From 1914 to today
Our story
Four generations of the Lavarini family, a patch of woodland nobody wanted, and a cattle shed that became an osteria, a simple country inn.
From 1914 to today
Four generations of the Lavarini family, a patch of woodland nobody wanted, and a cattle shed that became an osteria, a simple country inn.
Home/Our story
This trattoria didn't come about as the result of a plan. It came into being because a family lived three hundred meters from the natural bridge, saw people arriving on foot every day, and at a certain point thought they could offer those people something to drink and eat.
Luigi Benvenuto, the family's founder, moves with his wife and seven children into a rural house in Località Fenil, three hundred metres from the Ponte di Veja. A farming family like many others, in a Lessinia where people lived off woodland and pasture.
The Comune di Prun puts a wooded area up for auction. The portion with the bridge has little wood on it, the ground is stony and hard to reach: almost nobody wants it. Benvenuto buys it. He then builds a cattle shed six metres by six, with a kitchen of the same size beside it.
More and more people are coming up to see the bridge. Bruno Lavarini, his uncle Arturo, brothers Elio and Guido, and their mother Vittoria Carmela decide to open an osteria inside the cattle shed.
It's worth remembering what it was like here back then: no road, no water mains, no electricity. Everything needed had to be carried up by hand.
The osteria works, and it grows. Bruno, whom everyone calls el Bruno dal Ponte, turns it into a real trattoria together with his wife Margherita, who takes charge of the kitchen. The expansions begin: the dining room, then the terrace, then the taverna carved into the rock.
Lorenza and Elio, the children, joined the family business and gradually took over its running. But Bruno never really retired: you'll still find him at the bar counter, the place where it all began.
Martina and Caterina, Lorenza's daughters, are the fourth generation of the Lavarini family at the Ponte di Veja. They carry forward the same idea that moved their great-great-grandfather in 1927: whoever comes up here should be welcomed the way you'd welcome a guest into your own home, not just served at a table.
It's the thread that ties together a hundred years of history, and that keeps being told to whoever sits down here for the first time.
Family archive
The photographs we keep hanging in the trattoria, the ones customers always stop to look at.
What it all means
Today the Ponte di Veja is the best-known natural monument in the Lessinia, and visitors reach it from all over Europe. In 1927 it was just a stony, awkward patch of woodland. We're still here, in the same spot, doing the same thing: feeding and welcoming whoever arrives.
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The same family cooking for almost seventy years, in the same place. It's worth the trip as much as the bridge is.
For groups please call ahead.
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