A day in Sauris between gastronomic specialties and craft beers. Where to sleep in Carnia and what to see for a cheap stay.
sauris is a small mountain village of the Friuli Venezia Giulia and I got to know him better thanks to the Carnia Blog. The border with Austria is a few kilometers away and it is no coincidence that an ancient German dialect is still spoken here, unlike in other countries where the Friulian one is more familiar.
The first thing you need to know is that to get there you can only take one road, from Ampezzo along the Provincial Road 73 and you have to face several very suggestive galleries literally carved into the stone.
Then you have to cross the dam on the artificial lake of Sauris and here you finally arrive in the village of Zahre (this is the name in German dialect). Starting from Pesariis, in Val Pesarina, it took us about 50 minutes by car. This destination was not completely unknown to me, I admit, but thanks to the Blog Carnia I was able to visit things that I could hardly have done as a single tourist.
We first visited theWidespread hotel di sauris, a pretty village made of recovered wooden stavoli and which today are available to all tourists. The beds available are 140, not a few, and it was completely renovated in the 1980. Also equipped with a kitchen, on the one hand they encourage the desire to buy local products but on the other hand they express a type of tourist accommodation not yet known to all. We also got to visit some of them and all that wood makes you want to stay there.
Walking through the small streets of the town we also stopped at the ethnographic and Great War museum after seeing numerous masks carved in different wooden logs throughout the town. Why? One of the most picturesque takes place in Sauris 'Carnivals' of Italy and it is tradition to wear one painted wooden mask. We visited the ethnographic museum on April 25th, the day of the Liberation, and it was a certain effect to observe the large amount of war artifacts kept inside.
Not far away is the micro brewery Zahre, a small company that produces unfermented craft beer and is among the top four micro breweries in Italy with a production of 500 liters. A story, that of the brewery, really interesting from the choice of hops, from the number of days that the operators stay awake to give continuity to the processing process, up to the number of hectares (15) of barley in the lower Friuli area which guarantees them the first ingredient.
Obviously, a tasting of one of their beers could not be missing, a visit to the plant and finally some technical information, for example on the quality and purity of the water needed to produce such beers. The bottles are 0,75 lt, so watch out if you intend to drink it alone.
After chatting with a builder of wooden houses and visiting the spa and wellness center of the Albergo Diffuso, we aimed at Wolf ham factory of Sauris, a company with 53 years of history.
You always feel a certain emotion in visiting certain environments, such as the smoking room, knowing the type of wood that is used and finally immersing yourself in the maturing room where the Sauris hams make a fine show of themselves.
How to end a day in Suaris? At the table of course. On the way back, a few minutes from the village is the Riglarhaus, in the hamlet of Lateis. It is a hotel restaurant that enjoys a breathtaking view of the artificial reservoir but also has a wellness area with a sauna inside that overlooks the surrounding mountain ranges.
What we ate was the icing on the cake of a dream weekend. The typical ones Cjarson with herbs and ricotta, i Dumplings with speck, kummel and melted butter, the Torello cheek al refosco with polenta and as a dessert a tart with homemade jam. In short, whether you decide to come for the landscapes, the places or the food, Sauris is a destination in Carnia to put on your agenda.
