Beach honey

The story of Donatella Baldi, a small artisanal company, founded in 1995 in Località Nuova Sterpaia in San Giuliano Terme (Pisa), has a poetic and sweetly naturalistic quality. The company has won multiple awards and is located in the Migliarino San Rossore Massaciuccoli Park, on the coast between Calambrone and Viareggio, where 23 kilometers of beaches are protected by UNESCO. Donatella, who gives her name to the company, used to be an accountant but is now a celebrated beekeeper. Together with her cousin Angela Cardi, the company’s commercial director, she has created a fully organic company that produces various types of honey, from wildflower to chestnut. Above all, she has highlighted a rare variety of honey, with a light color and very fluid consistency that tastes of the sea: “beach honey”. Collected between May and August, it is produced by bees that fly among the flowers of tamarisk, strawberry tree, pyroforus, cistus, and helichrysum (in Versilia it is called camuciolo), Mediterranean scrub plants rich in essential oils that remain on the insects’ legs during pollination. The bees, whose hives are located between the dunes, live protected in the ecosystem between the shoreline and the pine forest, a limit gently impassable to them. Donatella now also produces beauty creams from her honey.