Gianfranco Becchina was born and raised in Castelvetrano, a small agricultural city in southwestern Sicily in the province of Trapani near the extensive ruins of the ancient Greek colony of Selinunte. He made a name for himself as a collector and international dealer of Greek, Roman  and Etruscan artwork and antiques in Switzerland. In 1989, tired of a life of constant travel and fueled by the idea of producing olive oil the way he knew it should and could taste, he returned to Castelvetrano and launched Olio Verde. It is produced at Tenuta Pignatelli (Antica Tenuta dei Principi Pignatelli) which is located in the heart of the Valle del Belice (the valley of what was once the Belice river) where the Nocellara del Belice olive, native to that part of Sicily, is grown and enjoyed both as an excellent table olive and also pressed into a deep green and aromatic extra virgin olive oil with piquant qualities.

Becchina never forgot the taste and aroma of the fresh oil he grew up with or the fact that his father and grandfather would make olive oil for their own personal use from olives pressed early in the season at the beginning of October, as opposed to the oil on the market that was made from olives harvested right up until January, greatly changing the characteristics of the oil. In fact, when Becchina founded his company, he kept those family principles in mind and set out to make an olive oil reminiscent of those times. The result was Olio Verde, “green oil”, a true extra virgin olive oil, made with rigorous production methods that ensure the freshest, highest quality extra virgin olive oil…that “early oil” of Becchina’s childhood.

Today, Olio Verde is synonymous with excellent extra virgin olive oil and is world renowned for its unique freshness. It was the first extra virgin olive oil to be available at both restaurant and retail levels that was cloudy green, lusciously fluid on the palate and had a true olive taste at a time when most others were heavy, yellow, buttery and clear. Becchina was also the first to press and bottle an oil made exclusively from the Nocellara del Belice olives, which were considered too precious for making oil at the time and reserved only for the cured olive market. Every step in the olive oil making process from growing and harvesting the olives to pressing and storing the oil is overseen by the Becchina family and carried out on their family estate, Tenuta Pignatelli, and at the related historic castle, Palazzo Pignatelli a.k.a. Bellumvider, both located in Castelvetrano.

Since 2003, Gianfranco’s daughter, Gabriella Becchina, has been collaborating with her father. Once a promising art historian, she gave in to her genetically embedded entrepreneurial spirit and switched over to the farming, food, tourism and retail business. She was handed over practically every aspect of the production, sales and marketing of Olio Verde s.r.l. which she followed, and ran parallel to her own new company, reorganizing it until December 2009. While Gianfranco now continues to tend to the land and trees of the family estate and oversees the annual harvest and pressing of the oil, Gabriella has passed on the “Olio Verde” torch to her sister Valeria, while maintaining a role in regards to marketing and communication. She has fully branched out into what is best defined as real cultural tourism. She has developed a 360 degrees open set of hospitality-related activities and services which include: accommodations at Tenuta Pignatelli, amongst other family properties, and at selected top properties in southwestern Sicily; oil and gastronomical tours at Olio Verde and other high-end producers; cooking classes, history and art tours, food workshops; event planning and various excursions all over Sicily, including 24H conciergerie and travel assistance to guests and non-guests alike. Her house book as she calls it, is often referred to by visitors as Gabriella’s  Gospel, which has inspired her to create a real guidebook of Sicily, together with students from a professional marketing course at a local school, due to be published in 2011.  To learn more, please visit www.keytosicily.com.

From December 2008 onwards young Daniel Becchina Pacheco, Gianfranco’s grandson, has been involved too, especially when looking to avoid his homework from school. He has been actively engaged in entertaining Tenuta Pignatelli guests, especially their children. He particularly enjoys showing visitors the pigpen and a younger audience the workings of tractors, quads, trucks and fork-lifts, taking them for fordibben rides through branchy and uneven olive fields, and jumping off the vehicles when clueless as to how to turn the engines off… No ficus tree nor factory roof is out of reach for Daniel, and as such, we would like to take this opportunity and warn any faint-of-heart guests to brace themselves for such unavoidable sights. This aside, Daniel cultivates his own vegetable patch under the guidance of his nonno, all 100% organic of course, and can’t stand the sight of leaves and worse twigs falling into the mill either, so that he can be found around harvest time inside the funnel feeding olives into the defoliator removing hoards of such débris. Safety and 10 year-olds? Not happening. Bless Daniel for participating and sharing our passion, making it all even much more worthwhile.

Finally, Valeria Becchina Pacheco, Gabriella’s sister and Daniel’s mother, has joined forces and permanently integrated the Sicilian team in October 2010 to supervise all administrative and commercial aspects of the Olio Verde company. No, you will not find her up to her elbows in olives,  or not yet at least, leg sticking out of a mill funnel like her son, splattered in olive oil like her father, or covered in undistinct vegetation like her sister, such as thorns, lemon blossom pollen, bird feathers, dog hairs, insects, and other allergenic triggers, which she wishes she could stand, but Valeria can definitely cook up a storm when needed. In fact she doubles as cook and kids celebrating their birthdays at Tenuta Pignatelli particularly like her tasty no-limits on fried (healthy who?) and super flavor-enhanced style. Ever tasted a Sicilian enchillada? Or stayed somewhere and, before leaving to go home, be handed a jar of tediously peeled, cleaned, perfectly cut aloe vera slices to soothe all your skin and intestinal aches…. Well, that’s generous Valeria for you! A real Russian-Sicilian/Polish-Swiss mamma if you will… ethnically and culturally that would in fact correspond to the Becchina daughters’ background, if you leave out the English, the French, and the German, or in Gabriella’s case, the American. Which in turn makes it clear why Valeria’s husband would have been Portuguese-Brazilian.

Last but not least, would it all have been possible without the founding support of Rosi Becchina, Gianfranco’s wife? In the early days and through the 1990s, Rosi’s contribution, ranging from financing and public relation, to  translating and setting up a distribution company for Olio Verde’s Swiss wholesale operations to help in a memorably delicate transitional phase, was invaluable. Sharing a vision with her husband, she helped transform Gianfranco’s hobby into a business, and never quite got the recognition she deserved for her efforts and encouragement. Ursula Rosemarie Juraschek Becchina – we love you and wish you were here sharing our everyday Sicilian life! You’d add that touch of perfection and roundness to all things, which only you could. We’d gather mushrooms together in the fall, and combine them into a rich parsley, garlic, chili pepper and olive oil laden trifolati stew which nobody makes like you. If we could, we would put everything pretty, fragrant, healthy and delicious around Tenuta Pignatelli into a bottle and name the magical essence after you… No panacea but strong will and positive outlook is all one can count on these days, though, when battling the heavy disease you have been bravely facing for over seven years now. You are an inspiration for all of us.

Enza Titone Becchina, an acquired first cousin of Gianfranco Becchina, and a seamstress by training, has been the heart and soul of Casina Pignatelli, the restored mansion on Tenuta Pignatelli for almost two decades. She can be considered the cook at the villa, baking up fresh gatò di ricotta to surprise guests at breakfast, teaching classes and permanently reinventing Olio Verde’s signature olive oil plumcake… Enza’s warmth is legendary amongst the Tenuta’s habitués and so is her kind spirit amongst the family. The only never-to-be-missed nor messed-with rendez-vous in her agenda is Castelvetrano’s weekly fleamarket on Tuesday mornings by the cemetery. The rest of her time is devoted to chores and tending to everyone’s needs, including her friendly mamma mostly in her care. She also dedicates herself to creatively resolving the age-old dilemma of matching what’s traditional and good with the new discoveries her curious nature leads her to. For instance, she’s the only one patient enough, to properly yet efficiently and quickly seed out a ripe pomegranate without traces of any of that bitter, thin, inner skin separating the seed-clusters, which spoils the experience of tasting a fresh melograno every so often. Lately Enza heard of all the health benefits related to pomegranates and started juicing them for the family (buying it? we grow it!). Deciding that the juicer didn’t do the fruit justice, its delicate flavor overpowered by the bitterness of the seed’s inner tiny burst pits as it were, she turned to juicing them by hand, pushing the seeds through a sieve with a spoon so as to prevent the pits from leaking their contribution… If that isn’t the perfect, though insane, combination of the old and the new, for those living in an timeless (and priceless) dimension like ours that is, we don’t know what else would be.

Francesco Pisciotta, our miller in October and November, and in charge of tool and machinery maintenance during the rest of the year, while also helping on the farm, started at the Olio Verde frantoio on Tenuta Pignatelli when he was barely 18 years old. He was helping his brother Fabio who had been our miller for years, and when Fabio opened a motorbike shop, Francesco, or Ciccio for insiders, became our new miller’s, Antonio Lanzarone’s right hand. Years have passed and Ciccio has graduated to becoming our fully self-sufficient, operational frantoiano. Late at night, when most milling takes place given one starts milling the olives harvested during the day not before 4pm, it does happen that Ciccio might empty a freshly pressed batch of olive oil into the wrong tank, and it is kind of hard to get a hold of him in the early a.m., but hey, we’re all only human…(anyone else heard the growling of GFB in the background, or is it just us?). Yet as long as he doesn’t mix our own olive oil with that of a third-party producer, we are happy (more growling there…). Furthermore, Francesco is devoted to his horse, which he keeps and rides up in the hills of Partanna, where the town slopes down into the valley dividing it from Montevago, known for its hotsprings and beautiful scenery, underground streams, microclimate, great trekking, caves and archaeological digs which have recently brought to light paleolithic settlements.

Domenico Ala is the overseer of all farming, garden and maintenance activities. He manages the pruning and picking crews, reports directly and only to Gianfranco while still always addressing everyone else’s issues and requests with a smile and as efficiently as possible. His farming experience, know-how, gentle yet firm manners  and permanent availability, have turned him into the most well-liked person at Tenuta Pignatelli, for insiders and guests alike. And if you meet his two angel-faced, blonder-than-blond sons (the living demonstration of that thing about Sicilian genes), who could be identical twins but aren’t, you would immediately understand what it is we are talking about. The perfect father, the perfect farmer, the perfect staff member – we wish for Domenico to keep finding satisfaction in his work with us, so that we may grow together and provide generations to come with a sturdy basis, a consolidated management, and flows of top quality Olio Verde oil.

Enza Titone’s daughter, Mariella Becchina and her first cousin Rosa Salvo form the heart of the super efficient bottling facility crew. On a good day, they alone can fill, cap, label, package over a thousand bottles. Having honed their skills over years… And if you show up with a tour group they’ll graciously step aside to let visitors see how Olio Verde is bottled, and sometimes even put your hands to the task. Can you imagine – any of the bottles you might pick up, after your Sicily trip, on a retail shelf at Manor in Switzerland or at Whole Foods in Sante Fe  could, potentially, have come out of your own hands?! Zero mess, clean to perfection, and sometimes a crooked label or two, just for good measure, that’s what these power ladies do, oh so well.

Technicians and specialists are called in when needed, though not as often as one would believe.

Olio Verde has been awarded many prestigious awards. More on the latter in the pertinent section of our blog.

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