Dal Falco

Local restaurant with a vast selection of wine

I've always felt you can gauge how popular a cheap eatery truly is amongst the locals by whether or not there's a TV blaring in the upper corner of the room. Tourist restaurants would never have TV on—spoils the whole romantic I'm-in-Italy air, you see. Places where the locals go for a home-cooked lunch at decent prices, however, are proud of their TV. If said TV is almost always tuned to a soccer match (and in the three times I've been to Dal Falco—including once when I stayed in its bare-bones guest rooms upstairs for two nights—it always was), then it's a hard-core locals' joint.

Yes, the atmosphere is a bit Spartan—in a modern room of a modern building just outside the city gates—but the cooking is simple, traditional, and like mamma used to make: pici all'aglione (the region's typical, chewy, hand-rolled spaghetti in a spicy garlic-and-pepperoncino sauce), grilled meats, and pecorino alle brace (a slab of Pienza's famous sheep's-milk cheese sandwiched between slices of prosciutto and grilled). There are 150 labels of wine in the cellars, but the house red itself is excellent.

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