For Gluten-Free Stories, today we’re not telling the story of a choice.
We’re telling the story of a profound change. Alessandra Buti is coeliac in a family of bakers. A diagnosis that arrived when the future already seemed mapped out, and that asked her to rethink everything: her work, her identity, the value of everyday gestures.
What you’re about to read isn’t a linear tale. It’s memory, passage, listening.
It’s the sound of flour, the woods, the silence that lightens your thoughts, and the return to hands that knead dough — this time in a different way.
From that house in the woods, Pietra d’Acqua B&B is born today. A place of welcome, built with care and awareness, where personal experience becomes care for whoever arrives.
This is Alessandra’s poem. It should be read slowly.
Like the things that have travelled through time and now taste of home.
Alessandra Buti – Pietra d’acqua
I’m coeliac in a family of bakers.
The diagnosis came 25 years ago,
when working with my family
seemed like security for a whole lifetime.
Meeting the right doctor,
who prescribed:
NO MORE WHEAT — FOR LIFE,
wasn’t a healthy relief
but a catastrophe:
no more work.
The business sold off for next to nothing
(partly because of my father’s serious illness),
I found myself unable to do anything,
with no qualification,
my self-esteem on the floor.
The hatred I feel toward coeliac disease
clouds my mind.
I have a memory of my father at work:
do you know the sound made by
100 kg of flour and water
when the arms of the mixer
plunge down into them?
It’s a sort of
FLUP! FLUP!
But my father leaves us the house in the woods.
There, thoughts grow lighter.
When the illness carries Dad away,
I go looking for his footsteps
in the nature he loved.
And I find my peace.
I begin to run the house as a B&B
and guests arrive:
some leave stories behind,
others carry promises away.
Alone, in the house in the woods,
outside the wind among the trees,
I knead once more
the old recipe for cantuccini.
From the oven comes a scent,
that very one,
the same old scent
of Dad’s cantuccini.
Then I knead bread.
And my hands squeeze
and go FLUP,
puffing out a little cloud of flour
and the smell of something good.
This time gluten-free.
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