Catrino and the Berti family “meet” in 1939 when the property of the Fattoria di Buriano (Barone De Rochefort) assigns the farm called Il Catrino to the family of sharecroppers who had as a “capoccio” Quintilio born in Montecatini Val di Cecina in 1894. The farm was one of the best on the farm and the master assigned it to the Berti known as hard workers but especially with 5 young sons all young and therefore able to make the most of the potential of the farm itself.

The family was composed of Stefanina (born in 1900), wife of Quintilio and sons Terzilia (1919), Mario (1921), Fedora (1921), Terzilio (1923), Bruna (1925), Franco (1931), Enzo (1933) and Piero (1935). Immediately afterwards there is the war that pushes the two older sons of Quintilio, Mario and Terzilio to the front as soldiers.

The passage of the front in the 1944 forces the Berti family to bear the classic consequences that fortunately, however, is limited to so much fear especially for the aerial bombardment of the allies of which there are still evident traces with a big hole in the woods adjacent to the farm. Like many peasant families, even the Berti, during and after the war, did their best to shelter and often feed many people from neighboring countries. In the countryside there was misery, but a piece of bread was always there.

In the 1990s emerges the crisis of dairy farms, so Franco focused on the production of meat. Also in the 1990s, the economic-social phenomenon of the farm exploded in Italy, but above all in Tuscany. Franco, Enzo, with wives and children: Stefano (1961), Fausto (1962) and Massimo (1964), decided to restructure a large part of the building stock in the company and now unused for agriculture to allocate it to the farm. After three years of hard work 4 apartments are built and in 2000 part of the agritourism activity. Since 2012, the company’s ownership has been transferred to the Agricola Il Catrino of Berti Franco, composed of Stefano, Fausto and Massimo.

Franco often overlooks his terrace from where he dominates a large part of the Val di Cecina and sees that threshing floor that in few decades has been the stage of his family’s history and glimpses before his eyes images of fear as when the German soldiers they stole the cattle and took away his father Quintilius, of fatigue and dust, because they were threshing on the farmyard, of nostalgia because on the farmyard they danced and enjoyed themselves with simple parties. Now on that yard there is a pool and the Germans are no longer those of the 1944 but they are customers and often friends who bathe and appreciate his hospitality.