One night at dinner at Agriturismo Ramusè, I watched with delight as Paolo Ciccioli spent a full 30 seconds shaving a black truffle over my pasta. (I’m not exaggerating—I have the iPhone video to prove it.) That was just the primo piatto, halfway through a dinner in which all three courses included a luxurious amount of truffles, during a stay in which every dinner and even breakfast included the same. 

Truffles are the point of Ciccioli’s agriturismo (a particularly Italian sort of accommodation connected with farming and gastronomy), a charming house that once belonged to his grandparents in this hills around Ascoli Piceno in Le Marche, in the eastern central part of Italy. In the early 2000s, he was working as an exporter of his region’s black and white truffles for London restaurants and the Borough Market. Jamie Oliver, Giorgio Locatelli, Gordon Ramsay and Raymond Blanc were among his clients.