Not every craftsperson shaping Italy's dining scene works in a kitchen. In the province of Benevento, in the hills of Campania, Angelica Marotta makes baskets — and her woven serving pieces are turning up in restaurants across Italy and beyond.
Marotta learned cesteria, the traditional art of basket weaving, from her grandfather, a weaver who worked with willow rods and passed on the craft in a few words of dialect. As a child she watched him gather and sort materials by size, learning which season each plant needed to be harvested in. When he died, she decided to pick up the trade herself — the only one in her family to do so — partly to keep his memory alive.
She began with the classic forms he taught her, but a move to Milan pushed her work somewhere new. Teaching courses and workshops, she started experimenting with smaller pieces, unusual proportions and mixed materials, and folded in her formal training in habitat design. The result is Cortreccia, her project making contemporary woven objects with a distinctly modern edge.
Her first restaurant commission started with a request for custom pieces, and the collaboration model stuck. Rather than shipping standard products, Marotta starts each project with a conversation: what will be served, how it will be plated, and what the dining room actually looks like — the tables, the furniture, the materials. A catalogue serves only as a starting point; the finished pieces are designed around the dish and the room. One recent client is I Tenerumi, a restaurant that has earned attention in its own right.
Word of mouth and Instagram now bring her most of her clients, a mix of Italian and international restaurants that see handwoven tableware as part of the story they tell diners.
For travellers, this is a reminder that a memorable meal is built from more than what lands on the plate. The objects a dish is served in — where they come from, who made them, how they connect to the place — are part of the experience worth noticing and asking about. And for anyone visiting Campania, it's a nudge to look beyond Naples and the coast: inland provinces like Benevento hold a quieter side of southern Italy, where traditional crafts like weaving are still practised by hand. If you're planning a food-focused trip, seek out restaurants that work with local artisans — the tableware itself can tell you as much about a region as the menu.
Story via Roads & Kingdoms.
