Pasta · Pasta shape · Short entry
Tortellini di Valeggio sul Mincio
Tortellini of very thin egg pasta around a braised meat filling, from Valeggio sul Mincio on the Veneto side of the Mincio river. Local restaurateurs say the women who taught the craft came from Emilia in the 1950s and 1960s. The name *nodo d'amore* ('love knot') was later coined from a local legend.
Silk-thin dough
In a 2025 Touring Club Italiano interview, the Valeggio restaurateur Nadia Pasquali describes the filling she uses. It is pork ribs, veal, beef, chicken breast and a little chicken liver, braised in white with Custoza wine, and contains no cured meat or Parmigiano, unlike the Emilian versions. Because the filling is braised, the sheet must be rolled very thin, "like a drape of yellow silk". The local motto is tirala fina, "roll it thin".
She dates the tradition to the 1950s and 1960s, when women from Emilia worked seasonally in the silk mills along the Mincio and taught local families to make tortellini. The restaurateurs' association named the tortellino nodo d'amore after a local legend and registered the name as a mark. Around 2000 it began a dinner for a thousand people on the Visconti bridge (Ponte Visconteo) at Borghetto. This is one restaurateur's account, published by the Touring Club.
How it connects
Pasta shape
- similar Tortellini
