It was 1953 when Credito Emiliano, a relatively small bank based in the region of Emilia Romagna, started taking wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano as a collateral for small-business loans.  Italy had just walked out of a war that had left the country and its people in tatters, but with an enormous desire to start over.

These were the years and the lands of Don Camillo and Peppone’s adventures, times at once rougher and more innocent than those where we currently live in. Different times, certainly, but one thing was very much the same: Italian economy relied, yesterday as today, heavily on the excellence of the country small to medium businesses. Often run by families, our “piccole imprese” were and still are the real motor of our economic world, the true representatives of “made in Italy” and its evergreen values of quality, dedication and ethics.