Palazzo di Varignana

An Emilia-Romagna estate where the oil, the preserves, and the honey all come from its grounds.

This is the youngest house Casa carries, and the only one that had to prove its region could grow olives at all. On the hills southeast of Bologna, at the northern edge of the olive's world, Carlo Gherardi found four ancient trees that had survived centuries of frost. "Nobody believed it," he has said of the beginning. "They called me crazy."

Since 2015 the estate has planted outward from those four survivors into the largest olive grove in Emilia-Romagna — nearly two hundred thousand trees, organic from the first planting — around a restored historic villa. The hills answered: the estate's oils have taken Gold at the New York International Olive Oil Competition two years running, and Gambero Rosso's Tre Foglie, Italy's own top mark.

The olives were only the argument's opening. The grounds now carry orchards, beehives, saffron, and rows of herbs, and the estate's kitchen turns them into the rest of its shelf — fruit sweetened with grapes rather than sugar, honey from its own hives, a chocolate cream built on its own oil. One property, eating entirely from itself.

Casa carries that whole idea: both oils from the grove, the orchard's fruit, the chocolate cream on the estate's extra virgin — the one address in the pantry that covers the stove and the morning table at once.