Our Story
Anna & Fabio
Before CasaMatilda became a place to stay,
it was already a way of living.
The farm, the pantry, the orchard, the vegetable garden, the acetaia, the apartments — they did not begin as separate ideas. They came from the same decision: to build a life shaped by land, food, care, family, and time.
That decision has a long story behind it. It begins with Fabio and Anna, with the land they learned to read before they ever learned to explain it.
Fabio
Fabio grew up watching the land being worked.
His grandfather was in the fields every day. His grandmother prepared food slowly, with care. Rural life was not an idea to him. It was something observed, absorbed, and understood before it was ever explained.
But Fabio also grew up with a father who believed education could open another kind of future. Fabio followed that path seriously. He studied economics, completed a doctorate, and built a professional life far from the fields.
At RAI, he worked in finance, management control, and organizational systems. He learned how structures work, how organizations change, and how discipline turns complexity into something that can endure.
But another part of him stayed alive.
Fabio had been close to Slow Food from its early years, when it was still more a conviction than a global institution. What it stood for was already familiar to him: land, patience, food, quality, and a different idea of what a good life could be.
Then came a moment of decision. An international company offered him the kind of role many people would have accepted. He went to Genoa to hear it out. Walking through the city afterward, his head and his heart were no longer saying the same thing.
Then his phone rang. It was Slow Food.
Fabio drove to Bra that same evening. He stayed for ten years. There, he brought structure and systems thinking into a world he had first entered through conviction. He helped build Slow Food during an important period of its growth and supported the academic project that would become the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo.
The path away from the land
had brought him back to it
in another form.
Anna
Anna’s story also began with food before food had to be explained.
As a child, she watched her grandmother prepare antipasto piemontese at the end of summer, when the vegetables were at their best. The sauce followed a recipe that had never been written down, because it had never needed to be. The preserves were sealed and put away in the pantry.
It was not taught as a lesson.
It was simply there.
Like the seasons.
Like the hills.
That foundation stayed with her, but Anna did not stay still. She moved outward through food, producers, regional products, hospitality, and cheese. She learned that quality is not only something to make. It is something to recognize, defend, and carry properly into the world.
She trained her palate through repetition, comparison, discipline, and travel. Turin. Cologne. Paris. Wisconsin, where she judged at the World Championship Cheese Contest.
A young woman from the Langhe, standing over a wheel of brie — carrying the quiet authority of someone who had earned her place.
Anna also worked in hospitality. There she learned something different, but just as important: a good stay does not come from a formula. It comes from reading the person in front of you and understanding what kind of care they need.
She carries two cultures — Italian and French — and moves between them naturally. What she brought to CasaMatilda was not only taste. It was attention.
The train
Their lives began only a few kilometers apart in the Langhe.
Both went out into the world.
Neither fully left the place that had formed them.
During those years, Anna and Fabio were both taking the train to Torino. One morning, Fabio sat down beside a young woman he had seen before. The conversation began simply. It did not stay simple for long.
Very quickly, they were talking about food, quality, land, and the right way to bring something from the earth to its final expression. The train rides continued. So did the conversations.
What began by chance started to feel like recognition. They were not only speaking about the same things. They were moving toward the same kind of life.
Eventually, Anna asked Fabio to join her for an evening of cheese and wine tasting.
Fabio could not refuse. He said yes.
The name
Their philosophy did not begin with CasaMatilda. It was already there — in the way they thought about food, land, work, care, and family. But family gave that philosophy more courage.
Matilda came first. Federico came soon after.
The children did not create the dream. They made it harder to postpone.
When Anna and Fabio began looking for land, they were not looking for a lifestyle project. They were looking for a place where the life they believed in could become real. When they found it, the work began.
The name came from that same place. CasaMatilda is not simply “Matilda’s house.” It is not a sentimental label. It is one word because the philosophy was one.
A home.
A farm.
A pantry.
A way of living.
They gave their shared philosophy a name before they fully had the words to explain it.
CasaMatilda.
The land
The land came first.
Then the cultivation.
Then the food products.
Then, in time, the farmhouse.
They planted with diversity in mind. Different crops. Different rhythms. Not dependence on one thing, but resilience through many.
The schedule did not come from a business calendar. It came from the land, the season, and what nature had actually given.
The old cascina was there from the beginning, but not as hospitality yet. Anna and Fabio would pass it and recognize something waiting inside it. One day, they would say to each other: that is the farmhouse.
It existed first as an idea.
Then as a project.
Only after the renovation did the farmhouse
become a place ready to welcome guests.
That order still matters.
Open hands, open community
Over time, CasaMatilda has also become a place where certain relationships are given form.
Not only relationships with guests, but also with people, territories, and stories that arrive from far away. Some of the blankets in the rooms, for example, come from Progetto Ermanno and the community of Jasimanà, in the Argentine Andes: a story of wool, hands, memory, and work that reaches the beds of CasaMatilda.
Those blankets are not simply decorative objects. They bring into the house the work of many hands, the memory of a family, the textile knowledge of Biella, and the dignity of a community that transformed its own material into something capable of traveling.
More recently, Kamal’s path from India to agricultural work at CasaMatilda, through a legal, safe, and dignified process, belongs to the same idea: hospitality is not only hosting. It is also creating clear, correct, and respectful conditions so that a person can work, orient himself, and begin building a possible future.
Community does not end at the edge of the property.
Sometimes it begins with a door left open.
For Anna and Fabio, this is not an image project. It is a concrete way of inhabiting the world: through land, food, work, and people.
Read Open Hands →From CasaMatilda
La Dispensa & Asì delle Langhe
CasaMatilda is expressed in more than one way. The stay is the lived experience of the house and the land. La Dispensa brings that everyday life to the table through farm preparations and preserves. Asì delle Langhe carries the same philosophy further, through artisanal wine vinegars shaped by time, patience, and craft.
They are not separate from the stay. They are part of the same CasaMatilda rhythm: the house, the land, the pantry, the table, and the work of the seasons.