In May 2025, at a hotel in Lake Como, my wife fell in love with the olives served at the bar.
When we returned home, I reached out to the hotel to ask about the olives. I learned that they are a special variety called Bella di Cerignola, grown in the town of Cerignola in Puglia. The hotel told me that the olives they serve are sourced from Fratepietro, a fifth-generation producer.
It became my mission to get my hands on these olives for my wife.
It wasn’t easy.
Due to the cost and complications of shipping and customs, Fratepietro doesn’t ship to the United States. The next year, after I booked a trip to Switzerland, I reached out to ask them to send a package to my hotel there.
Alas, they also don’t ship to Switzerland.
But my hotel was in Lugano, just across the border from Italy. If Fratepietro could ship the olives somewhere in Italy, perhaps I could drive over and collect them.
This led me to IndaBox, an Italian service that allows packages to be delivered to local pickup points.
Setting up an account required an Italian telephone number—which, of course, I did not have. So I acquired a temporary Italian number, registered for IndaBox, found a pickup location near the border, and worked with Fratepietro to arrange the shipment.
At this point, a surprising number of people had become invested in Operation Olive: the staff at the hotel in Lake Como who helped me identify the olives; Valentina at Fratepietro, who patiently worked through the shipping logistics; and Fabio, the proprietor of a store called Vini Italy, who agreed to receive a very large and unusually important package.
A few days ago, I drove across the border and met Fabio.
The olives were there.
Given the effort involved in acquiring them, ordering a jar or two seemed inadequate. I had packed an empty suitcase for the trip, and I used AI to calculate the maximum number of jars I could fit within the 50-pound checked-bag limit—with a small allowance for eating a few olives before we return home.
This is how I came to be driving around northern Italy with €272 of olives.
There are certain things we bring home from a trip because we want a souvenir. And then there are things we pursue because they can briefly transport someone we love back to a particular place and moment.
I suspect the olives won’t taste exactly the same in our kitchen in Chicago as they did at a bar overlooking Lake Como. Travel has a way of adding something to the experience that can’t be packed into a suitcase.
But I think they’ll come pretty close.
And if nothing else, I now have a friend in Puglia, an invitation to harvest olives with the team, and enough olives to last until my next trip to Italy.
