June 6, 2006 was an odd date to launch a new project. A diabolical date. In a major newspaper there was a headline that said, in quotation marks, “the end of the world has arrived”. But it was the beginning. The beginning of Giallozafferano. Today it is one of the most visited sites in Italy, perhaps the most popular in terms of cooking recipes. Then it was the dream of Sonia Peronaci, a Milanese of South Tyrolean origin, who grew up learning to cook from her grandmother Ottilia, and then alongside her father, who had a restaurant in Milan, Eleven, at number 11 in via Losanna. She loved food but felt she couldn’t manage a restaurant too because it was the restaurant that kept Dad away from home.
It was Sonia’s partner, Francesco Lopes, who at the time had launched a website on taxes, who gave her the idea of opening one on recipes. The idea was to remake in Italy, on a small scale, what Martha Stewart did in the United States, who at the time was already an absolute star. Sonia chose the name, Giallozafferano, as a tribute to the city where she lived, Milan; and wrote the first twenty recipes. “We started with the great classics of Italian cuisine, the ones that people still look for most often on search engines: lasagna alla bolognese, spaghetti alla vongole, carbonara and tiramisu”.
There are no memorabilia of that debut; the oldest web page that can still be traced dates back to 5 October 2006. It turns out that already at the time there were several columns and services, including the glossary, advice for purchases, a blog (“at the table with Enrico Bertolino “that day) and several newsletters. And above all there was Sonia who was very good and who immediately became a web star, an influencer we would say today. The success was immediate and already in 2008 Sonia Peronaci was contacted by Paolo Ainio who brought Giallozafferano into the Banzai group and, seven years later, into Mondadori where she sails at full speed.
“In hindsight I would never have sold it, but at the time we needed professionalism that we didn’t have,” says Sonia. No regrets though: in 2015 he launched a new website that bears his name and which he takes care of with passion day after day to make it grow. “In the end, whatever you do, if you feel you have to do something else, don’t be afraid to leave what you have and leave again: the risk always brings something positive”. For one who with her recipes has taught millions of people how to cook the most important recipe is the one for happiness: “You have to change if you are not happy”.
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