Eleonora Cunaccia, the Italian queen of foraging

The latest recognition dates back to July 2026, when experts in the United States in the field of foraging they recognize Eleonora Cunaccia the credit for having made Americans rediscover the qualities of mugolio, an aromatic syrup obtained from the young green cones of the mountain pine (Pinus mugo), a conifer typical of the Alpine mountains.

Eleonora Cunaccia, known to all as Noris, was born and raised in Spiazzo, Val Rendena, in the heart of Trentino, at the foot of the Brenta Dolomites. Her relationship with the forest wasn't a career choice she came to as an adult: it was part of her childhood. As a child, she picked flowers, fruits, and herbs and learned, through practice, to recognize what the mountains had to offer.

Then, however, her life took a seemingly different path: the restaurant business. In the 1980s, she opened Locanda Mezzosoldo with her then-husband, which under her leadership earned a Michelin star. For nearly thirty years, she lived on the other side of the relationship with food: no longer simply gathering what grows spontaneously, but transforming it and bringing it to the table.

After nearly three decades in the restaurant business, Noris feels the need to return to the raw materials, but even further back: before the kitchen, before the market, before the cultivation. In the meantime, he had also traveled extensively: he says he spent about ten years in the Andes mountains and Tibet. At a certain point, however, he realized that he didn't have to travel to the other side of the world to find something extraordinary: he had to learn to read his own Dolomites.

In 2003, Noris and her brother Giovanni founded Primitivizia, an artisanal workshop in the Rendena Valley. The name is a small manifesto: it comes from the union of primitivo and delizia . Alimurgic herbs, berries, roots, flowers, resins, lichens, and shoots become ingredients and preparations destined even for haute cuisine chefs: Noris harvests, and her brother Giovanni transforms.

Among his obsessions is the mountain pine, which grows at altitudes above 2.000 meters. With the young pine cones, he makes the famous mugolio, a resinous preparation with an intensely balsamic flavor that can be used, for example, on ice cream or bread. Production is deliberately limited because harvesting must respect permitted quantities and nature's availability. And the forest is his pantry.

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