Fortville is one of Midwest’s many tiny Main Street towns. Three square miles. Population 4,000. Famous for a giant statue of a pink elephant wearing horn-rimmed glasses and drinking a martini outside a liquor store. Not exactly the place you expect to go restaurant hopping.

Simone and Elizabeth Lucarini see Fortville another way: a budding, easy-living, affordable community. It’s why the couple is building Simone Lucarini’s dream Italian restaurant there. Cortona, a lunch and dinner spot scheduled to open this fall at 209 S Main St., is a tribute to Simone Lucarini’s native Cortona, Italy. The Tuscan town was made famous by the Frances Mayes book “Under The Tuscan Sun.”