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The Poderi of Palazzo Santostefano
From the land to the table, a family tradition
If producing oil is an ancient job, made up of stubborn toil and patient attention to the production processes-from the care of the soil and the trees, to the milling of the olives-it is equally true that for seven generations we have continued to follow with ever renewed passion what is now the Poderi di Palazzo Santostefano, in a succession of all-female steps.

Constant commitment over time

Passion for oil
from generation to generation
In fact, the history of our olive groves, as well as that of the carrubeto, dates back to October 20, 1920, when in Ispica the young as enterprising Cav. Salvatore Carrubba (1895-1977), son of Don Giuseppe and Donna Virginia Pisana, better known as the Baron of Sant’Anna, married the beautiful Maria Moltisanti (1893-1980), second child of the landowner Don Simone and Donna Dorata (Dorotea) Rustico.

From that marriage, to which the beautiful Maria also brought as a dowry several mounds of land received as an inheritance from her grandparents and which were added to those of her husband Salvatore, was born the second-born Dorotea Carruba (1928-2022), who later on Aug. 3, 1957, would marry Hispanic Dr. Francesco Santostefano, a brilliant pediatrician at the Bambin Gesù Hospital in Rome and later an INPS inspector, for whom his father Cav. Antonino Santostefano in 1948 had purchased from the heirs of a fallen Hispanic aristocratic family what later became Palazzo Santostefano, in the hope that his son might one day leave Rome to return with his family to his ancestral Sicily.

This is how Poderi and Palazzo became a single property later passed to the only daughter Giovanna Santostefano, who on April 21, 1985 married Dr. Giorgio La Rosa, a highly regarded Ragusa Ibla physician, from whom Angela La Rosa Santostefano was born in 1986.

Thanks to the efforts of Giovanna and Giorgio, the palace was thus deeply and structurally restored, while their daughter took care of its decoration together with her husband Sandro Barbagallo, who married in Ispica on May 11, 2019, and to whom Elisabetta and Sofia were born.

Today Angela La Rosa Santostefano has taken over the entire management of the Poderi and along with the land cultivates the dream of being able to pass on this “family” business to her daughters as well.