Among truffle hunters and truffle lovers it is easy to come across stories that more and more often seem to merge between myth and reality. One of the most popular topics is undoubtedly linked to one of the questions that everyone has asked at least once: what was the largest truffle ever harvested and who will be the lucky one to have been kissed by the goddess blindfolded of luck?
Despite the thousands of stories that spread among the quarrymen, today we will unveil an Italian story that still fascinates and amazes. But first, we need to step back in time.
We are in San Miniato, Tuscany, and the calendar marks 1954. One evening Arturo Gallerini and his dog Paris decided to write his name in the legend of truffle hunters thanks to a discovery that still has never been surpassed: a truffle of 2,520 grams!
Known as Bego, Arturo was a truffle hunter who did not like to go and look for them outside his trusted places.
An old-fashioned truffle maker, with his secrets and his strategies that tried to do his job at his best. It was said that he was a night owl and many knew him because he claimed to find many truffles, perhaps with the hope of being taken for a liar like any good truffler. But instead, according to his notebook, he was actually collecting, almost half a kilo a day in the middle of the season!
Legend has it that, on a night of October 26, 1954, Arturo returned home to the town of Saccuccio in Balconevisi with “a great desire to weigh that thing that was really big like a child’s head”. After lighting one of those candles that the Proposer gave him as scraps of the sacristy, he put the truffle in the balance plate and pulled up the ring. The rest is history, a story that today would be very difficult to repeat and, above all, to evaluate seen these truffles of incredible size are auctioned.
As specified at the beginning, these stories walk on the subtle end that separates fiction and reality. To date, the only documentation considered “reliable” that we have of this story is that reported by Don Luciano Marrucci, parish priest of the country that describes the night when Arturo returns home with his “diamond”.
To feed the legend, it seems that the truffle found by Mr Arturo was then given to the thirty-fourth president of the United States of America: Dwight D. Esienhower.