Launching November 17

Generations

The Story of Olimpia Bortolotto

From a farm in Moorooduc to the great dining rooms of Melbourne, one woman’s story of courage, family and the table that never closed, along with the favourite recipes that fed them all.

Olimpia’s story

Olimpia Bortolotto was born in 1937 in Italy and crossed the ocean as a small girl, carrying her mother’s voice and her family’s stubborn courage. Through wartime suspicion, hard years on the land and the loss that divided her childhood into before and after, she learned that you don’t wait for hardship to end before you begin again. You plant something. You sing while you work. You feed the people around you.

From a farm kitchen on the Mornington Peninsula came a sandwich bar in Moorabbin, a canteen at a sewerage works, a café in St Kilda where Pavarotti once asked to take dinner home, and eight remarkable years at Crown. Along the way, she and her family helped change what Melbourne ate, and how it gathered.

Generations is her story, and the story of the women who built it with her. It is a book about food as love, standards as a way of life, and a table that keeps growing.

Look inside