When I stepped into the dining room at ChiaroScuro, Marina Ravarotto was already there. In front of her lay a simple workstation: the dough, a bowl of water to keep it perfectly hydrated, and the round reed tray on which she patiently stretches su filindeu.

Marina Ravarotto is the chef and founder of ChiaroScuro, the restaurant she opened in Cagliari in 2017. She is one of the very few people still able to make su filindeu, the ancient pasta that belongs to Nuoro's culinary heritage. Before anything else, she is a woman who chose to build her professional life while remaining deeply connected to the land she comes from.

"I made a personal choice never to leave Sardinia," she says. "I wanted to build my career around my own territory."

For Marina, that territory is home: Nuoro. She was born and raised there to a father from Nuoro, a mechanic with strong hands and a passion for Sunday cooking, and a mother of German heritage, whose strong character and determination left a lasting impression on her. Growing up between these two worlds shaped a culinary sensibility that naturally blends different influences.

One memory returns to her again and again: leaving school and arriving at her grandmother's house, where lunch was always waiting. She remembers her grandmother standing by the window, the aroma of fried fish on Fridays, and the scent of tomato sauce filling the house throughout the rest of the week. At that time, cooking was not yet a calling. It was a quiet education, teaching her that food could be a daily expression of care, family, and belonging.

Then there were Sundays with her father. Marina remembers him preparing potato gnocchi, handmade ravioli, and grilled meat for the family. "My father had enormous hands," she recalls. "One of my favourite memories is watching him shape these tiny little gnocchi with those incredibly large hands."

That image of craftsmanship says a great deal about Marina. For her, food has always been something that first takes shape through the hands before it becomes an idea or a recipe.

She enrolled at the hospitality school in Nuoro at the age of seventeen. Looking back, she admits that she did not immediately see cooking as her calling. She learned the fundamentals, built a solid foundation, and graduated with the technical skills she needed. Her real awakening came later, when she encountered the profession in its most demanding form. The turning point came at the Valle dell'Erica Resort, where she worked alongside chef Mario Tirotto, the man she still considers her mentor. From him she learned how to build a menu, the importance of thoughtful pairings, and the value of constantly challenging herself. Most importantly, he taught her a lesson she has carried with her ever since: stay when every instinct tells you to leave.

At the time, she was the only woman in a brigade of thirty-five men. After just one month, she was ready to quit, convinced she did not belong there. Tirotto stopped her and said words that would shape the rest of her career: "Marina, if you leave now, you let them win. Be brave. Finish the season."

She chose to stay. That decision taught her that this profession demands far more than passion alone. It requires resilience, discipline, and the ability to remain steady under pressure without ever losing sight of who you are.

The role of women in the kitchen has shaped Marina’s entire story. She explains that being a woman in the professional culinary world was challenging when she began her career, and, to some extent, it still is today. “There are still very few female chefs,” she says. “This profession is a way of life. It comes with pressure, hard work, and sacrifice.” When we think of home cooking, we often picture a woman. Yet when we think of professional kitchens, restaurant brigades, and culinary leadership, our minds still tend to turn to men. It is as if the act of nourishing belongs to women only while it remains unseen within the home, but becomes a man's domain the moment it gains recognition and a public identity.

Marina Ravarotto has experienced this divide firsthand, and it is one of the reasons why her cooking has such a distinctive voice today. It is a cuisine defined by strength and precision, but also by a willingness to embrace vulnerability. “I’m a very strong person, but at the same time I can also be very fragile,” she says. “There are moments when exhaustion takes over, but I fall, and then I get back up.”

ChiaroScuro was born in 2017, after years of dedication and hard work, as an opportunity to give shape to her own identity. It is both a personal and a collective project, allowing her to tell the story of Sardinia through her own culinary language. “After so many years, it was finally time to dedicate myself to my own vision and create my own identity,” she explains.

The restaurant’s name is inspired by the writings of Grazia Deledda. Conceived as a story unfolding chapter by chapter, it is a declaration of love for Barbagia and the cuisine of Sardinia’s inland regions. Yet Marina has no desire to portray a static, museum-like Sardinia weighed down by the obligation of tradition. Instead, she wants to tell the story of a modern Sardinia that is also light in spirit—not superficial, but profound without becoming heavy. It is about taking deeply rooted ingredients, techniques, and memories, and bringing them into a contemporary dining experience.

Marina sees herself more as a guardian than an interpreter of tradition. Her role is to preserve Sardinia’s culinary heritage by keeping it alive through her own perspective. The clearest example is filindeu, which she serves at the restaurant in a clarified sheep broth. The essential elements of the traditional recipe remain—the sheep and the broth—but clarifying the broth creates a lighter, more refined texture that supports the delicate pasta without overpowering it.

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate a rich sheep broth,” she explains. “I wanted to give equal importance to two extraordinary ingredients: the broth and the pasta. Making the broth lighter is, above all, a way of allowing the filindeu to truly shine.” Filindeu lies at the symbolic heart of her journey, but it would be limiting to describe it simply as a culinary rarity. For Marina Ravarotto, it represents an act of reconnection with her roots. It belongs to the culinary tradition of Nuoro, where it has historically been passed down from mother to daughter. She, however, did not inherit this knowledge because no one ever taught her. She had to learn it on her own.

During the lockdown, she decided to give it a try. At first, the strands were too thick and the layers too few, but she kept going. She would send photos of her progress to her sister, who encouraged her to push further. “You have to work harder,” she would tell her. Marina took those words to heart, and it took her four years to master the technique.

“I did it entirely on my own. Every time I stretch the dough and look at it, I think to myself: how beautiful it is to see something so rare, and to know that I was able to achieve it.”

For Marina, filindeu is “soul, heart, and dedication, but it is also discipline.” Made from just semolina and salted water, the dough is stretched repeatedly until it becomes an incredibly fine web of delicate strands. Tradition calls for it to be stretched seven times, resulting in 256 threads. The pasta is then carefully arranged on a circular frame and left to air dry. As it dries, it loses moisture, becomes firm, and is finally broken into pieces before being served in broth.

Marina prepares filindeu every Thursday. Mondays and Tuesdays are reserved for shopping, the market, and everyday errands. Thursdays belong entirely to the pasta and, in turn, to reconnecting with herself. “It allows me to take everything that has happened during the week and leave it there,” she says. “My mind is focused on the pasta, my hands are working, but at the same time I feel completely at ease.”

Filindeu has taught her an important lesson: not everything can be accelerated, made more productive, or optimized. Some gestures simply require their own time. For Marina, that time has also become a lesson in entrepreneurship. “This pasta has given me so much, and it has helped me mentally as well. You have to slow down. You have to give it the time it deserves if you want things to turn out well.”

This, perhaps more than anything else, reveals something essential about Marina’s character. She describes herself as stubborn—and people often say that those from Barbagia are even more determined than Sardinians in general. Yet her determination is not simply a matter of persistence. It comes from her ability to stay with a gesture, to keep working at it until it reveals its true meaning.

This is also where her idea of sustainability begins to take shape: the possibility of building a career that does not completely consume the person behind it. It is no easy task, as Marina herself explains: “I have two jobs. I’m a chef, and I’m also an entrepreneur.” Being a chef means creating dishes, leading the kitchen, maintaining standards, and defining a clear culinary vision. Being an entrepreneur means running a business—looking after people, working with suppliers, managing costs, making daily decisions, and carrying the weight of financial responsibility. Two professions combined into one, with much of the effort remaining invisible to those who simply enjoy the meal.

To sustain that balance, Marina needs moments of her own, and one of them is cycling. When she worked as an employee, she had more time to ride. Today, those moments are much rarer, but whenever she can—even late at night, after service—she gets on her bicycle. It is her way of leaving the kitchen behind and reconnecting with the world outside. “When I ride, I notice a thousand different scents,” she says. “The smell of the sea, the smoke from chimneys in winter, the fragrance of plants, especially in spring. It’s a moment of freedom. From the moment I get on my bike until I arrive home, I find peace.”

For Marina Ravarotto, sustainability is not only personal—it is also gastronomic, economic, and deeply rooted in the local territory. At ChiaroScuro, every effort is made to respect the rhythm of the seasons, shop at the local market, work with small producers, and showcase the richness of Sardinia’s ingredients. She firmly believes that the island holds extraordinary potential if it learns to recognize and strengthen its own supply chain.

“I truly believe Sardinia could become a region capable of sustaining itself, instead of relying on products brought in from elsewhere,” she says. “As a restaurateur, I should be the first to promote and support my own territory.”

This philosophy runs through every dish on the menu. There is meat, of course, because the cuisine of inland Sardinia is deeply connected to it. But there are also seasonal fruit and vegetables, foraged and cultivated produce, traditional nose-to-tail cooking, Villagrande prosciutto, filindeu, and a small seada served to end the meal. Fish also has its place, though Marina avoids the stereotype that Cagliari must always be associated with seafood. She cooks with whatever the market offers, following the natural rhythm of the seasons and applying the same principle to the sea as she does to the land: listen to nature rather than trying to force it.

Her Territory Tasting Menu was created with the intention of guiding guests through a Sardinia they often do not truly know. During the winter months, most diners are locals from Cagliari, while the warmer season brings more Italian and international travellers. Some arrive already familiar with the name filindeu, having heard of it as one of the world's rarest pastas. But knowing the name of a dish is not the same as understanding the culture behind it. That is why ChiaroScuro becomes a place of interpretation and connection, where Sardinian traditions are shared through food and storytelling.

Her connection to Nuoro remains incredibly strong. She arrived in Cagliari by chance more than twenty years ago while visiting a close friend, and soon fell in love with the city—its history, its character, and its vibrant energy. Yet Nuoro has never stopped feeling like home.

“The moment I arrive, the first thing I do is roll down the car window and breathe in the air,” she says. “It smells like home.”

Nuoro is where her family lives, where her nieces and nephews are growing up, and where her deepest roots remain. Returning is a way of recharging, of receiving a kind of love that cannot be found anywhere else. Her goal is to carry forward everything her parents made possible for her, giving meaning to the path they helped her build while offering guests an authentic way to discover her Sardinia: inland, complex, deeply flavourful, sometimes demanding, yet capable of revealing extraordinary beauty to those willing to slow down.

When asked about the places closest to her heart, Marina speaks of destinations she returns to because she admires the strength of the people and the projects behind them. She mentions one place in particular for the dedication with which a family legacy has been preserved: Sabor’e Mari, the project founded by Alessia Madeddu’s father and carried forward with determination by Alessia herself. Then, inevitably, she returns to Nuoro—to the mountain where she goes to breathe and reconnect with herself, and to the local producers who provide many of the ingredients that later find their way into her kitchen.

Photo by  Roberto Satta