The Second Generation
Growing Without Losing What Matters
When Aldo's daughter, Giovanna Ferrini, took over in the late 1980s, she faced a choice familiar to many small Italian food producers: modernise to scale up, or stay small and stay true. Giovanna chose a middle path. She expanded the dairy's facilities, added two more product lines — Fior di Latte and Ricotta di Pecora — and began supplying a handful of restaurants in Florence and Siena. But she refused to change the milk supply, the cultures, or the ageing process.
"The moment you start buying milk from a central cooperative," she told an interviewer in 1997, "you lose the thing that makes your cheese yours. The flavour of our Pecorino comes from what the sheep eat on those specific hills. You cannot bottle that and ship it in a tanker."
Under Giovanna's leadership, Latteria Santo Stefano earned its first recognition from the regional food authority and began attending national food fairs. A small but loyal following grew among chefs and serious food enthusiasts across northern and central Italy.
Today
The Third Generation
Today, Latteria Santo Stefano is run by Giovanna's son, Luca Ferrini, alongside his sister Marta, who oversees production. Luca trained as a food technologist in Bologna before returning to the family dairy in 2011. Marta studied traditional cheesemaking in France and the Basque Country before bringing those wider influences home to Tuscany.
Together they have preserved the original Pecorino recipe while introducing two new products: a creamy Burrata made in the Pugliese style and a semi-aged cow's milk cheese called Formaggio di Collina, developed by Marta over four years of careful experimentation.
The dairy still sources its milk from seven local farms, each within 20 kilometres. The farmers are partners, not just suppliers — Latteria Santo Stefano works with them on pasture management and animal welfare, understanding that the quality of the milk is the quality of the cheese.
Production remains intentionally small. The dairy produces approximately 400 kilograms of cheese per week across all product lines. This is not enough to satisfy the enquiries that come in, but it is enough to maintain the standard that Aldo Ferrini set in 1962. Some things are worth protecting, even at a cost.
Our Values
Provenance
We can trace every batch of cheese to the farm, the animal, and the day the milk was collected. Transparency is not a marketing claim — it is the way we have always worked.
Seasonality
Our cheeses change subtly through the year as the pastures change. Spring Pecorino tastes different from autumn Pecorino — and that is as it should be.
No Compromise
We do not use artificial rennet, added flavourings, or accelerated ageing. We make Italian cheese the way it was always made — slowly, by hand, with good milk.
