Who we are

After forty years of waiting, Golferenzo has now reopened it’s bottega.

Of all the incredible things we are doing in this village, this is the one that makes us most proud. Because a town cannot really be revived without it’s bottega.

Without the morning scent of fresh baked bread, together with carefully sliced cold cuts, fresh milk bought on the road to home, local delicacies, an excuse to have a chat, “maybe it will rain today”, “how was the wine harvest?”, and speaking in local dialect to ensure it stays alive, “have you seen our young… Ms. Mariuccia would have been so proud!”…

A bottega is like a heart whose heartbeat has been restored.

A bottega is not just a project, as projects are often “unemotional”, with focus on numbers, business plan, basically activities done with the head and less with the heart. If Corte only looked at the comprehensive project this way, none of this would have been possible.

A bottega is a dream; ours has come to life.

A village is not reborn if it forgets its past and so our Bottega resides within a house that has a lot to say about local history.

We decided to name it, “Lino’s Bottega (shop)”, because Mr. Lino, the village’s postman, lived within these very walls.

He was a postman because his father was also a postmaan. That was the way things were back in the day when love letters were still being written.

People’s lives were marked by what Lino held in his bag. He walked for miles on end to bring news even to the most distant farms.

He was a meek and kind man and we imagine him with a lump in his throat before knocking on the door to deliver a telegram of condolences or smiling when delivering a postcard sent by some wealthy relative who had seen the sea. On the other side of the door, regardless of who it was, always asked Lino to “come in, sit down, and let me offer you something”; there was never much hurry bask in those times.

Why are we sharing these experiences? Because we would like that when you come to visit our shop, you can breathe a bit of that nostalgia in when a town was a community, shopping was done calmly, when food didn’t always have the same flavour and it took very little to be happy.