In the 1950s the Bertoli family beat iron: their workshop repaired and built for other people's farming. The next step was almost natural — working the fields as contractors, with their own machines — and the one after that was the leap: their own land, their own farm. In the 1980s Giuseppe Bertoli takes over from the family.

The circle closes on a detail that seems written for the purpose: in 2006 the family's old workshop is restored and becomes the La Ghiraia farmhouse inn. Where other people's machines were once mended, today the table is laid — and in the kitchen there is the pasta of the house.

Santa Luce lies between Pisa and the sea: a landscape of clay hills, well ventilated, with a lake at its centre. It is not only picture-postcard scenery but a real technical advantage: on this ground fungal diseases struggle to take hold, and durum wheat finds ideal conditions in which to ripen.

Here the Bertoli family grows selected varieties of durum wheat: alongside modern cultivars such as Creso and Levante there is room for old and historic grains like Senatore Cappelli and Saragolla, in strict observance of certified organic farming — green manure, crop rotation, organic fertilisation.

They have chosen to farm organically, using no chemicals at any stage of cultivation: it means producing less, but in full respect of the environment around them.

«Producing less in order to produce better is not a marketing slogan: it is an agronomic choice that you pay for in quintals and cash in as quality.»
— Pasta Bertoli

For decades the Bertoli wheat left for other people's pasta factories and mills, like everybody else's. In 2013 the family decides the harvest deserves a name of its own, and Pasta Bertoli is born. There is one founding rule, and it is written on the technical sheet of every shape: the dough is made exclusively with semolina from organic durum wheat grown on their own farm, with no semolina added from outside sources.

The method does the rest: the semolina comes from milling, the dough is only semolina and water, the extrusion is through bronze — which gives the pasta a rough surface, ideal for holding the sauce — and the drying is slow, up to thirty hours at low temperature (35–40 degrees), so that proteins, aromas and nutrients stay where they are. No glyphosate, no pesticides.

«Short supply chain» is a phrase that by now says everything and nothing. Here it can be checked: production is traced from sowing to packaging, and Pasta Bertoli is among the companies in the TrackIT Blockchain project run by the Italian Trade Agency — there is a QR code on the pack, and behind the QR code is the story of that wheat, recorded step by step. Transparency is a ledger.

Beside the classic organic semolina line lives the coloured six-flavour line: chilli, summer truffle, saffron, porcini mushroom, wine, cuttlefish ink. These are the shapes that catch the eye at tasting counters and that travel furthest: today Pasta Bertoli is already a presence in Europe and looks with ambition and realism to the high-potential Asian markets, Japan and South Korea.

The range is completed by Tuscan pici — the shape of the house: thick, tenacious and stubborn, asking for slow cooking and a craftsman's respect in the finishing — by the fine egg pasta, by the ready sauces drawn from tradition, and by the organic extra virgin olive oil pressed from the farm's three thousand and more centuries-old olive trees. A whole larder of fine things, born of the same unmistakable Tuscan soil.

In February 2026 the project the family cares about most begins to take shape among the fields of Santa Luce. The storage silos, built in 2020, are already there to hold the farm's grain: the aim is to build the farm pasta factory inside the estate itself, cradled by the wheat hills, and so close the last link in the chain at last. The plant will be fully operational by the end of 2026.

«A farm pasta factory in the middle of a wheat field.» Silvia Bertoli's words.

It is the destination of a story consistent to the point of stubbornness: a family that began by mending other people's machines and that today has chosen a radical road — to make sure its own wheat never leaves the gate again except inside a packet of pasta signed Bertoli.