Introduction by Flavio Turri Bardolino Oil Museum

It was a beautiful winter’s day when Enrico Lorenzini, owner of some ancient machinery for oil extraction, contacted me to tell me that he had to do some work in his shed and that he needed space.

I immediately went there and saw two wonderful centrifuges from the first half of the 20th century, which belonged to his father who’d had an oil mill located in the town of Garda.

The retrieval took place a few days later, and in the following months they were restored and exhibited in our Museum in Cisano.

This is the story of the Oleificio Bisesti told by Enrico:

It was from the unconditional love for the land and the entrepreneurial vivacity of grandfather BISESTI GUERRINO that "L'OLEIFICIO BISESTI" was born in Garda in the 1940s. The farmers from the nearby villages came to the village bringing the harvested olives in hemp or jute bags, on carts pulled by donkeys or oxen.

In a narrow space in the Borgo (now Corso Italia) there is an oil mill with granite millstones, called an electrically operated "millstone", for cold pressing olives on behalf of third parties.

The millstone consists of an iron tank with a granite bottom where two large wheels with rotary movement provide for the fragmentation of the stones and pulp of the olives.

The olive paste was then spread on round filters with holes, called "fiscoli", which, inserted into a Pieralisi cast iron tower press, separated the solid part (pomace) from the liquid part (must).

This was collected in large containers and left to settle until the oily part, lighter than water, came to the surface. The skill of our grandfather, and then of our father Giovanni Lorenzini, consisted of  "foaming" this state of floating oil with large shallow pans to separate it from the processing residues.

As the business progressed, the Bisesti oil mill, at this point managed by our father Giovanni, expanded into more suitable adjoining premises and in 1955 modernized its structures with the purchase of new machinery:

- a mechanical crusher equipped with manual loading of the fiscoli (the Frangolea)

- two high-power hydraulic presses,

- a centrifuge, with the addition of a second one, capable of speeding up production while maintaining the excellent quality of the extra virgin olive oil. The disc centrifuge with drum separates the oil from solid and liquid impurities thanks to the centripetal force. The separated liquids reach the top of the drum where the crude oil is discharged outside.

It was the task of us seven brothers to help our father in this "mission": the older ones in the preparation of the olive paste and more tiring jobs, the younger ones in the annoying cleaning of the conical stainless steel discs of the centrifuges (about 45) which , appropriately numbered, had to be strictly put back in the same starting order, or when filling customers' demijohns with the hand pump operated by a handlebar crank that we could barely reach and manoeuver.

Memories of youth that forcefully resurface every time you smell the scent of the oil in the oil mill or taste this wonderful and healthy product of nature with sacred admiration.

We also had the task of cleaning the courtyard from animal "waste" to make use of it for fertilizing plants and the vegetable garden. Nothing was out of place and everything was reused and recycled anticipating modern day recommendations.

 

Text Eng. Enrico Lorenzini Garda VR