A nickname from Vesima, and an oven that never went cold.

“Veximà” was not a name, it was a nickname. It belonged to our great-grandfather, a lad who came down from Vesima, a hamlet on the western coast of Genoa, and who in 1913 lit an oven in Via Cerusa, in Voltri. He sold farinata plain, the way everybody did.

Then he started experimenting. He dressed it with what the sea and the hills gave him that week: onions, bianchetti — today rossetti, because they can no longer be fished — mushrooms, prawns, artichokes. Fresh, seasonal things, tied to the flavours of Liguria and to that damp, bright air that runs along the whole western coast.

That is the whole invention: a poor dish, dressed as if it were not. A century later the city copies it, and we still do it in a copper pan, one at a time.