Quality Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Guaranteed from four generations of tenacious and obstinate people
1920
Our extra virgin olive oil was born
Tommaso Mazzone, born on 25 March 1866 from a family of farmers, was the only one of the 7 brothers who wanted to try his hand at olives and extra virgin olive oil. Married to Checchina Binetti on 5 June 1916, he decided to change his life in 1920 by buying a building in Via Capocci, with a courtyard and stables for the horses he was passionate about. It was in the last building before the open countryside, in a small room on the ground floor, where he started the first oil mill with a mechanical press and grinder moved by mules. Meanwhile, Michele (1909), Filomena (1910), Nunzia (1917) and Gino (1919) were born. After a bit of mishaps with horse theft and some meagre crops, things started to turn out well
1927
Luck, as fickle as man, begins to abandon him. Checchina, at the age of 43, gives birth to Antonio (1927). A difficult birth. Checchina gets sick, loses milk, and Tommaso is forced to take charge of another family in exchange for Antonio’s breastfeeding
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1928
Relations with his eldest son Michele, now eighteen, become increasingly stormy, Tommaso tries to impose his authority but Michele refuses to obey and leaves home. After a year spent in Rome with aunt Teresa and uncle Pasquale Binetti, he embarks on an ocean liner bound for Buenos Aires Argentina, from where he will no longer return.
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1938
The health conditions of his wife Franca get worse and worse and he decides to take her to the best doctors of the time, to the Regina Elena Hospital in Rome. The doctors immediately opted for surgery but the uterine cancer, too advanced, was no longer removable. So, Tommaso took his wife back home in Ruvo where she died on November 2nd, 1938.
All the efforts made to save her, all the costs incurred for the intervention, the trip and the stay in Rome were useless, and so to meet these expenses he had to sell some properties.
Meanwhile, Gino, the second son, had just turned 19 and started the school for non-commissioned officers in the Italian alpine trooper in L’Aquila. In 1939, he was assigned to the troops destined for the African Campaign. War takes him too. Tommaso takes his son to the station and follows the train with his cart until he disappears. He knew he would never see him again.
1941
Nunzia marries the carabiniere Vincenzo Lobascio in service in Satriano di Lucania where the couple moves. Antonio, very close to his sister Nunzia, occasionally goes to visit her in Basilicata. Little more than a boy, he lives an adolescence without reference points: without a mother, with an elderly father and married sisters, he has moments of confusion.
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1941
Arrivano così anche le nozze di Nunzia che sposa il carabiniere Vincenzo Lobascio di istanza a Satriano di Lucania dove la coppia si trasferisce. Antonio, legatissimo alla sorella Nunzia, ogni tanto va trovarla in Basilicata, lui poco più che ragazzino vive una adolescenza senza punti di riferimento, senza madre con un padre anziano e le sorelle sposate, ha dei momenti di sbandamento.
1944
Tommaso, physically and morally distressed by the disappointments received, dies in 1944.
After three years in Africa, under the command of General Rommel, spent between Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Morocco, and after another three years of imprisonment in El Paso in Texas, Gino returned to Ruvo in 1946.
Only mice inhabit the building in Via Capocci. Gino goes to look for his brother Antonio and finds out that he had found work at the port of Molfetta where the allies were still in. They reopen the paternal house, trying to put the pieces back together. Unfortunately, the two brothers are unable to get along and often clash due to incompatibility of character.
1951
Nel 1951 Gino conosce e sposa Carmela Melone, al matrimonio festeggiato nella sala sotto il cinema politeama, ci sono anche le due figlie di Nunzia, Lorenza 5 anni e Franca di un anno, e il figlio unico di Filomena, Giacomo anche lui di un anno.
1952
Antonio, tired of the constant quarrels with his older brother, decides to move to Australia. Shortly after, Vincenzo, Nunzia’s husband, dies. Two dramatic events that mark this family once again.
1954
Carmela and Gino cannot have children and so, in this building with the intercommunicating rooms, the cousins Lorenza, Franca and Giacomo grow up as three brothers of an extended family consisting of two dads, Peppino and Gino, and three mothers, Filomena, Nunzia and Carmela.
1960
Stubborn and tenacious like all the Mazzone, Gino wants to put back on what his father Tommaso had built. Working hard in the fields first and then using the funds from the green plan, he began to increase the area of his farm. Gifted with an excellent nose for business, enterprising and futuristic, he manages to collect one success after another. The Mazzone oil mill reopens in 1960, still in Via Capocci. Gino buys a two-wheeled muller and two 12-inch hydraulic presses from SIMA-Jesi, under a shack made of tuff and fibre cement, and he starts to grind the olives.
1967
Gino renewed everything, building a concrete building on two levels in his father’s courtyard, the olive grove on the ground floor and the oil mill in the basement with Barracane machines. Right from the start, the Mazzone mill stands out for its order and cleanliness to which Gino placed an almost maniacal attention. He was one of the first in Ruvo to cover the walls near the machines with tiles, contradicting the common saying “si fatt ‘nu trappeite” “you have soiled everything as in an oil mill”.
Giacomo, the only male nephew of Gino, follows and supports his uncle in all activities, in the work in the countryside, in the grape harvest and production of wine and with the work shifts in the mill, learning all the tricks of the trade.
In 1975, Giacomo decides to marry Enza Basile and stops working as farmer and oil miller, to find a work that could ensure stability for his new family.
1984 - 1989
In these years, the family lives another fatal period. Peppino and Filomena die first and then Gino and Carmela. The Mazzone mill stops its activity again for two years. Giacomo, who knows the events that happened to this family, and having seen and experienced all the sacrifices of his uncle, does not want to let this tradition die. In fact, in 1991, he built a new oil mill in the industrial area of Ruvo and named it Oleificio Mazzone (Oil Mill), the current headquarters of our business.
