Andrea Ricciarini draws from family ritual in his olive oil identity

There’s something very endearing about a designer who creates a brand just to settle a family argument about spelling. Andrea Ricciarini’s olive oil project, Giobatta, started partly because his grandfather’s name had been written differently over the decades – sometimes Giovan Battista, other times Gio Battista, and occasionally just Giobatta. “With this project, I wanted to finally clarify it once and for all,” Ricciarini explains with obvious affection. But beyond resolving nomenclature disputes, the Verona-based designer was tackling something more ambitious: positioning artisanal olive oil in a market where most people grab whatever’s cheapest at the supermarket. His family’s grove near Arezzo has been producing oil since 1986, though the land had been in the family much longer. The production method remains deliberately unchanged despite technological advances – not out of stubborn traditionalism, but because the terrain makes mechanical harvesting nearly impossible. That constraint has shaped everything about the operation. The olives are still hand-picked, a process that has evolved into something of a family ritual. “The harvest has become a true family ritual, a moment of gathering where there is no need to rush,” Ricciarini notes. It’s this unhurried, artisanal approach that permeates every aspect of the Giobatta brand, from the careful selection of typography to the structural logic of the packaging system. The oil itself possesses distinct characteristics that set it apart from typical Italian production. While it shares similarities with other oils from the Tuscan hills near Arezzo, its flavour profile is notably different from oils produced elsewhere in Italy. This comes down to the specific olive varieties grown on the family land, which produce an oil with bold, distinctive character and the deep green colour characteristic of freshly pressed oil. The oil is left unfiltered, preserving its purity and intensity.