A family story

Being tripe makers has a profound meaning: it doesn’t just mean selling trippa and lampredotto, it means following all the processing stages of the raw material and above all spreading its history and legacy around.

The tripe maker is in front of his cart; smoking the freshly boiled lamprey in the pan; the neighborhood boys crowd around him with crusty bread in their hands, for breakfast: they clean their fingers on the bottom of their trousers to help themselves with a pinch of salt.

(Il Quartiere, Vasco Pratolini)

We have a lot of history to tell. We can say it without fear of being proved wrong: we live on trippa and lampredotto. And not for now but for a long, long time, since in the 1800s Guido Bambi known as “il Mori” opened his tripe warehouse in via di Camaldoli in San Frediano. From that moment on, most of his numerous children, grandchildren, and grandchildren’s children, and continuing to the present day, have carried on the family tradition. The events that took place over more than a century of life were innumerable: from when in the warehouse of Dino, Guido’s son, there was a queue of people to take flasks of tripe broth to prepare a soup, to when Guerrando, known as “il Fioco”, Dino’s brother, told his nephews about the times when he went by cart to get tripe from the Leopolda station despite the Nazi troops garrisoning the area. And then again the memories of the famous 1966 flood, the difficulties of the new sanitation regulations of the late 1970s, up to the contemporary turning point of the union of the Bambi family with that of the Trapani.

The Trapani family enters Bambi’s story when Antonio Trapani marries Grazia Bambi, Guerrando’s daughter. After an initial period spent inside the warehouse working tripe, Antonio began to take an interest in the distribution of the raw material until he founded Tripperia Trapani Antonio e Figli in 1978.

A further name change took place in the 2000s when Tiziano Trapani, Antonio’s son, decided to found the Nuova Tripperia Fiorentina. In the meantime, the processing of the product has moved to Barberino del Mugello, and Tiziano, together with his sons Tommaso and Giacomo, continues to carry on the family tradition.

Today the Bambi Trippa e Lampredotto brand, with its stores in Florence, Milan, and Turin, aims to carry on the memory of a family – or rather two –, a characteristic profession and the legacy of undoubtedly particular products such as trippa and lampredotto.

And anyway, the best is still to come!