I was maybe 13 years old when I started my first business. I spent most of the summer of 1990 playing soccer on the beach and dreaming of Italy winning the World Cup. August was the hottest of the summer months, and all I really wanted was to go swimming in the sea, but my mother and father had different ideas. “You are supposed to wait at least four hours after a meal before you can go swimming,” they would say, and I reluctantly believed them. With my head down, I would patiently wait under the ombrellone, escaping the hottest hours of the day with a comic book or the odd bit of schoolwork.
One day, bored out of my mind, I devised a plan. I figured that if it was a business I was trying to start, my entrepreneurial attitude would overshadow my digestive needs! With the help of a few friends, we procured several rasterellos—small rakes used for catching clams (arselle, to be precise)—and presented the plan to my parents, who nodded approvingly. We were now free to spend an unspecified amount of time in the water.
We did, however, have to do some of the work we had promised—a small price to pay, we thought.
Arselle, telline or zighe are tiny clams found only in some areas of coastal Tuscany. They are prized for their distinct sweetness and depth of flavour, but you have to be patient with them—their small size makes cleaning, shucking and extracting all their flavour a rather tedious process.
Most days, we would manage to catch upwards of 15 to 20 kilograms of arselle by sifting the sand close to the shore back and forth. After hours of work, our new endeavour quickly encountered an unexpected problem—we needed to move our product! With the insolence of our youth, we managed to approach a few beachgoers as our first customers, and between repeat and new customers, we would often manage to sell most of our catch. However, it soon became clear that the effort required for selling our product was keeping us away from our original mission. So, we did the unthinkable. Still in our bathing suits, we knocked at the back door of the first restaurant we encountered on the Lungomare, the renowned Osteria del Mare (can you believe it?). That day, we sold 20 kilograms of arselle on the spot, which, combined with the five kilograms we had previously sold on the beach, made for our best-selling day—75,000 lire! We were also asked for 20 more kilograms of arselle for the following day. It was on! We left in our bathing suits and felt rich from the little money in our pockets. If you had asked us, we would have told you we had it all.
We would end up visiting the back door of Osteria del Mare and its many characters many times after that first day. I remember sometimes feeling a bit intimidated by some of the cooks, finding refuge behind my brother Fabio’s back—two years my senior. It makes me smile to think that 25 years after that first visit, I would be back at that same back door—this time asking for a job.
Not every day would we sell our entire catch—and those were probably the best days. Whenever we had unsold product, we would look for Federico’s grandma, Serenella, whose family owned the section of beach we would meet at (most beaches in the area are privately owned). She was an amazing cook and a true nonna, delighted by the presence of her grandkid and his friends, and ready to feed us all at a whim.
And she did.
We would drop off the arselle with Serenella, and I would offer to help, because my mom had raised me like that. We would first place the arselle in a large bowl and give them a sort of massage with salt to encourage any sand to be expelled. We would then wash them well, drain them, and talk to them for a bit before adding them to a pot on a lively fire with a glass of water to help them steam along.
After a few minutes, the arselle would open up, and the prized broth would be ready to be strained again. At this point, we would also remove the meat from the shells and set them aside, taking care to discard any unopened ones. There was always a simple job for me to do, and I really liked feeling useful.
And then, it was time to make the sauce. We would start by frying a good amount of garlic with parsley stems and a generous pinch of chilies in plenty of olive oil, of course. We would then deglaze with a lot of wine and add the broth from the arselle. After 15 minutes of gentle bubbling (that I spent snacking because helping out did have its privileges), the unthinkable happened. Serenella grabbed fistfuls of spaghetti and added them raw, directly into the broth. What was she thinking? I watched her helping the pasta into the pot as it softened a little.
The pasta eventually cooked in the broth, absorbing all its delicious flavours. In return, the broth reduced to almost nothing. In addition to that, the pasta also started to release its starches, thickening the now sauce and perfectly emulsifying the oils and broth together. At that point, the arselle meat went back in, along with a generous handful of parsley—a true ode to simplicity. We would then spend the rest of those hot evenings crowded around a makeshift table right on the beach, still in our bathing suits, eating pasta and drinking Coca-Cola while laughing at the many characters we had met.
That was the summer of 1990, when Italy almost won the World Cup and I started my very first business.