The Cacciucco Day

The event of the Cacciucco Day started in 2005 to celebrate the history of the Alcide restaurant founded long ago in 1849 and is still run today by the Ancillotti family with the dish that made them famous:

The “Cacciucco Alla livornese” famous fish soup from Leghorn City.

This typical Leghorn soup arrived at Poggibonsi in Alcide Ancillotti’s house at the start of 900 when several workers from Leghorn who were living there brought fresh fish and taught Alcide’s daughter the young Maria to make the “Cacciucco Alla Livornese”.

From that day the Cacciucco has remained the symbolic dish of the Alcide Restaurant.

But how can a cacciucco become one of the main dishes in a restaurant in a town in the heart of Tuscany a long way from the sea.   Well the members of the Ancillotti family apart from being in the restaurant business for more than 150 years are also wholesale dealers in fish having always had an outlet for sale in Poggibonsi. They started to sell salted fish and then about seventy years ago began to also sell fresh sea fish in shops and weekly markets in Valdelsa.

The commerce of a product, fish in fact, that in an epoch when refrigerators did not exist was certainly not an easy task, and when not all families could allow themselves a visit to the sea or less than that a holiday along the coast brought fish onto the tables in the province of Siena.