Antica Osteria Stella d’Oro, a bygone experience

Villa di Verzegnis, in the province of Udine, is home the Antica Osteria Stella d’Oro that offers a simple yet refined and exquisite cuisine. 

Isolation can play strange tricks if not worse. Forget films like The Shinning or some of Goya’a works because real life can be even more chilling. An example is the case of collective hystero-demonopathies that broke out in Verzegnis in 1878, when heavy snowfall and the subsequent long isolation provoked a form of madness among many of the women in the area that was not understood and branded as demonic possession at the time due to the positivist mentality and the distrust that existed because of the town’s proximity to Austria.

Today Verzegnis does not suffer from such isolation and, in fact, is only minutes away by car from Tolmezzo. The only the positive things remain from being so isolated, the silence and the feeling of melancholy from the Friuli mountains. The area is that of Carnia  and it is a kind of concentrated Friuli where the dialect is much more conservative that that spoken in Udine. The forests are still uncontaminated and the cuisine has remained unchanged, an indication of how hard life was in the past.

The Antica Osteria Stella d’Oro  (Old Gold Star Tavern) is in Villa di Verzegnis and on a Saturday night you may feel you are the only people left alive. The Osteria was requisitioned in 1944 by the Cossacks, the eastern European nomads, as a refuge and military outpost. At the time these soldiers were allied with the Germans who had promised them control of Carnia in the event of an Axis victory. Of course, the Second World War ended differently and the Osteria Stella d’Oro was restored to the local population and still has its sign above the gate.

Thus it should come as no surprise that the cuisine is an almost didactic reflection of both history and Carnia with Cjarson dishes being both simple yet refined with textbook game creations and exquisite Toĉ di Vore, which means ‘work dip’ and is sausage cooked in milk and liquid cheese. The wine list is not that up to date but has a nice selection of the more important Friuli wines. 

Antica Osteria Stella d’Oro 
Via Tolmezzo, 6 - Frazione Villa
33020 Terzegnis (UD)
Tel. +39 0433 2699
Facebook: Antica Osteria Stella d'Oro
Closed sunday for dinner and monday