How it all started
Dante Nesti, Firenze 1990
It was a sunny morning in early summer just after the Second World War, when young Dante, in search of some meat for his family to eat, was traveling through the broken cobblestone streets of Florence on his bicycle.
Trying not to loose his balance while avoiding the large holes in the street, he didn’t see a large stone and tripped over it, falling roughly to the ground. Covered in dust and with his knees all scraped, he noticed the wheel of his bicycle had a flat tire.
By the time he reached the market, the meat was already all finished. His bright blue eyes suddenly looked down. The butcher noticed the disappointment in young Dante’s face and decided to give him the leftover fat pieces of the meat telling him that if he mixed it together with soda he could make soap.
Soap? Soap!!! An item that was quite rare in those times; the war had just ended and what was once considered a necessity that was always available, was now hard to come by.
Young Dante got back on his bicycle, went straight to the hardware store to buy all of the necessary supplies that he was told he needed, and headed home. He returned home without any meat, with his knees scraped and bruised, but with a light in his eyes that made the blue shine even more intensely. He asked his mother for the copper basin that she normally used to wash the clothes with, and he closed himself in the garage.
For days he tried and tried until he noticed at the bottom of the basin a solid white block had formed. He put it over a small net to dry and once it was ready, he cut it up into pieces and gave them to his family, friends, and even friends of his friends to try.
Day by day, demand for his soaps quickly grew and Dante found himself busy doing something that he had created on his own and was all his, and that filled him with pride. He soon bought a piece of land next to his house and by 1947, his small venture had become a full blown company and was registered by the Chamber of Commerce of Florence.
Today, the Nesti Dante factory is one of the most highly regarded facilities in Europe for the manufacturing of soap using the method of soap production with the water boiler. The company is proudly run by the second and third generation of the Nesti family who established the company motto:
“We work not to be the biggest, but to be the best.”
