It all began with a family-run bar. Catia and Mauro’s mum worked in public relations. Dad Franco, an ex lorry driver, had the idea: “He’s always been a point of reference for everything, the family businessman, capable of leading (literally) the way”. Bar Uliassion the Adriatica Nord road still serves drinks and boiling hot black coffee. Their brother Walter is at the counter, an ex airplane pilot who landed in the first family establishment.
Yet it was Mauro, in 1990, who decided they had to be more daring. «He asked me to drop university and take the Recexam. In three months’ time you'll go back, he said», Catia recalls, «I was a 23-year-old daredevil, no way I wanted to live a prisoner's life in the restaurant. But saying no to Mauro has always been impossible». Everyone knows how it went, Catia and Mauro, yin and yang, have never left number 6 on Banchina di Levante.
«It took me a while to like it», she stops, «we had promised each other, no relatives involved. Now I work with my brother, husband, nephew. With my brother at first we kept on bickering. He made me mad when he forgot to take note of the reservations. Until he gave up. For the past ten years, complicity, respect, and love have prevailed, on everything. If one of us is nervous, the other lets it go. We have the same soul. It's always been like this». If it's not Mauro, she admits, she doesn't like it. Mauro Paolini, Catia’s husband, is a pillar in the kitchen brigade.
Past the eyes of this girl with stilettos walking across the dining room with discreet elegance, pass portraits and memories, frames from the film of a lifetime. Each one is a piece of the puzzle, a brick. Like the visits to Enoteca Pinchiorri and Dal Pescatore. «Our restaurant was a small, simple place. Then I went to Florence and Canneto Sull’Oglio, and nothing was ever the same. At the court of Annie and Giorgio, there were very young guys in the dining room, they were at ease in the most elegant place in the world. At Santini'sI remember as if it were today how Antonio, a giant, asked me to sit beside him. He asked me, an ordinary girl, erasing any distance».
It’s been ten years since those two pit stops that changed her life. In the meantime, Catia, who moved from 12 cm to 6 cm heels with no regrets, thinks of her permanent centre of gravity: «My son Gianmarco. He breathes every corner of this world. He grew up with a nanny and his grandparents but he always understood, I could always count on his support. Without him, I would have not found the strength».
