La Dolce Vitasenza fretta.
La Dolce Vitasenza fretta.
Our story
Make yourselves comfortable: this is a story we like to tell out loud, between one course and the next. It begins with the name — the shortest part, and the truest. Nos, in Latin, means “us”. Because you never go to a restaurant alone: you don't say “I'm going”, you say “let's go”. And because in here we speak the same way — never “I”, always “we”: when something goes well it belongs to everyone, and when something needs putting right, that does too. You say “let's go”; we answer in the plural. Everything else comes from there.
Where we started
We'll say it as we see it: Alberobello, in the evening, has always had little to offer. And to us the evening felt like the most beautiful part of the day — the one that deserved more. So the idea was never “let's open another restaurant”: it was to give the evening its time back. A whole evening, slow, with its own music. A moment you give yourself.
at the pace of la dolce vita
A story before an idea
Here the “us” makes its one exception, and we owe it to you: the idea is Valerio's, and nobody else's. He left early — away from home in his first year of secondary school, boarding at the hospitality school in Spoleto. Then years aboard ships: not for the sea, but for the languages and cultures that pass before you. Nobody in his family had ever been in this trade; he came to it out of passion, one job at a time. In July 2016 he took Palazzo Scotto back in hand — a late-nineteenth-century residence in the centre of Alberobello — starting with the rooms. The restaurant, the harder piece, came later: the one that was missing. On 22 August 2024 we opened NOS, inside the palazzo — a house that already had a story of its own. About the house, and everything that lies beyond the table, we tell you separately.
The “us”, in the kitchen
From those years on the ships one simple idea remained: recipes travel, just like people. Our kitchen was born there — and it's made together. If you look for a chef's name on the menu you won't find one, and that isn't an oversight: we study, try, and decide every dish together, with Valerio keeping time. Something played as a band, not a soloist's number. The how — sometimes it's the recipe that travels, sometimes the ingredient — is more fun to discover on the menu, which reads like an album: every dish carries the name of a song.
You eat — and, in the meantime, you smile.
The “us”, in the dining room
And then there's us — who, given the name, are the whole point. NOS has become a small forge for local talent: people of the trade who were about to pack their bags for abroad, and who chose instead to stay and build something of their own. We're humble and we still have so much to learn — but a few things, in the meantime, we have learned: the amuse-bouche nobody ordered that arrives all the same, the welcome glass, and Martin at the piano every evening — the breath of the room. The faces, one by one, and the music have pages of their own.
Whenever you like
It isn't a finished story: we play it again from the top every evening. And told out loud — with a glass in hand and someone at the piano — it comes out even better. Say “let's go”: we'll take care of the rest.