The restaurant

If Viareggio has a place in the gastronomic map of Italy, he certainly owes it to Romano Franceschini and his wife Franca Checchi. Romano, a native of Montecarlo, arrived in Viareggio seventeen years old, no restaurant experience, but with a will of iron, a palate educated to authentic flavors and an immense passion for the product, values ​​inherited from its peasant origins: it will be the Versilia of the years ’60 to make it passionate about catering. Years of apprenticeship and in 1966 will open “Da Romano”. His wife Franca will enter the kitchen just a year later, giving life to a kitchen that will precede the times, creating current recipes even today for their lightness, the wise use of the ingredients and a link to the territory well beyond the execution of the traditional dishes: from the seabed of the Tyrrhenian Sea to the mountains of the Garfagnana, her sensitivity and her proverbial gluttony remain the common thread after more than 45 years of professional history.

In 1965, Romano has not yet turned 22, he knows, where he works, the very young Franca Checchi (born 1950), sister of Anna, recently Gusmano’s wife, is love at first sight and, after a while, they are officially engaged.

Franca and his sister Anna (called for love and respect, being older, by Franca, “Aunt Anna”) have in their blood the passion for cooking, they grew up at the “school” of their talented mother Giustina.
Franca is the youngest of nine children, her family, originally from Viareggio, has grown up in a traditionally rural culture that has also gone so far as to love the sea and fishing.

Here we are at a fundamental moment in the life of Roman who is 23 years old.
We are in 1966, to be exact at the 15th of April, when in the central Via Mazzini of Viareggio (the road that joins the splendid Passeggiata a Mare to Piazza della Stazione) at number 120, the Ristorante / Rosticceria “da Romano” opens.

The first year of work is exciting, challenging and settling, Romano takes care of the room, the wines and the purchases, in the kitchen he hired a young chef, Giuseppe Mannini, with him, fundamental, mother and sister, of Romano, he rushed to help him.

Since the restaurant is “party” Romano and Franca get married and, after a nice honeymoon on the Amalfi Coast, when they return, even Franca, not yet seventeen, enters the kitchen as help. A few months later Giuseppe Mannini left, and, after some attempts with other professionals, Franca Checchi Franceschini became the “queen” of the Restaurant Kitchen.

Address: Via Giuseppe Mazzini 120
55049 Viareggio – LU

Telephone: + 39 0584 31382

Mail:info@romanoristorante.it

Website:Ristorante da Romano

Among the many changes the only thing to remain unchanged, the most important, is the style of the gastronomic proposal, made of sobriety, far from the fashions to themselves, attentive custodian of the scents and flavors of Versilia, with the best dishes of the tradition that alternate, in the rich paper, to those fruit of careful and continuous research, both in the raw material and in the cooking systems.