Antica Macelleria Falorni

Just off the main square in Greve is the Antica Macelleria Falorni, a butcher’s shop that every harassed dinner party giver would like to live next to. This business, established in the 1840s, has become justifiably famous all over Italy for the quality of its meat. The proprietors, Lorenzo and Stefano Bencistà, proudly claim that every morning on opening there are at least 60 different cuts of meat for sale, as well as roasts, meatballs and Tuscan shish kebabs prepared to their mother’s recipes with fresh herbs, juniper berries, tomatoes & red peppers. Their acclaimed FINOCCHIONA sausage is made not with the usual cultivated fennel, but with feathery wild fennel gathered wild fennel gathered locally in the Chianti hills. And most astonishing of all, they still make, to an antique and ridiculously non-commercial recipe, prosciutto casalingo sotto cenere, now completely unavailable anywhere else. The ham is first stamped with the date, and then buried under wood ashes for up to two years. Originally the Tuscan peasants preserved their pork in this way throughout the summer months to have it, pink and tender, to eat during the long cold winter. Lorenzo does it now, he says, not to make money, because its impossible to do on a large scale, but ‘purely for the satisfaction of it, to keep the old traditions alive’. The Antica Macelleria Falorni also exports wild boar sausages and prosciutto all over Europe.