CHIAVERANO. Imagine being the second generation of one of the best geographically located restaurants in the area, lucky enough to overlook Lake Sirio. Imagine that tourists begin to arrive in that still little-known paradise beyond the Canavese. Not an assault, fortunately, but hikers and visitors with rucksacks and maps asking for information on the dancing lands, the castle of Montalto, the terraced vineyards and the network of paths, Santo Stefano di Sessano, people enchanted by a landscape they did not expect. to find. At that point, you, the second generation of restaurateurs with a location kissed by the landscape and nature, come up with the idea of intercepting that new “slow” tourism in the Canavese area. Making the little house once used as a barn and stable, next to the restaurant that your parents built in the early eighties, a miniature inn that looks like something out of a storybook, a stone structure set in the green, between the lake, the rose garden and under the grandeur of the cypress.
Two rooms, one for two, the other for four, ground floor and first floor. Access without architectural barriers, an outdoor area for summer breakfast where you can forget your phone and watch. If we add to this that between the idea and the opening of the inn there was a pandemic, then here is summarized in a few lines the last two years of the Revel Chion owners and managers of the Vecchio cipresso restaurant. Who now, in fact, lead the homonymous inn recently opened right next door.
I’m Luca, 47, with his older sisters Ornella (the owner), Danda and Lucia, Matteo’s grandmother, a thirty-year-old computer scientist who has been passed the baton for the part concerning communication and social media. A family that plays as a team, in short, capable in its heterogeneous age vision of achieving what so many have been saying for a long time about the great tourist potential of this land. «Two years ago we decided to recover the small structure used in the past as a stable and barn – says Luca Revel Chion -. We realized that many, after having eaten at the restaurant, would have gladly stopped or would have come back later to visit these places at a leisurely pace. It was not easy for the readjustment works, this is a protected natural area. Then last year Covid arrived and we had to work hard to maintain our usual optimism. And instead we did it. We are on Airbnb, they are starting to get to know us even abroad, we offer common packages to other operators, from the ride with the e-bike to the excursion or the day at Moia. We are just waiting for a couple of Germans, husband and wife ». The old cypress which has become the symbol of this part of the lake dominates the inn and restaurant. «This is how my mother Maria, great cook, and my father Roberto called the place on 8 August forty years ago. The cypress was dated 1857, it stands on the hill that my mother chose as the place for the activity with which she wanted to support my father when after thirty years at the waterdotto of Ivrea was on his way to retirement. After all they had six children ». The restaurant is waiting for June 1st to open inside too, now “it’s always full on weekends, it’s best to book”.