Costanza’s Dolci
Thursday, June 29
One thing that is very important to the “Wonder Grottole” project team is that tourists like us get to know real village life in Grottole and get to know the village community. In addition, you can book so-called “experiences” in the project – activities with individual people from the village. During our three week stay in Grottole we did three great tours: the wine tour with Silvio, the terracotta tour of our village with Rocco and the city tour of Grottole, where Michela told us a lot about the history of the village and about the everyday life of the people in Grottole today .
During our village tour, Michela led us through the many small streets of Grottole, showed us the castle and the various churches in the village. The great thing was that Michela, who grew up in the village, knew practically every person we happened to meet on our tour of Grottole and introduced us to many people in the village. That’s how we ended up, for example, in the living room of dear Rosa – a lovely Italian nonna whom we spontaneously met on the street and who insisted on inviting us to her house to feed us sweets. After leaving Rosa’s house a while later, with even more sweets in our bags, we visited Rosalia (the dear grandma with the pop-up vegetable stand in front of the house).
Then we continued walking with Michela through the alleys of Grottole and passed a large, white house. Michela told us that Costanza lives here and sells pastries and cakes in her house. I was immediately interested as there are a few bakeries in Grottole but none that actually sells a lot of cake or pastries. Michela – who knows most people in the village – immediately called Constanza on her cell phone and ordered 250 grams of mixed pastries for me to pick up the next day. Costanza has a bakery and a professional oven in her house, but you have to pre order. If you want to buy something from her, you text her on WhatsApp and place your order for the next day. So the next day, at the agreed time, I went to Costanza’s house alone to pick up my cakes. I met lovely Costanza and got a plate of beautiful, different Italian pastries for a few euros. Cream puffs, pistachio tarts, filled puff pastry with chocolate cream … everything on the plate looked so beautiful and of delicious! Costanza’s pastries exceeded my expectations in both appearance and taste. I was so impressed that the following week I ordered a second assortment of pastries from Costanza!
