Franco interviewed by Jean Feraca on Wisconsin Public Radio
14th February 2005
Rockford Register Star
......In a valley believed to produce the best olive oil in the world about five miles south of Radda in Chianti, lives the Lombardi family on their farm Pornanino, where they host year round tourists in two beautiful restored stone barns. Franco Lombardi insists the finest extra virgin olive oils are those that have had the least contact with man or machine.”...


Franco on AZ TV in Phoenix

                 26th January 2005
Putting Olive Oils To the Taste Test
For our olive oil tasting, we selected nine bottles in different price ranges, deliberately avoiding house brands. Some are easily available, while others can be purchased at gourmet food stores, some farmers markets or on the Internet. Chefs Cesare Lanfranconi, Ris Lacoste and Jose Andres graded the oils on a scale from 1 to 10 and suggested best uses. Here is what they said:
Washington Post
OIL
COLOR
AROMA
TASTE
BEST FOR
ASSESSMENT
  Pornanino Farm extra virgin,
  first old-pressed;bottled by the
  olive grower Franco Lombardi in   
  Tuscany, Italy; 18 fluid ounces,
  $29		    Cloudy but good color        Good aroma as well.
   Super fresh.You can   
   smell the grass.		    Good balance of acidity,   
   spiciness and grassiness. 		  A salad where you want to   
  savor the taste of the oil.		   It must be Tuscan.  
  Grade:Almost a 10



The Times and The Sunday Times Archive
In Tuscany for the olive harvest, JONATHAN FUTRELL finds himself led down a culinary trail, tracing the finest virgin oil in its progress from branch to table The only picking I like to do on holiday is sand, from between my toes, on a beach. In fact, whenever I come across handwritten signs, always on scrappy bits of cardboard, by the roadside, proclaiming "pick-your-own", I instinctively want to turn off and shake some sense into the scores of unpaid pickers bent double in the field. If God had intended us to spend our leisure time on our hands and knees, he would not have invented farmers.



Post Gazette
I've been to my share of olive oil tastings, but none was more persuasive than a recent one at the Hyeholde Restaurant in Moon. The olive oil that Franco Lombardi and his family make on their farm in Tuscany may not be the only pure oil on the market, but it seems certain, from the care taken, that none could be more pure.


Slick Oil Merchants
[From the lead article in theWeekend Australian Review of May 22-23, 1999, written by Clare Pedrick; Telephone: 02 9288 2312; used with permission] Franco Lombardi represents a new breed of olive oil producer in Italy. He is anxious to protect the image of the product in the face of mounting doubts about the quality of some of it. He has an orchard of 4000 olive trees, all grown from saplings.


Reizen 1999     Wat er schuilgaat in Toscane     Door P. J. Vergunst
De zon heeft het hoofd van Franco Lombardi meer dan gemiddeld gebruind. Aan een marmeren tafel,in de schaduw van het huis, vertelt de zestiger ondersteund door langzame gebaren over Toscane, zijn druiven en olijven zijn cypressen en kastelen, zijn stil- le stadjes en gezonde keuken.




Food Illustrated
Franco Lombardi is obsessed with purity. For him, the finest extra virgin olive oils are those that have had the least contact with man or machine.  "We don't use tractors to harvest the olives because we might break some of the branches," says Franco.
   After talking with Franco, you get the impression that in his ideal world he would like to be able to turn olives into olive oil by magic, without them ever coming into contact with a human.