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We first got to know Livia Giuggioli through her visits to the Meander store in Edinburgh. When not spending time at the family farm in Umbria, Livia and her husband Callum live nearby in Stockbridge and have become good friends of the team. Over time, our conversations have wandered from sustainable design and regenerative farming to travel and the great food produced on their land (we’re slightly obsessed with their heritage strawberry compote).
Quintosapore, their family farm in the heart of Umbria, is a place rooted in history. Set among rolling hills, olive groves and medieval towns, it is where Livia and her twin brothers, Alessandro and Nicola Giuggioli, have brought new life to once-abandoned land. What began as a deeply personal family project has evolved into a regenerative, soil-to-fork farm with a growing international reputation, even attracting visitors such as Stanley Tucci, Colin Firth and Michelin-starred chefs including Philip Howard.
We’ve loved learning more about their journey, from family legacy to regenerative agriculture, from soil to table and the philosophy that underpins everything they do.
Livia: When we were young, our parents bought 6 hectares of land and started building a home for their retirement bit by bit. I was 18, my sister 17 and our twin brothers 6 years old. Fast forward 30 years and the neighbouring land, an abandoned farmland, is up for sale. It is now 2019, we are all older and living in other cities, but it is a no brainer to think “this is the best gift we can all give our children”. It was a protected area for repopulation of wild animals and it had a beautiful forest too, so we went for it. Little did we know that in 2020, with the lockdown, we would have found ourselves starting a farm almost by accident...
I have always worked with my twin brothers, and in particular with Nicola, as together we founded the sustainability consultancy company Eco-Age, which we ran for 17 years (until our CFO stole all the money and ran away, forcing us to close it down for good in 2024. But this is another story for another time!). I love working with my siblings as we share the same belief that family will always come first, that we can have the most difficult conversations, and argue on a number of things around the business, but then in the evening we find ourselves sharing dinner and drinking wine and talking about our children.
That year changed a lot of people’s lives and perspectives. We were incredibly lucky as for us it was a healing time, but for a lot of people around the world it was incredibly traumatic and painful. I always had a very strong relationship with Citta della Pieve and what was our 'holiday' home for so many years. Our children Luca and Matteo spent endless summers and school holidays there and it was always difficult going 'back to reality' to London after that. When we found ourselves locked down in paradise, I thought “I can get used to this!” and when it was lifted I stayed. It happened at the right moment in my life as well, I was separated, our kids were out of school, it made it easier to 'change life'.
Absolutely yes. Having worked for so many years on environmental and social justice, advocating for these core values, finding the solutions, promoting them with businesses – when we started Quintosapore we couldn’t do it in any different way. Applying the principles of respect for people and planet to farming was hard at the beginning (employing everyone full time with no season contracts or using no pesticides or chemicals at all, not even the ones allowed by the organic certification for example) but it is now paying back. We have a wonderful team, which feels like a family, we are growing with a community and we are pioneering biomimic farming, using a variety of farming techniques which help us also adapt to this climate chaos.
It was a collection of many things, the way we grew up played a huge role of course, but also the word respect has always been at the core of everything. It all starts from there doesn’t it?
We didn’t really “decide”, but nature decided for us. We started with a seed bank of approximately 500 seeds my brothers collected through the years, and today we have more than 1,500 varieties of heritage vegetables. Every year we try to plant different ones based on a multiple of factors – being because that particular variety of tomatoes has survived yet another “the hottest” Summer, or because we want to produce a special sauce with zucchini or because we have a big order of artichokes. Diversity of crops helps also de-risking the business from weather factors for example. If you lose the entire production of olive oil because of too much rain or not rain at all, you still have the tomato sauce and vice versa.
Alessandro: When we bought the farmland, we stumbled across the remnants of a vineyard which was more of a chaotic jumble of twisting vines and a few grapes of different colours. It had little in common with the pristine regimented rows you see in most wineries. To us it was full of promise and potential and our imaginations quickly went into overdrive. We consulted with a famous enologist who didn’t share our potential. ‘Rip it up!’ he decreed. “It is almost too old!” He advised replanting with Sangiovese, the fast growing and hardy grape that now swamps an estimated 65,000 hectares in Italy as the trend for French style winemaking continues to accelerate. We decided not to follow his advice and part ways.
Instead of binning our mystery vines, we decided to clean it. We cleaned each plant by hand, we removed the old bark and massaged it. Our friends joked it was the equivalent to a spa treatment for each plant. It took weeks. Slowly we began to breathe life into the vines. We called Roberto Chioggia, who is our enologist today, who suggested the plants were 80-90 years old. Moreover, he began to wonder what on earth they were given as they didn’t seem to resemble the dominant varieties. We all wondered if we had something special, perhaps a lost variety?
It was time to put in a call to Professor Paliotti , the distinguished professor of viniculture and expert in ancient vineyards from Perugia University. Professor Paliotti has subsequently become a friend and a mentor. But back then - when after a month of trying, we finally reached him by phone, he was foreboding, as unreachable as the Pope. ‘Professor Paliotti, we have an old vineyard and a grape that we don’t think exists any more!’. He sounded weary and a touch sceptical, ‘Hmm OK. You know every day, someone calls me thinking they have disappeared grapes.’ He agreed we could send him a box of grapes at the next harvest. A year later, we filled a box with the grapes and sent them to him…It takes one hour to get to Perugia. After one hour and five minutes my phone started ringing:
‘Alessandro Giuggioli?’ enquired a male voice.
‘Yes. It’s me’.
‘You lucky ***%!*** said Professor Paliotti.
This was the moment we discovered Quintosapore was home to the Malmaturo grape, an ancient Etruscans grape missing from the official wine register since the 17th century.
Livia:Yes, our Soil to Fork farm and dining experiences are very popular! For us they are the perfect way to share our work with everyone. Visitors experience our multi-disciplinary approach to agriculture, and learn about reviving forgotten varieties, breathing life into ancient crops, experimenting with biodiversity and farming the Quintosapore way – using Biomimicry wisdom and mixing different techniques such as Agroforestry, EM Technology, Biochar, and a bit of Quantum Physics (yes really!)
After the guided visit, they are treated to a fabulous outdoor lunch and served a 5 courses tasting menu featuring all the fresh vegetables harvested on the day, cooked on our outdoor wood-fire Ofyr and GreenEgg Kitchen. The meal includes plenty of our special Malmaturo wine of course!
I don’t think we can choose one product as each one of them is the result of hours of love, from producing the seeds to growing the vegetables to harvesting them and preparing them and cooking them and putting the recipes into jars. Even the labelling is all done by hand. There are so many different stories behind each one of them, you will have to try them all!
A huge thank you to Livia, Ale, and Nic for taking the time to chat with us all about their idyllic home. This has definitely inspired us to book a trip to the gorgeous region and hopefully sample some of the wonderful fruits and vegetables on offer, including the mysterious Malmaturo wine of course! You can keep up with the Giuggioli family over on the farm's Instagram, and explore some of their wonderful experiences and produce via their website.
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