Places: Alla Chitarra Antica — A Line Drawn in Dough

Where the Adriatic Meets the Guitar Strings of Abruzzo

The City by the Sea

At street level, Pescara is all movement — scooters, gulls, and the glitter of the Adriatic.
But step off the promenade into a narrow side street near Via Trento and you’ll find a different rhythm: slower, aromatic, and unmistakably local.
That’s where Alla Chitarra Antica hides, a small osteria named for the most Abruzzese of tools — the wooden frame strung with metal wires that cuts pasta into strands the thickness of a guitar string.

Inside, there are no gimmicks.
Wooden tables, clay bowls, bottles of Montepulciano on the counter, and the steady tac-tac-tac of someone pressing dough against the chitarra.
Here, tradition isn’t reenacted; it’s lived daily.

The Instrument That Made a Region Sing

The chitarra abruzzese was born in this stretch of land between mountains and sea.
Invented in the 1800s in Teramo and perfected in kitchens from Chieti to Pescara, it turned a flat sheet of egg dough into strings — spaghetti alla chitarra — that absorb sauce better than any smooth extrusion could.

In the old days, every family owned one; children learned to pluck it before they could write.
The strands it produced weren’t uniform; they carried the ridges of the wire, small roughnesses that made sauce cling.
That’s the sound and texture that gave this restaurant its name.

A Kitchen Tuned to the Adriatic

Chef-owner Paolo Di Bartolomeo (one of Pescara’s quiet stalwarts) built Alla Chitarra Antica around a simple idea: marry the inland pasta tradition with the sea’s daily catch.

His kitchen works like a duet — wheat from the hills, fish from the port, olive oil from the valleys.
Each morning he visits the mercato ittico near the harbour, choosing squid, clams, and tiny shrimp still smelling of salt.
By noon they’re tangled in strands of fresh chitarra or fettucce, gleaming gold under a drizzle of Intosso olive oil.

The result is cuisine that’s recognisably Abruzzese but laced with maritime lightness — the kind of food that makes you understand how the same region can produce both shepherds and sailors.

The Pasta as Landscape

Every dish at Alla Chitarra Antica feels like a translation of the coastline into texture:

• Spaghetti alla Chitarra allo Scoglio — the classic; seafood, tomatoes, white wine, and garlic emulsified into a bronze-coloured foam.
• Tagliolini con Zucchine e Gamberi — the meeting of land and sea, echoing the saffron-zucchini combinations of the inland hills.
• Fettucce al Nero di Seppia — ink-black, saline, scented with fennel.
• Taccozzelle di Grano Duro con Ragù di Polpo — a clever nod to mountain heritage, turning a shepherd’s pasta into a fisherman’s dish.

The pasta is made daily, cut and dried just long enough to develop bite.
Each strand carries that faint rasp of bronze and wheat — the “voice” of Abruzzo’s grain fields.

A Bridge Between Traditions

Where Da Paolino’s cooking is dense and slow, Alla Chitarra Antica is fluid.
Guanciale gives way to bottarga, pecorino to shaved ricotta salata, but the gestures remain the same.
The oil still pools golden at the plate’s edge; the sauces are still made from patience, not stock cubes.

Paolo likes to say that “Abruzzo ends where the pasta meets the wave.”
He means that coastal cooking here doesn’t forget its inland DNA — the wheat, the saffron, the habit of thrift.

One of his most popular seasonal dishes proves the point:
Tagliolini con Zucchine, Guanciale e Zafferano dell’Aquila — your very pasta all’Abruzzese reborn by the sea.
The guanciale is rendered until crisp, zucchini ribbons folded in, and the sauce finished with saffron steeped in the pasta water.
It tastes of sun on salt water — the colour of late August.

The Ingredient Philosophy

Everything in the kitchen revolves around proximity.
Olive oil comes from small mills in the hills of Chieti.
The flour is a blend of Italian durum and local heritage wheat.
Herbs come from Paolo’s own terrace garden: mint for calamari, thyme for clams, basil for tomato.

Saffron arrives from a farmer in Navelli, delivered in parchment envelopes.
He buys only the year’s first harvest, because the scent fades after winter.

Even the wine list feels geographic: Pecorino d’Abruzzo, Cerasuolo, and Tintilia del Molise — bottles that taste of slope and sunlight.

Inside the Room

The restaurant seats barely thirty.
Walls are lined with framed photos of fishermen and musicians; a wooden chitarra hangs above the counter.
On some nights a neighbour brings a guitar and plays softly between courses — a literal echo of the pasta’s name.

There’s no rush.
Diners linger over second glasses, discussing which villages make the best olive oil.
The atmosphere is part trattoria, part living museum — comfortable but alive.

Seafood Without Excess

Unlike many coastal spots that load plates with butter or cream, Alla Chitarra Antica keeps things stripped back.
Pasta and seafood meet through olive oil, acidity and timing, not heaviness.
That restraint lets Abruzzo’s saffron and guanciale combinations coexist naturally with the sea.

You might find:

• Tagliolini al Limone e Triglia, bright and aromatic.
• Spaghetti con Vongole e Zafferano, subtle, floral, the real gold of the region.
• Fettucce con Moscardini e Peperone Dolce di Altino — spice meeting tide.

Each dish tastes like it could only exist here, where the mountains send their ingredients downhill until they meet the sea.

The People Behind the Plates

Paolo and his wife Claudia run the front and back like a duet.
She remembers returning guests by wine preference; he remembers their favourite pasta.
Their son, when home from university, sometimes helps roll dough.
It’s a family operation, and that shows in the warmth of the service — informal but attentive.

Ask for recommendations, and they’ll tell you stories: how Paolo learned to clean squid from his uncle in Vasto, how saffron threads should never be toasted too long, how Abruzzo’s best tomatoes grow not by the sea but twenty kilometres inland.

It’s dinner as oral history.

Fun Facts & Cultural Notes

• Spaghetti alla chitarra is Abruzzo’s only pasta shape recognised by name in Italy’s official agri-food heritage registry (PAT).
• The restaurant’s oldest chitarra, still in use, belonged to Paolo’s grandmother and is tuned slightly uneven — producing strands of varying width that he calls “the measure of imperfection.”
• Locals joke that you can judge a true Pescarese trattoria by whether you hear the chitarra before you see the menu.
• Their house olive oil, from Tollo, won a regional Slow Food “Grande Olio” citation in 2022.
• The restaurant closes for a week every October so Paolo can help with the grape harvest — because, as he says, “wine tells the pasta how to behave.”