Cancelliera Grande
Anna Maria Pellegrino
Gastronomic culture and coordination of institutional activities.
Venetian by birth and Paduan by adoption, she calls herself a gastrònoma: an old word that gathers up her many ways of working with food, through writing, photography, sharing knowledge and cooking. A member of the Accademia Italiana della Cucina and of the Centro Studi Franco Marenghi, she is founding president of the Associazione Italiana Food Blogger and sits on the boards of the Associazione Professionale Cuochi Italiani, the professional body of Italian chefs, and of the Associazione del Tiramisù. Historical research and gastronomic culture run through everything she does. She spoke at TEDx Piazzola sul Brenta on broken connections with food, and she hosts and moderates talks, storytelling dinners and regular radio segments. She has edited guides and books, among them Non sono quelli delle stelle (Antiga Edizioni, 2022) and, with the journalist and historian Giampiero Rorato, A tavola con Giacomo Casanova. Cibi e vini di un ghiottone veneto (De Bastiani Editore, 2025). Since 2015 she has been an expert guest on Geo, on Rai 3, where she tells of the stories, recipes and gestures at risk of being lost in time. A work of research and of giving back, born of a simple conviction: food is always a cultural act.
Gastaldo Emerito
Lorenzo Pavan
Event logistics and point of contact for membership.
When he took on the role of Gastaldo of the Dogale Confraternita in 2007, he can hardly have imagined that the appointment would lead him into a whole world of stockfish, Venetian traditions, memory and conviviality. A long-standing friend of Franco Favaretto, with whom he shares a taste for good-natured fun, he has always known how to pair a smile with the seriousness needed to guard and defend a recipe as old and as identity-defining as baccalà mantecato, Venice’s whipped stockfish cream. His bond with the dish, though, does not belong to the life of the Confraternita alone: baccalà, as stockfish is known across north-eastern Italy, carries the scents and memories of his childhood and gives back, through taste, that deep link between personal memory and culinary culture which often makes a tradition stronger than time. Today, as Gastaldo Emerito, he still holds a part of the Confraternita’s memory: the part built up over the years through relationships, encounters and a commitment in which the seriousness of safeguarding has never ruled out the pleasure of being together. Because a tradition stays alive above all when it goes on being shared.
Savio di Bocca
Franco Favaretto
Assesses restaurant applications and presents plaques and window decals.
Born, you might say, amid baccalà: as a boy his finest reward was watching the stockfish being beaten, following his wholesaler grandfather and his merchant father. What began as a family habit became, over the years, a craft, a field of study and a passion. A chef and a traveller, he has carried stockfish around the world and become official Ambassador of the Lofoten islands, where he returns regularly to study its quality and seasonality. For more than fifteen years he has taught at ALMA, the international school of cooking founded by Gualtiero Marchesi, with a class devoted entirely to stockfish. A co-founder of the Dogale Confraternita del Baccalà Mantecato, he has been president of the Federazione Italiana Cuochi, the Italian chefs’ federation, for the province of Venice, and team manager for the Veneto at the World Culinary Championships. He has coordinated international culinary events and taken part in television programmes in Italy and abroad. With his wife Paola and their son Pietro he has run the family restaurant Baccalàdivino for over thirty years: a place where what he learned as a child is renewed every day, because a tradition stays alive only if it is known, practised and handed on.
Savio all’Accoglienza
Maria Bonaldo
Welcome and hospitality at events.
Born in Venice, a merchant of long standing and an Officer of Merit of the Italian Republic, she has built a professional and associative career around participation, representation and a steady commitment to women’s entrepreneurship. Vice-president of Terziario Donna in Confcommercio, she was provincial president of FIT for Venice and delegate for Treviso, Rovigo and Belluno, gathering over thirty years of experience on the national councils and the board of ECOMAP. She is a Consultrice of the Accademia Italiana della Cucina, Venezia Mestre delegation, and a member of the Women’s Entrepreneurship Commission of the Chamber of Commerce of Venice and Rovigo; she also sits on the council of Panathlon International Venezia Mestre. She was treasurer of the Scuola Grande di San Teodoro in Venice. For years she has written for Il Gazzettino, a Venetian daily, where she curates a weekly page given over to games, cooking and poetry. As Savio all’Accoglienza of the Dogale Confraternita she brings this long experience of relationships and participation to the service of Venetian traditions, making hospitality not merely a role but a way of building community.
Savio all’Arte
Michele Zampedri
Historical and cultural matters and art history.
He belongs to a generation that has watched home cooking change profoundly: from the wood-burning kitchen range to the induction hob, from tools governed by experience alone to today’s technologies. Through all of it one thing has stayed the same for him: the kitchen as the heart of the house and the place where family memory is kept. He grew up among grandparents and parents who gathered around tables that were always laden, learning early that a dish can hold far more than its ingredients. At home that dish was above all baccalà: whipped, stewed, alla vicentina or baked, and carrying an intense aroma that can still take him back to his childhood. Among his most vivid memories is his grandmother whipping the baccalà with patience and plenty of elbow grease, keeping time with the sing-song refrains she hummed. Today he cooks those same recipes with modern tools, while preserving their gestures and their meaning. As Savio all’Arte of the Dogale Confraternita he brings exactly this awareness: tools and habits may change, while safeguarding a tradition and handing it on means keeping alive the bond between a community, its culture and its roots.
Savio alle Finanze
Massimo Pivetta
Administration and finances of the Confraternita.
Born in Mestre in 1960, he divides his time between Salzano, near Venice, and Pecol di Zoldo, his mother’s home village in the mountains. Two different places, and both shaped his relationship with food and with memory: on one side the Venetian tradition, on the other the frugal, practical cooking of the Zoldo mountains. After a long career in mechanical tooling and machine tools, which took him across Italy and abroad and brought him into contact with very different worlds, he is now retired. From an early age he cultivated a particular attention to food, handed down by his family together with a simple principle that back then felt almost natural: food has value, and nothing should go to waste. That sensibility grew between Venetian dishes and mountain cooking, two kitchens only apparently far apart. Joining the Dogale Confraternita del Baccalà Mantecato allowed him to go deeper into Venetian gastronomic history and culture and, at the same time, to find an ideal point of contact with the mountains that part of his family comes from. As Savio alle Finanze he brings experience and a practical turn of mind to the Confraternita, and goes on exploring that weave of lowland and mountain that has always fascinated him.
Savio alle Ambascerie
Matteo Adreani
Communications, external relations and digital infrastructure.
His first meeting with baccalà mantecato belongs to family memory: his grandmother made it every Friday, turning a dish of the tradition into a small rite of patient gestures, waiting and sharing. A communications professional with over thirty years of experience, he has always cultivated a close attention to traditions and to food and wine culture, seeing in food not only a pleasure but a language able to connect people, generations and territories. It is from this double dimension, professional and personal, that his commitment as Savio alle Ambascerie of the Dogale Confraternita springs: to build bridges between Venice and the world outside, and to make the history, values and projects of the Dogale known beyond the borders of the Serenissima. Convinced that the original recipe for baccalà mantecato is a heritage of identity to be guarded and shared, he helps to strengthen the role of the Confraternita through events, relationships and communication projects. Because a deeply Venetian tradition can keep its own roots and, at the same time, speak a language the world can understand.
Savio alle Tradizioni
Rossella Dalla Pietà
Minutes and record keeping.
Venetian by birth and Trevisan by adoption, she has worked for over thirty years as a professional networker in nutrition and wellbeing: a path that has given her a range of different skills, held together by a natural gift for communication and enriched over the years by experience in mentoring, coaching and personal development. Long committed to social causes and volunteering, she is a founding member and sits on the board of cultural and social associations in her area. The same attention to what deserves to be rediscovered runs through her relationship with Venice. Passionate about art and tradition, she has devoted a book to the stories and the recipes of the city where she was born, weaving personal memory together with gastronomic culture. As Savio alle Tradizioni of the Dogale Confraternita del Baccalà Mantecato she carries this work of safeguarding and sharing forward: because keeping a tradition does not mean freezing it in time, but knowing it deeply enough to be able to hand it on.
Savio alla Cultura
Andrea Vergari
Founder of the International Stockfish Society and Italian coordinator of the UNESCO candidacy.
A doctor specialising in orthodontics and craniofacial growth, he took his university degree and his specialist training in Bergen, Norway. That country runs through the other main strand of his work as well: protecting and promoting the culture of stockfish and the communities that over the centuries have kept its knowledge, its practices and its traditions alive. In 1999, in Rovereto, he was among the founders of the Venerabile Confraternita dello Stofiss dei Frati, a brotherhood devoted to stockfish, and in 2012 he founded the International Stockfish Society, an international organisation created to study, safeguard and promote the cultural heritage bound up with stockfish. He is Italian coordinator of the candidacy for the Traditions of Stockfish to be recognised as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO: a project that brings together the communities of practice tied to fishing, curing, trade, cooking and the handing on of this ancient tradition from one generation to the next. He also promotes the Via Italiana dello Stoccafisso, the Italian stockfish route, a network that connects brotherhoods, territories and different regional traditions. A path that gives stockfish back its truest dimension: not merely a food, but a cultural thread that for centuries has joined seas, peoples and communities.
Savio alla Parola
Alvaro De Anna
One of the architects of the founding of the Confraternita in 2001.
Friulian by birth and Trevisan by adoption, he has spent more than fifty years in marketing, communication and promotion, with a particular eye for food and wine. After his first professional years in Milan, in 1984 he founded Pilota in Treviso, later Pilota Green, an agency that joined the international BBDO network and in which he worked as strategic planner and creative director for public and private clients, Italian and international. Over the years he has signed projects promoting regions and their food and wine in Italy and abroad, from campaigns for tourism in the Veneto to others devoted to the great Italian wines. In 2004 he added publishing to communication, founding Bacco Arianna and directing for sixteen years Papageno, an international magazine circulated in the Alpe Adria area. His bond with the Dogale Confraternita goes back further than its own founding. In 2001, with Dino Boscarato of the Amelia, he proposed the project Baccalà dei Veneziani to the Associazione dei Ristoranti del Buon Ricordo, the association of Buon Ricordo restaurants, and out of it the Confraternita would take shape. He helped draft the statute, created its logo and its website and edited the publication of the same name: giving the project not only a structure, but an identity, an image and a voice.
