Colannino's Sicilian is a family-owned business dedicated to providing the best all-natural products for your skin, lips, hair, and shaving needs. Following in the eons-old footsteps of our Sicilian forefathers, we utilize the miracles of the bee and the olive to bring ancient comfort to a modern world as we celebrate the bond between man, olive and bee.
The roots of Colannino's Sicilian were firmly planted in the ancient soil of Sicily long before the Romans, Greeks, or even the Sicani of stone-age Italy ever found their way to the largest island of the Mediterranean Sea. Before the Romans, before the Greeks, before even the earliest records of civilization, was the ancient bond forged of man, olive and bee. Men cultivated and nurtured the olive, and it in return provided food and fuel, fruit and oil, leaf and wood. The bee came to help the warm winds pollinate the olive and for its trouble found nectar and pollen to produce honey and wax — enough to share with the men who nurtured the trees. And when the men discovered how to blend the bees' wax with the olive's oil, both the tree and the bee were used to heal and soothe the men whose toils benefited them all. Now, we make these same ancient balms and balsams devised by our ancestors untold millennia ago available to a modern world. In this sharing, we renew the ancient bond of man, olive, and bee. The bond that is the history of Colannino's Sicilian. The bond that is our roots.
As a very small child, I remember the wonder of watching my Sicilian grandfather work with his roses, his grapevines, his tomatoes, peppers, and fruit trees. I remember the power of his hands as he defied thorns, braved tomato worms, and removed wayward brambles. I also remember the end of the day when we would sit: when he would drink his wine and soothe his dry, cracked, often bleeding and sunbaked hands with balsams he had made of pure olive oil, unbleached beeswax, and healing botanicals. Sometimes I'd look up at him and wonder about God who made trees that produce oil, bees that make wax, and men who put them all together: about the bond between man, olive, and bee.
The other fond memory I recall from early childhood was my father's older brother (my Uncle Anthony for whom I was named) and his barbershop. On those magical Saturdays when my father brought my brother and I in for a haircut, my uncle would let us stay and sweep up all the hair as he and my older cousins snip-snip-snipped their customers' hair with clockwork precision. And as my father and uncle argued about whether my father would be allowed to pay for the haircuts, my brother and I had a front-row seat to the large and slightly menacing leather strop that hung on the side of the leather-padded, chrome-trimmed, brass-levered mechanical wonder of my uncle's number one barber chair. It was at the foot of this marvel that I would stop sweeping and just watch as my uncle zip-zip-zipped his straight razor up and down, up and down only moments before giving his customers the best and closest shave mankind has ever devised.
Many years later — well past the point where childhood had grown to a well-worn and nostalgic adulthood — I came across an old straight razor just like the one used by my beloved and long-gone uncle. I bought it. I used it. No, I didn't cut myself and, yes, I got a great shave right from the start. (Something to do with the genes, I think.) But, along with that great shave, came some of the driest skin I'd ever experienced. All of this occurred at a point in my life when, as an ode to my Uncle Carlo, I was making goat cheeses in preparation for opening a goat dairy.
Now, ordinarily, you'd probably think that goat cheese, barbershops and my grandpa's hands would have very little to do with one another. And under ordinary circumstances you'd probably be right. However, as I've discovered many times in my life, there is no such thing as “ordinary circumstances.”
One of the not so ordinary circumstances involved in this seemingly unrelated chain of events was my making a ripened cheese that is covered in beeswax and aged for several months. Obviously, to make that particular cheese, I had to have beeswax in the house. So, when I shaved with my uncle's straight razor and discovered that the great shave came at the cost of very dry skin, I obviously though of my grandpa and the balsams he made from olive oil and beeswax, … beeswax which I just happened to have because of the goat cheese I was making like my Uncle Carlo. (See how this all fits together?) Needless to say, in that moment — and the years that followed, I rediscovered what my grandfather, and his grandfather, and his great-great-great grandfather before him knew. I had rediscovered the ancient bond between man, olive, and bee.
None but God can know the future. We do well just to know ourselves. However, the more we know of ourselves, the more insight we can gain into our own future. And what we know is that the future of Colannino's Sicilian is as its beginnings: a celebration of the roots of an ancient civilization and the kind and generous God who created the olive and the bee to provide we mortals with little graces sufficient for the day. A celebration of a family tradition that stretches back between the generations to a time before. A celebration of the bond between man, olive, and bee.