Borghetto Residents’ Traditional Dinner Celebrates Local Community and Heritage
A gathering for Borghettani residents. No rush for reservations. No requests from Germany, Belgium, or Austria for a seat at the table. Only a few friends from the town center (or at most from Salionze) and some relatives who returned to the village for the occasion after moving abroad.
The traditional dinner on Borghetto’s bridge
This is the mini-dinner for about 250 people that Doc di Borghetto residents organize at the end of July on the small wooden bridge over the Mincio River, about a month before the large event hosting 4,000 people across 600 meters of the visconteo bridge for the open-air dinner organized by the restaurateurs’ association.
After the large numbers in June — this year, 12,000 requests arrived at the valeggian restaurants to participate in the dinner on the “long bridge” — Borghetto re-discovers its intimacy with a dinner where residents have a sort of right of first refusal on the tickets for a seat at the approximately 150-meter-long table set in the heart of their hamlet.
On the small bridge, no kilos of handmade tortellini: only risotto with radicchio and speck, linguine with tomato and olives, nervetti with onions and beans, and roast meat. Plastic plates and glasses. Yellow and red paper napkins. Citronella candles. But a unique view.
The organization and meaning of the dinner
Lucia Storchi, who worked for years in the dining room of Antica locanda Mincio and is now retired, coordinated this event advertised on the parish bulletin board: “In Borghetto, about 250-300 people live, and practically all of them are here tonight. This dinner is organized ‘at home’ by the residents. Everyone helps out. It’s nothing like the dinner on the visconteo bridge and was started five years ago for a specific reason.”
“Next to the bridge,” she explains, “in a niche carved into the house of the mills, is the statuette of our saint, Saint John Nepomucene. Vandals detached it and threw it into the river. It was retrieved, repaired, and put back in its place. The dinner was created exactly to celebrate this restoration.”
And beneath the saint’s image, with the Mincio flowing swiftly below the wooden bridge, residents of this hamlet gathered. Over the years, it has become a culinary gem, a photographic destination for hundreds of newlyweds, but also a real estate hotspot: while buying a house in central Valeggio costs about two and a half million euros per square meter, here, by the river in the mill area, prices range from six to eight million euros per square meter.
The protagonists of the evening
At the table set on the “short” bridge, the mayor Fausto Sachetto, the president of Pro Loco Marileno Bretengani, and religious and law enforcement authorities were invited.
Suddenly, during the evening, the regional president Giancarlo Galan appeared. An esteemed guest invitation? No, Galan was just passing by for dinner at a restaurant nearby.
At the table was also Don Angelo Boscarini, who was the parish priest in Borghetto for 13 years and has seen the hamlet change over the years: “Thirteen years ago, there were 580 people in the parish. Now, it probably won’t even reach 400. The hamlet is gradually losing residents even as tourist activities increase. Those who live here cannot build new houses. So, this dinner aims to be a way to meet friends and neighbors, to strengthen bonds of solidarity, and to recover the sense of living in a small village.”