dell’Angelo. For almost eighteen years he cooked at 2,400 metres, at the Baita Belvedere in Champoluc, then came home: with Gianmarco Ferrandi he founded Officine del Cibo (among Italy’s 50 Top Pizza) and turned a seventeenth-century farmhouse in Fosdinovo into Locanda De Banchieri, with its own estate. The Michelin Guide 2025 awarded it a star: a cuisine of the borderland, between land and sea.

A languages graduate, an interpreter, a near-Serie A basketball player: cooking came later, and became a vocation. After years of high-end catering — from the Turin Book Fair to lunches for Napolitano and Gorbachev — in 2016 she opened the restaurant that bears her name in a deconsecrated sixteenth-century church in the heart of Tortona. Her elegant, intuitive cooking has grown alongside Derthona, the Timorasso of the Colli Tortonesi; beside her, her husband Enrico has built a wine list that has become a cult address.

Sara, from Milan, grew up among rare pigments and artists’ colours; in 2010 she chose the kitchen, in the school of Massimiliano Aresi, a pupil of Gualtiero Marchesi, and in 2019 opened Frosch in Varena, in the Val di Fiemme. Fabrizio trained with Marchesi at L’Albereta, where he became head chef in 2004 after Paris, Rome and Cannes; at La Speranzina in Sirmione he won a Michelin star in 2021. Since 2024 they have run Frosch together: elegance, precision and a fine balance between tradition and innovation.