- Written by: Mona Biedrzycka
Echoes from the Hill
Gabicce Monte isn’t a place you stumble upon. It’s perched too high, too still, too self-contained for accidents. From below, it looks like a wrinkle in the Apennines - just another clifftop stitched with pine trees and terracotta. But those who make the winding climb discover a ledge of land that faces the Adriatic, where the light seems to slow, and the air smells like rosemary, salt, and warm stone.
And at the edge of that view sits Dalla Gioconda, a place reclaimed and rebuilt by two people who chose to start from what others had written off.
For years, silent, this hillside once moved to a different rhythm. In 1975, Gabicce Monte became home to Baia degli Angeli, a futuristically flamboyant Italo‑disco temple that predated New York’s Studio 54 and quickly became one of Europe’s most glamorous nightspots. Grace Jones, Marcella Bella, Raffaella Carrà and a whole constellation of disco royalty danced here week after week, eyes closed in abandon, arms wide to the beat. For a time, this wasn’t just a beach town. It was a destination - electric, ambitious - where people came to be seen, to lose time, and to dissolve into something larger. And then it faded. Not suddenly. Just… stopped. As the disco era. But...that energy lingers still - an invisible undercurrent in the bones of this place.
Dalla Gioconda doesn’t chase nostalgia, but it knows how to listen. It understands that mood, memory, and place can shape a night as surely as salt or heat. Today, it moves to a quieter rhythm, still unmistakably Italian, but more introspective than extroverted.
Those Who Heard It First
That energy never disappeared. It just waited for someone to pick it up. Allegra Tirotti Romanoff and Stefano Bizzarri heard it first, answered it, restored the space, reimagined its tempo, and tuned it to a new frequency.
Allegra, with a background in fashion - time at Etro, studies at Istituto Marangoni - brought an instinct for material, proportion, and rhythm. Every architectural line and tile was hers, chosen with obsessive clarity. Stefano, manager, host, passionate wine lover and resident archivist of emotion, preserved more than spirit; he kept the room’s original volume: how sound should travel, how night should arrive.
Davide Di Fabio, once Massimo Bottura’s right hand, joined them as chef and creative force in the kitchen, bringing food that’s playful and grounded, led by memory, supported by technique, and always attuned to emotion.
Architecture as Echo and Intent
What was left was a shell. A sea-facing ruin that many locals had written off as irreparable or worse, irrelevant. It could have become a wellness hotel. A themed bar. A luxury beachwear concept store. It became something else because Allegra and Stefano said no to all of that, and yes to a quieter kind of permanence.
They stripped all nostalgia and gave it a new phrasing. Slatted wood, poured concrete, and long horizontal lines that face the sea without flinching. The bones stayed. The rest was retuned. Pink Furlo stone underfoot. Local wood left raw where it could be. There are terrazzo surfaces, soft-toned upholstery, and glass panes. Inside, light moves in gradients, not gestures. Texture speaks louder than colour. Nothing screams. Everything listens.
They designed it like a score - listening not to trends, but to the hillside, the light, and the way people actually move through a room.
When the Room Remembers
The dining room is laid out in glances. Tables are angled, subtly rotated toward the sea, not each other. The message is clear: you’re here not to be seen, but to see.
And yet, it doesn’t feel staged. It feels lived in - tuned to tempo rather than form. The music hums low but alive, a steady rhythm you carry in your chest more than your ears. After dinner, I told Stefano I felt like I’d just come back from a good party - that full-body warmth, the tastes still looping in your head, the summer sky still soft above you. He smiled. “In fact,” he said, “this was a disco.”
In the Room, Not the Spotlight
You notice it without noticing it. Service at Dalla Gioconda just aligns. No choreography, yet every move lands. Conversations glide. Needs surface and somehow are met in the blink of an eye. No one gives a speech. No one sells a story. The staff move with a quiet confidence, attuned not to performance, but to presence. You’re allowed space. And if you want more - more detail, more conversation, it’s offered without hesitation, never imposed.
And Allegra, she flows across the room like one of her own architectural lines - calm, assured, grounded. In a long dress that catches the air as she moves. She brings dishes to the table herself, naming them with clarity and warmth. With an ease that makes you feel like you’re exactly where you’re meant to be. She’s charming without trying to charm - always composed, always watching.
Stefano might appear a moment later, offering a bottle or a word, a quiet check-in, a pause that says: we’re here. But only if you need us. The rest happens behind you. One server slips away, the sommelier steps in with an invisible relay. No one claims the spotlight, and no one tries to guide your evening. Instead, they follow your lead.
The result is a service style that feels personal without ever becoming personalist. Like at Jordnær, Piazza Duomo, or Noma - the room adjusts to you. Your tempo becomes the house tempo. Not because they planned it. It’s a way of being — responsive, relaxed, exact.
Where Memory Grows
Behind the kitchen is a garden. Not large, ornamental, nor to impress you. It exists for continuity, as a living link between past and future. A quiet resistance to spectacle. But for Davide di Fabio, the roots of his cooking go even deeper. The garden matters — but memory matters more. His cuisine begins not in the soil, but in what’s been passed down: gestures, recipes, inherited rhythms of Italian cooking.
“Without historical memory,” he said, “you cannot lay the foundations for tomorrow.”
At Dalla Gioconda, tomorrow is composed dish by dish, not by repeating tradition, but by reconstructing it. Di Fabio deconstructs inherited flavours, reclaims the matrix of taste, and rebuilds them into something that feels both rooted and utterly new. He’s not seeking revolution. He’s building a future that holds its shape because it remembers where it came from.
There are no signs in the garden. No backstory on the plate, but it is there — in the acidity of a broth, in the bitter green note of a dressing, in a texture that reminds you of Sunday but lands firmly in the now. These aren’t “reimaginings.” They’re continuations. The kind of quiet innovation that carries a culture forward without losing its weight.
And perhaps, if you taste closely, you’ll sense another layer beneath: a certain lightness, a trace of la dolce vita, the spark of an era remembered not as costume, but as feeling. A current that moves just below the surface, like everything else here.
The Vinyl Menu and the Adriatic Playlist
Dalla Gioconda’s tasting menu comes tucked inside a vintage vinyl sleeve - heavy in hand, textured, with sun-catching metallic letters and a bright orange record slipped inside. It’s the kind of object you turn over before you open. Not a gimmick but a cue.
The cover image echoes the coast below, printed with a neon-pink QR code on - analogue and digital, retro and immediate, side by side. Inside, the layout reads more like a tracklist than a conventional menu. No stories, though. No chef’s letter. Just the essentials, placed with quiet intent.
Like the Adriatic itself, the meal moves in tides: astringent to soft, bitter to light, always circling back to clarity. Track two might be an amberjack duet. Track six, just silence — tonnarelli, no fuss. It asks nothing but this: listen with your mouth. And don’t skip.
What Lingers
It starts slowly. The music gives the right energy. A warm, puffy round of focaccia arrives at the table with a bowl of four strawberries — that’s it. Just fruit in a deep red sauce of onion and basil oil. It sounds simple. It was. But it hit. Everyone went quiet.
Then the amberjack — generous, cool, slightly bitter. Resting over the dressed summer vegetables, sharpened by a green apricot sauce. On top, tiny cubes of fermented fruit. A little crunch, a little tang, nothing obvious. Like a sentence with one word left out — and that’s what makes you feel it.
Cappelletti came next. The filling bitter with olive, the sauce bright orange butter with sea urchin. Alongside it, a short drink: Bitter Di Baldo, seawater, tonic. They didn’t match. They talked to each other. Salty, bitter, soft. Like being handed two verses from the same poem, and asked to find the rhyme.
Then came morone, a local fatty fish. Marinated in miso and fermented chilli. Grilled just enough to keep the inside moist and flaky. Glazed with fermented chilli paste, lemon powder, fermented lemon, oregano, and salt. No garnish, no metaphor. Just smoke, citrus, and heat that sticks.
By now, the sun is setting. The light shifts. Lamps glow on. The music - always there - nudges up a notch. Someone across the terrace starts moving their shoulders to the rhythm of a familiar tune. The room settles into a new gear.
Then: silence. A plate of spaghetti with dried porcini, pine oil, walnuts, and black truffle. No decoration. Just depth. Umami with a backbone. Pure lust.And next one, even stronger, tonnarelli "cacio e pepe" Spaghetti with pine nuts' milk instead of pecorino cheese, with colatura di alici, juniper and pepper. Pure genius.
Dessert didn’t descend all at once, but in suggestions: a zabaione ice cream with fig-and-vinegar reduction, curled with arugula and caramelised walnuts; a slice of vanilla banana that tasted more like a remembered afternoon than any fruit; and finally, a cannolo of Mangalica lard, both outrageous and precise — the kind of finale that makes you question what dessert even means.
The Code They Won’t Explain
The whole place runs on an unspoken code. You feel it when the music fades in just as the breeze picks up. When your plate arrives without fanfare, exactly when you stopped speaking. When the lighting adjusts, your eyes don’t notice, but your shoulders do.
Thousands of small decisions made not for effect but for continuity. The glasses hum, but don’t clink. The napkins match the light. The walls absorb. You don’t feel performed for. You feel permitted and quietly, thoroughly looked after. Allegra may place the dish herself, not with ceremony but instinct. Stefano might lift your luggage or pause at your table, not to charm but to check the weather in the room. It’s true hosting, the kind that begins long before you arrive and continues long after you’ve left.
The End of the Meal, the End of the Night
Meals at Dalla Gioconda don’t end. They slow. They soften. They stretch into one another like chords held so long the room forgets to clap. You realise it’s over not with a bill or ritual, but with a kind of ambient decrescendo - the light dimmer, the room quieter, the table no longer reset.
You step out onto the terrace. Below, the sea has folded into itself. Across the curve of the hill, lights blink on in scattered villas. There are no cars. No taxis waiting. You are expected to sit a little longer. Maybe you’ll order one more thing at the bar. Maybe you’ll do nothing at all.
And here is the genius of it: you don’t feel like a guest who is finished. You feel like someone who has been allowed to linger. Dalla Gioconda doesn’t push you back into the world. It holds the door open, then turns away. What happens next is yours. You might return to a hotel room. You might, now, walk to one of theirs. Because this story, once limited to dinner, includes a handful of rooms and a quiet private garden lounge, new elements of hospitality they have built, not out of ambition, but in the name of continuity.
It makes sense. Of course it does. To eat like this, you need time. To remember it, you need space. And to believe it happened at all, you still need to wake up inside it. That’s what they’ve made here: a place where a night, a meal, a moment, can decide not to end.
As of this June, Dalla Gioconda celebrates its fourth anniversary, a short time by most measures, but long enough to prove that vision, patience, and stubborn elegance can outlast even the most forgettable trends.
