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Battiferro Tartufi — Curiosities and History
Legends, superstitions, and dark magic surrounding the “diamond of the earth”
Before restaurants served it to customers and food critics who made it precious, truffles were something very different: an object of suspicion, wonder, and fear. They grew underground without visible seeds, had no roots of their own, and couldn't be cultivated. They appeared and disappeared following rhythms that no one truly understood. And the aroma — that intense, wild scent, capable of altering the senses — had no rational explanation.
In short, it was the perfect candidate to enter the world of witches.
Even in antiquity, truffles embarrassed philosophers. Theophrastus, in the 3rd century BC, wrote that they grew where lightning struck — and lightning was the domain of the gods. Pliny the Elder called it a “miracle of nature” and classified it among things that grow without roots, without seeds, without a comprehensible origin. For the Romans, it was the daughter of Jupiter, born from the impact of thunder on damp earth.
This aura of mystery did not dissipate with the Middle Ages — in fact, it deepened. In an era when anything without a natural explanation necessarily had a supernatural one, the truffle became an object of interest for herbalists, alchemists, and — inevitably — inquisitors.
“Miracle of nature”
— Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, 1st century AD
One of the most well-known episodes of the relationship between truffles and religion is attributed to Martin Luther, who in the 16th century allegedly called the truffle “devil's food” due to its sulphurous smell and hidden nature. Whether the quote is authentic or apocryphal, it testifies to the spirit of the times: a food that originated in the darkness of the earth, emitted altering aromas, and had effects on mood and senses was, to a medieval mind, necessarily linked to non-divine forces.
In France, in the countryside of Périgord — now the world capital of the black truffle — truffle hunters were viewed with suspicion. Their ability to find something invisible, hidden, that no one else could locate, seemed supernatural. Some were accused of having made a pact with forest spirits. Finding truffles was a gift too dark to be mere luck.
Perhaps the most curious connection is the one that goes through the pig. Before the Lagotto Romagnolo — and before dogs became the quintessential truffle hunters — pigs were the animals used to find truffles. And the pig, in European folklore, was one of the animals most closely associated with witchcraft: both as a form witches transformed into and as a sacrificial animal in nocturnal rituals.
It's not hard to imagine how the scene would have appeared: a solitary figure, at night, following a rooting animal in an oak forest — trees sacred since antiquity, associated with Jupiter and the druids. The truffle emerging from the dark earth, brought to light by a beast with a snout in the mud.
In the folklore of medieval Tuscany and Umbria, stories circulated about “tartufarole” — old women who knew where to find truffles and were suspected of gaining this knowledge from spirits of the earth. New moon nights and stormy days were the most fertile — and new moon nights were, traditionally, the nights of witches.
The aspect that most linked truffles to witchcraft was their aphrodisiac power. A power documented since antiquity, which in the Middle Ages became a matter of scandal.
Grimoires — witches' books of magic — often included recipes with mushrooms and truffles as ingredients for love potions. The idea was simple: something that alters the senses, that makes the air heavy with perfume, that arouses desires, cannot be innocent. It must be the work of magic.
We know today that truffles contain androstenol, a pheromone that sows naturally use to locate males ready for mating — and which also has documented effects on humans. But in the 14th or 15th century, that widespread sensation of excitement and warmth after eating truffles had no biochemical explanation. It only had one explanation: someone had cast a spell.
There's one last detail worth considering: truffles almost always grow in symbiosis with the roots of oak trees. And the oak — in almost every pre-Christian European tradition — is a sacred tree, a boundary tree between the world of the living and the dead, between earth and sky.
Druids performed their rites in oak groves. Fairies and spirits inhabited oak trees in Celtic tales. Even in Italian tradition, the oak was Jupiter's tree, protective and powerful, but also a gateway to other worlds.
The truffle hidden among the oak roots, growing in darkness and silence, emerging from the underworld full of perfume and strength — was, for those who looked at it with medieval eyes, a messenger from that middle world. Not entirely natural, not entirely supernatural. Suspended, as the truffle has always been suspended: between the earth and the table, between the forest and the kitchen.
Today, truffles no longer scare anyone. In fact, they have become the most celebrated ingredient in Italian cuisine — the very same that for centuries raised an eyebrow among bishops and inquisitors.
At Battiferro Tartufi, we gather them from the same oak trees in Umbria where they grew in the time of legends. We haven't made pacts with any spirits — just three generations of knowledge of the forest, the dogs, and the land.
But the next time you smell a fresh truffle and feel that indecipherable, wild scent, unlike anything else in the world… you'll understand why, for some, it seemed like magic.
Battiferro Tartufi — Terni, Umbria — Three generations of harvesting and processing fresh truffles.
