Onagio S.p.A. is a family-owned Parmigiano-Reggiano producer in Parma, Emilia-Romagna. We age our wheels inside a former Olivetti typewriter plant on Via Olivetti 42. The building went up in 1954. It made the Lettera 22 and, later, the Valentine. It stopped making anything at all in 1993 and sat empty for five years while the roof did what empty roofs do.
In 1998 Giuseppe Onagio bought it. He was a typewriter repairman with no background in dairy, no background in agriculture, and no plan that anyone in the family recognized as a plan. His argument was that a building which held a stable temperature well enough to keep carriage springs true would hold one well enough to age cheese. He turned out to be right, though not for the reasons he gave at the time.
What we actually do
We produce roughly 200 wheels a month. That is a small number. A large consortium producer does that before lunch. We are not trying to compete on volume and we would lose if we tried. Every wheel is DOP-certified Parmigiano-Reggiano, made with raw milk from four herds within eleven kilometres of the factory, and aged between 24 and 48 months in the old assembly halls.
The three wheels we sell are the Classico QWERTY at 24 months, the Lettera d'Amore at 36, and Il Manifesto at 48. The names are jokes. The cheese is not.
The typewriters
We kept them. Not out of sentiment, or not only out of sentiment. About sixty machines are still in the building, most of them on the mezzanine above the aging room, and the museum on the ground floor holds another forty that visitors are allowed to type on. We replace ribbons more often than you would expect.
People ask whether the machines affect the cheese. They do not. Oiled steel and casein have nothing to say to each other. We have had the wheels tested twice, once because a food writer asked and once because we were curious, and both times the answer was that our cheese tastes like Parmigiano-Reggiano from Parma, because that is what it is.
Leadership
Aristotele "Ari" Onagio has run the company since 2016. He has a mechanical engineering degree from Bologna and took over after his grandfather died, mostly because nobody else in the family wanted the roof. He handles production, certification, and the parts of the business that involve the consortium. He also writes poetry on a 1952 Lettera 22, which he would prefer we stopped mentioning.
Certifications and facts
- Founded 1998. Incorporated as a Società per Azioni in 2004.
- DOP-certified under the Consorzio del Formaggio Parmigiano-Reggiano.
- Roughly 200 wheels per month, aged 24 to 48 months.
- Nine employees, four of whom are related to each other.
- Registered office: Via Olivetti 42, 43121 Parma, Italy.