At the intersection of olive trees and education, Eugenia ’18 feels at home

Passionate about food, family and working with kids, Eugenia Cavarretta ’18 has struck the perfect balance between giving back to her alma mater here on Waverley Place, and helping her mother, Costanza, build a high-end olive oil business by hand from farmland in central Sicily that has been in their family for centuries. Read on to learn more about Eugenia, Costanza and the Magamila land and brand.

“You enter, and it’s always the perfect temperature; it’s a bit cooler in the countryside. It overlooks Mt. Etna, which is beautiful, and the days are slowed down,” says Eugenia Cavaretta ’18. She smiles, describing Magamila, the 320-acre plot of land in the emerald-green heart of Sicily that has been passed down through her family since the 1700s. “It has the most amazing atmosphere.” 

In Eugenia’s earliest memories of Magamila, the land was barely developed. Sprawling wheat fields farmed by her grandmother, Silvia, and producing grain for local sale only, the Magamila of the early 2000s and prior was scenic, but it wasn’t particularly livable—nor was it trying to be. 

Eugenia and her family weren’t far away. Eugenia was born and raised two hours from Magamila, in the northern Sicilian city of Palermo, until she was six. “You couldn’t sleep at Magamila then. It wasn’t a place we would go to spend the summers,” Eugenia recalls. “Now, when I go to Palermo, I always want to go to Magamila.” 

The same year that Eugenia and her family moved countries so that her father, Ignazio P ’14 ’15 ’18, could pursue his PhD in civil engineering at Imperial College London, Silvia surprised Eugenia’s mother, Costanza P ’14 ’15 ’18, by passing Magamila on to her. 

Costanza was raised by a mother with a deep love for the land she cultivated, and an enterprising father who was something of a transport titan. He started and ran his own bus company—for a time, Italy’s largest—and Costanza worked alongside him for much of her adult life.

She never felt real ownership of her work in transport, Eugenia says, but always had a keen sense of the importance of entrepreneurship. “All my mom knew was, You have your own business,” says Eugenia. “So when the land was given to her, I think it was a way for her to branch off from my grandfather; have her own thing, and make it her own.”

In 2008, some years after Costanza inherited Magamila, Ignazio built an irrigation system for the farm—a sustainable, closed-loop design in which water is pumped from a pool in the property’s valley into another at its highest point, which then irrigates the groves below by way of gravity. 

“With that, the olives started growing,” Eugenia says. Three thousand trees were planted, and after only a few years, about 4,000 liters of high-quality, certified organic oil was being pressed annually from the olives plucked from Magamila’s branches.

Picked by a small team at just the right level of (un)ripeness during a short window, usually around late October, Magamila’s olives are then driven five minutes down the road to be cold-pressed the same day—which, while excellent for oil quality and taste, comes with risk: local olive oil pressers, who are used to working with vast quantities of olives, require a certain minimum volume in order to operate their pressing machines, or “frantoios.” If the team picks olives in a given day—but not quite enough olives—they cannot be pressed.

Eugenia grew up watching Costanza in the kitchen, and developed a love of cooking that surpassed even that of her mother. In high school, she began posting cooking videos online, inspiring Costanza. In 2017, while still living in London, Costanza decided to marry her two worlds—Sicily and St. John’s Wood—by bottling and exporting Magamila’s oil, rather than selling it in bulk in the Sicilian countryside.

Full of healthy polyphenols thanks to the rich volcanic soil in which the olive trees grow, and clearly a product of the love she put into it, Costanza’s oil steadily began collecting awards at competitions around the world—including London, New York and Dubai.

Magamila (the brand, not the farm) really started gathering steam over the past two years, according to Eugenia. “My mom is very energetic, and she’s an incredible businesswoman. She would spend weeks going everywhere around London, every single day from 8 am until 8 pm, with a backpack full of olive oil, having people try it.” 

“Our target is high-quality, niche delicatessens,” says Eugenia, who advises her mother on the sorts of stores to aim for. Panzer’s, the ASL-famous Circus Road deli, was among Magamila’s first stockists in London, and was soon followed by the Notting Hill Fish + Meat Shop, among others.

In addition to advising her mother on stockists, and sometimes helping her sell at fairs and pop-ups (and the ASL small business showcase in the commons last Sunday!), Eugenia single-handedly built the Magamila website and runs its social media. 

Magamila’s Instagram, which tends to alternate between breezy, inviting landscapes; still-life images that suggest leisurely summer days spent relaxing in the shade amid olive groves; and food videos featuring silky green oil and golden sulla honey—made by bees that frequent the booming magenta sulla flowers that spring up in the wake of an olive harvest—often boasts the aesthetic sensibility of a chic, aspirational food or travel influencer account. 

Glistening oil is drizzled over audibly crisp sourdough toast, creamy burrata or a vibrant vegetable dish. Pesto is stirred generously into a pot of pasta on a stovetop. A bright tuna sandwich featuring multiple Magamila products is assembled in quick shots at a tight, bird’s-eye view. Eugenia’s high school years spent as a DIY food videomaker shine through beautifully.

Camillo ’14, the eldest of the three Cavarretta siblings, is an architect. He only recently became very involved with Magamila. He has spent the past four months living on the farm full time with Costanza, restoring a disused stable and turning the beautiful bones of the structure into a building capable of housing groups of guests, or hosting a large dinner.

Eugenia explains that Magamila is currently pursuing two avenues of business, and tourism is one. “Our idea is to host students from schools; show them how a farm works, a day in the life of a farmer and how you make olive oil from olive trees. Sicily is booming right now,” she explains, “which is why we are doing a lot of work on the farm.”

At the same time, Magamila is fighting an uphill battle against the import fees imposed by Brexit, and the more existential threats that come with a changing climate, as it pursues its other route toward mainstream success: scaling the brand’s artisanal offerings.

Using the many fruits of the farm—not just its signature olive oil—is one such way for Magamila to scale up production. 

This year, Eugenia decided to develop a pesto made with the olive oil. Inspired by the southern Sicilian island of Pantelleria, where incredible capers are abundant, as well as pesto alla trapanese (an almond-based pesto hailing from Trapani, in western Sicily), Eugenia’s blend is a delightful mix of basil, garlic and capers, and almonds and olive oil straight from the fields of Magamila.

Magamila also sells jars of delicious fig jam, raw sulla honey, and pistachio cream. Next on Eugenia’s recipe-development wish list is an almond butter, but she and Costanza have yet to find the right tool for the task. “We’ve gone through three blenders, because they all break… But I think it’s a cool idea, because almond butter is not necessarily a Sicilian specialty—but it’s using Sicilian ingredients for an international market. You can see someone from Panzer’s wanting to get an almond butter.”

As fluent as Eugenia is in the language of olive oil, and all that can come of it—“all I speak about with my mom is olive oil!”—she insists that she does not actually spend much time working on Magamila anymore. It’s a side project that takes only about five hours of her week these days.

Eugenia recently spent eight months in marketing within the hospitality industry, running socials for the high-end London restaurant group MJMK. She learned a lot in the role and became friends with chefs and food industry people she looked up to—but also learned that her deeper professional interests lie in working with children, which she has loved as long as she can remember. “I realized that I would rather just help my mom with her project, and then do my own stuff at school here,” Eugenia reflects. “And although I love food and cooking, I realized I can still have that part of my life outside of work, so I came back to ASL.” 

As a university student in London, Eugenia would come back to One Waverley Place a few times each week to help out with the after-school program (ASP). “I never thought about being a teacher; I always thought I wanted to be a developmental psychologist.”

Now that she’s back at ASL, working with ASPs daily and substitute teaching in the Lower School most days, Eugenia has come to learn that, in fact, she would love to become a teacher someday.

“When I came here as a student, I didn’t speak English very well. I was supported so much that it makes sense to me to give back here.” And, Eugenia adds, “Everyone seems very excited to be here. It’s a school that’s given me so much. The teachers I had have changed my life.”