“We discovered Val Germanasca in the summer of 2003. Our parents had bought a house in Perrero to get away from the heat of Turin during that very hot summer” recalls Erica. The two sisters, who were teenagers, loved neither the house nor the valley. “If someone had told me then that I would end up living up here, I would have thought they were crazy, and replied “Never in my life!”… Instead, here I am”, says Erica. She moved into the house in Perrero in September 2014. “At that time, I was writing my graduation thesis in Forestry and Environmental Sciences and I was tired of the city. I chose to live in that house because it was abandoned, a bit like the whole village of Perrero, and it was deteriorating. I felt it needed me”.

Since the summer of 2019, that house has officially become La Laouziero farm’s honey extraction laboratory. “I had fallen in love with bees at university, attending a course in Entomology” says Erica.
When she arrived in Perrero, while writing her thesis, she learnt beekeeping from a 90-year-old beekeeper. In 2017 Erica enrolled in ReStartAlp, but when the project she intended to launch with Federico and Anita was selected she already had three hives to look after: “I had built them myself, with solid wood and natural dyes mixed with linseed oil,” she says.
So it was Anita who took part in the “on-campus” course, also because Stella was then born in July of the same year. “It was my sister who was in love with bees, but during my internship at cooperative cooperativa Valli Unite, following Giovanni among his bees, I, too, discovered the beauty of this insect,” says Anita, who still lives in Turin, where she works in the programming sector after graduating in Mathematics for Finance.

Even though La Laouziero was not one of the three ReStartAlp finalists, the business plan written for Fondazione Edoardo Garrone and then fine-tuned during the three months of the course, “turned out to be key – explains Anita – to receive funds amounting to around €12 thousand from Fondazione La Stampa – Specchio dei tempi O.N.L.U.S.,”. These funds allowed Anita and Erica to restore their parents’ old house and purchase machinery for their honey extraction laboratory: an uncapping bench, the honey extractor, and the ripeners. “When we opened the laboratory, we also decided to officially start business at the farm” says Federico.