For Santi Palazzolo work is Love. Attention, not passion, a term that by its vocation has the ability to be overwhelming, instinctive and often volatile. Love is another thing. Something alive, natural and immortal. <<Doing sweet things is love and, as my grandfather used to say, we enter people’s homes on holidays, in happy moments>>, recalls the Master.

A love handed down from generation to generation, the love for pastry in the Palazzolo family, which began with grandfather Santi in 1919 in a small Sicilian town, Cinisi. A confectioner – as they were once called – was something never seen in the family, they took him for crazy at first but with the trust of his great-grandfather, a scale, 10 eggs, a kilo of flour and a kilo of sugar as a dowry, he began his/their adventure reached here. Grandpa’s teachings, handed down from generation to generation, reached Maestro Palazzolo and his children with the same awareness of then, of not taking anything for granted and of seeking quality in every single ingredient.

At a time like this, where the food industry has made great strides to achieve a qualitatively excellent level of production from an organoleptic point of view, opening an agri-food park like Fico and showing the final consumer a complete view of the artisan product chain, making him live a real experience, it becomes an added value of weight to the entire project. Showing the consumer how artisanal production can make a product unique and “fresh” by enhancing the taste of each individual ingredient is the aim of the many Masters present in Fico, first and foremost our Master Santi Palazzolo.

The works are in the finishing straight and Bologna is preparing to welcome its first large agri-food park of 100,000 square metres. Fico Eataly World will contain all the wonder of Italian biodiversity, will host factories, classrooms, leisure areas and places to eat. Inside there will also be a pastry shop and ice cream shop, but not just any. Master Santi Palazzolo will manage these spaces of taste and we at Orion will be there for him in the furnishings and windows that will host his delicacies.

With Santi Palazzolo Sicily stops in Emilia Romagna, packing up all its confectionary tradition, unique in Italy and in the world, made such by the search for excellent raw materials as well as by a historical-cultural capital of this land so lively and <<remember that ice cream was born right here, in our splendid Sicily>>.

<<We want to tell the world about the food and wine excellence and the beauty of Italian agri-food>>, this is Fico’s mission, to give an authentic experience through food. Reading a little between the lines, one could say that it is a thought shared by the Palazzolo pastry shop since its origins, as it is precisely through the maximum quality of the primary products that a very high level of pastry is obtained and as Master Palazzolo tells us &lt ;<we have the task of describing the dessert, even through tasting it>>. This will be the genuine atmosphere that will be breathed inside the “sweet” premises of Fico designed by Palazzolo and we like to think that it will also expand to all the other 100 thousand square meters of the park, carrying around our food tradition and what is good we know how to do in the world: fall in love.

Maria Luisa Spera

Esthete, researcher of beauty understood not as an exercise in style, but rather as inspiration. When she grows up she wants to become monotasking, since today she can’t go to sleep before having done one more than necessary.