To cook like your mother is good, to cook like your grandmother better,” runs an old Tuscan proverb. For the chef Wynn Gabriel, that ought to create something of a quandary: one of his grandmothers was Italian, the other Welsh. Perhaps fortunately, the cooking at his restaurant, Al Macereto, a converted farm building 15 miles south of Florence, owes rather more to the hills of Chianti than it does to the Rhondda Valley.

This is where local families celebrate festivals and saints’ days with huge, traditional feasts of good home cooking. The tagliatelle we were served was nut-brown from chestnut flour, while slabs of maiolino, roast suckling pig, arrived at the table fragrant with wood smoke and rosemary.

I had come to this part of Tuscany with some preconceptions. The roads would be full of Brits, the restaurants even more so, and the food being served to them would be an international amalgam of Michelinised Italian.

Instead, I found a region fiercely protective of its identity and traditions — expressed above all through a love of simple, rustic food. The almost mythical figure of the nonna, or little grandmother, hovers over Tuscan cooking as sternly as Escoffier does over French haute cuisine. Even today, Florentines speak in hushed tones of tiny, rustic establishments where Michelin-starred chefs go to rediscover the authenticity of cucina contadina, the cooking of the peasants.

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One place they might well visit is Osteria La Befa, in a tiny hilltop hamlet of a dozen or so houses. Although we were the only customers for lunch, the owner said she was glad we’d phoned 20 minutes earlier to make a reservation: it meant she could ask her neighbour to go out and shoot a rabbit for us.

Part went into our pasta, the rest was roasted over a large wood fire. Unmarked carafes of red wine sat on the tables along with the olive oil and salt. Nothing more was needed, except a long walk afterwards in the silent forests surrounding the village.

In such rural backwaters, invention of any sort tends to be frowned on: when it comes to something as serious as food, one new recipe every century or so is plenty to be going on with. But innovation isn’t altogether impossible, as the case of the cheesemaker Antonia Ballarin demonstrates.

She was trying to make traditional pecorino from sheep’s milk when a batch came out wrong. As she gathered together her misshapen, blotchy efforts to feed to the pigs, some of the juices ran down her arm. Absentmindedly licking them off, she realised she had created something rather good, and buccia di rospo was born — the name means “skin of toad”, a celebration of the cheese’s outstanding ugliness.

Antonia’s award-winning cheeses adorn trolleys in creative establishments such as the three-Michelin-starred Enoteca Pinchiorri, in Florence. But in true contadina style, she frowns on innovation for its own sake. “When people start working for me, they always want to experiment by adding different herbs,” she says. “But you don’t need to add anything at all to sheep’s milk to make cheeses that are completely different from each other.”

She prefers to concentrate on small but significant substitutions. Thus, her marzolino — a fresh, pale cheese traditionally made from milk that comes from the lush, sainfoin-scented shoots of meadow grass that appear in early spring — utilises rennet made from wild cardoons, while her ricotta is coagulated by being stirred with a fig branch, traditional methods that contribute to their distinctive character.

Driving down the unpaved track that leads to her family’s farm, Fattoria Costanzo e Paterno — a collection of farm buildings once owned by the Machiavelli dynasty, now converted into an agriturismo of surpassing loveliness — it isn’t hard to see why Tuscany exerts such a hold on the imagination.

This is the ageless Italy of our fantasies, where cyprus trees dot the landscape like so many exclamation marks and tiny castellated farms dominate hillsides combed with vines. Many of the nicest restaurants in the Chianti region are breathtaking as well as mouthwatering.

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