„…Very early next morning, we drove by rough and often muddy roads towards some beautifully shaped mountains. We crossed brooks and flooded places where we looked into the blood-red savage eyes of buffaloes. They looked like hippopotami.”

It was in this way that Wolfgang Goethe, the German author and traveller, described the Plain of Paestum and his morning trip to admire the classic beauty of its temples, elegant and silent witnesses of that which was one of the most flourishing colonies of Magna Grecia. It was the year 1787 and the area was covered by swamps and muddy ground, the uncontested reign of the buffalo. With its tar-black coat, its sharp horns and its high, flat hooves, this mysterious bovine lived majestically in the still waters.

Today there are no muddy swamps any more, the marshland turned into a generous piece of land located between the blue sea and the beautiful mountains of the Cilento. The buffalos, however, haven’t disappeared. Far from it! People like Antonio Palmieri have created a real art from buffalo and dairy farming.

It was in 1988 that the cheese factory Vannulo was founded. The name derives from the local area where the owner's grandfather, Antonio, started to breed buffalos at the beginning of the last century on these 200 hectares of land. Here the famous mozzarella is produced, but not only mozzarella. The farm is renown as one of Italy’s most innovative farms as new technologies are combined with respect to nature. Since 1996 the farm turned from traditional agriculture to organic farming and is today the only organic buffalo farm in Italy.

Antonio Palmieri has turned his family farm into a place where discovering the agricultural and gastronomical traditions becomes a real cultural discovery. Surrounded by a wide park full of native Mediterranean plants, the owner's family residence is the outstanding result of a series of renovations of a characteristic red Pompeian rustic manor house dating from the 18th century.

The same care has been taken in the arrangement of the barns, lofts and stables: floors made of Tufo, boundary walls made from local stone, avenues decorated with rose-beds and lemon trees. Then, of course, the great enclosures where the animals reign supreme.
The Palmieri Farm and the Vannulo Dairy offer the possibility to discover in person both the ancient and modern science of breeding these animals, close relatives of Indian and North American Buffaloes, and which are present in only a few areas of Italy. But a visit to the Vannulo Dairy enables one to discover too the art, so refined in its simplicity, of transforming milk into a tasty food, one of the symbols of Italy abroad and a precious item of the culture of this Country.