Savini Tartufi

Four generations of Tuscan truffle hunters. The family who unearthed the largest white truffle in history.

In the 1920s, Giuseppe Savini farmed at Balconevisi, near San Miniato, and hunted truffles with his dog on the side. His son Zelindo made it the whole trade — an estate warden who did well enough in the woods to trade his Vespa for a big British motorbike, which in postwar Tuscany said everything. Zelindo's son Luciano trained as a pastry chef, and in the early 1980s he and his wife Carla began cooking the family's finds into jars. Today the fourth generation leads: Cristiano Savini, with his sister Romina, from Forcoli, in white-truffle country.

The dogs are colleagues, not accessories — Rocco, Giotto, Fiuto have all had their names in print — and behind the family stand several hundred affiliated hunters across these hills.

Then there is November 2007. Cristiano, his father, and Rocco dug a white truffle of nearly a kilo and a half out of the ground at Palaia — the largest ever found. It was auctioned that December for about $330,000, the proceeds given to charity, the record logged by Guinness, and a replica sits in the family museum, roughly where the story is retold daily.

A truffle season is weeks long; the jars are how it reaches a year, and an ocean. Everything Casa lists began as a morning in these woods — the summer truffle carried into salt, sauce, and honey, the white into oil — cooked in the family's kitchen at Forcoli, the trade Luciano began and never stopped refining. The rule at the table is the hunter's own: small amounts, at the end, after the heat.