The child and the guitar.
How the passion for truffles of Simone Calugi of Selektia Tartufi was born.
We could certainly say: the Child, the Truffle and the Guitar.
Simone was a 10-year-old boy who grew up in a family of Tuscan truffle hunters and had a great passion for music. His dream was to receive his first guitar as a gift so he could start playing it.
That evening his father Renato decided it was time to please his son, but little Simone had to earn that guitar by going truffling with him.
And so father and son set off on their first “truffle hunt” together in the company of Diana, their inseparable truffle dog, a 4-year-old half-breed.
Fate, however, occasionally enjoys complicating things: the weather changed rapidly as it often does in the Tuscan countryside and rain began to fall, first lightly then more and more copiously. Before long a veritable cloudburst hit the two truffle hunters.
“I thought we wouldn’t find anything and that we would have to return home empty-handed,” Simone recalls today, “I had boots full of water and I couldn’t walk because they stayed planted in the mud. My father has great passion for truffles but with that bad weather he too was about to decide to go home.”
The two truffle hunters had already decided to go home but on the edge of a ditch the dog “senses” the truffle and starts rasping. In a few seconds a huge white truffle with a distinctive and unmistakable smell came out: Simone would never forget that smell again. Fate had smiled on little Simone, turning him into a young truffle hunter.
And what a joy with the proceeds from the sale of that first great Tuscan white truffle to be able to buy the first and beloved guitar that Simone still cherishes to this day.
“We can really say that my passion for truffles was born in that moment,” says Simone Calugi today, who has transformed that family business into “Selektia Tartufi” a leading company in the industry recognized and appreciated all over the world.
