– OUR STORY –

[ FROM SOMERSET TO ITALY & BACK ]

With an Italian great-grandfather, Jules had chosen to study Italian along with French at university and decided to take a year out before study in order to do so. After spending 3 months in the North of Italy, where she became fluent in the language, she travelled down to Positano on the Amalfi coast in South Italy to work the summer there, staying with family friends. And this is where they met, originally in 1991, but it was at the end of 2005 when they met up again in Italy; older, wiser and more mature! By the end of 2006, Stefano had moved to England and, after a variety of different jobs, he decided to try and sell his Italian food and a few varieties of olives at local markets.  Things progressed and a few years later Jules joined the company full-time, leaving her job as secondary school teacher of Modern Foreign Languages in January 2014.

– FAMILY –

Our daughter Lucia arrived in 2010 and she adores olives, shows a great interest in cooking and has natural entrepreneurial abilities.....watch this space!

– STEFANO –

I have always been passionate about food, having grown up with my mother’s wonderful cooking and my grandfather’s love of hunting and growing his own food. Good ingredients are essential and I source as much of my produce as possible from local suppliers. I even self-source my own game meat near to where I live and butcher it myself; you can’t get more local than that!

For 6 years I have been restoring The Pump House: it is an amazing venue, come and see for yourselves!

– JULES –

Jules started helping at events long before she joined the company full-time. Once she had left teaching, her profession for 12 years, she started going regularly to our weekly farmers’ markets as well as other monthly markets. Taking over all sorts of management duties as well as running front of house, our skills balance (almost!) perfectly; it really is a family business!