On a shelf, almost forgotten, stands a group of heavy glass bottles. Their labels are worn, their colours muted by time, their contents left undisturbed for decades. Taken together, however, they tell a precise and surprisingly complete story: that of a small Lucchese distillery which, in the decades before and after the Second World War, supplied bars, shops and families across the Lucca area.
The name on the labels is A. Nannini.
The place is Sant’Anna, on the edge of Lucca.
Sant’Anna, now absorbed into the urban fabric of the city, was historically a practical location for small workshops, warehouses and light industry: close to the centre, well connected, and free from the constraints of the historic core. It is exactly the kind of place one would expect to find a modest spirits producer operating on a regional scale.
Printed on the labels is a single line that tells us almost everything we need to know:
“Prodotto e imbottigliato dalla Fabbrica di Liquori Nannini di M. Del Buono – Lucca – S. Anna.”
A. Nannini was the commercial name; Del Buono was the family behind the business. Like many Italian liquor producers of the period, the firm traded under a brand identity while remaining a family-run enterprise, legally and practically centred on a single household.
A real distillery, not a reseller
These were not anonymous or merely rebottled products. The bottles explicitly state prodotto e imbottigliato — produced and bottled — and the physical evidence supports the claim.
The earliest examples are sealed with waxed cloth capsules impressed with a private stamp, a type of closure typical of small producers before full industrial standardisation. Later bottles carry official state tax bands marked Imposta di Fabbricazione – Contrassegno di Stato, complete with serial numbers. Across the production appears the same excise reference: Licenza n. 20 – U.T.I.F. Livorno.
This consistency points to a single authorised operation, monitored by the state excise authorities and producing enough volume to justify serialised seals and regular inspection.
This was not a marginal, single-product activity. It was a functioning distillery, with recipes, equipment and technical knowledge, capable of producing everyday spirits alongside stronger, more characterful drinks in line with international fashions of the time. The graphic language of the labels — Art Deco lettering, metallic inks, stylised imagery — places the core of production in the 1930s and the immediate post-war years, a period in which Italian design often lagged slightly behind political and economic change, particularly in small family firms.
A business shaped by regulation
The shift from private wax seals to official state tax bands reflects a wider national story. Between the interwar years and the 1950s, alcohol production in Italy became increasingly regulated, taxed and consolidated. For small producers like the Del Buono family, compliance meant investment, paperwork and steadily shrinking margins.
The bottles suggest adaptation rather than expansion: continuity of branding, no obvious modernisation beyond what legislation required, and an absence of the design language associated with the 1960s and later decades.
A quiet disappearance
There is no dramatic ending recorded on the bottles themselves — no “final production”, no commemorative label. Instead, there is silence. No later seals, no metric updates, no barcodes, no modern typography.
This quiet disappearance follows a familiar pattern. Across Tuscany, dozens of small distilleries vanished in the decades after the war, unable or unwilling to compete with large industrial producers or to absorb the costs of increasingly strict regulation. A. Nannini of Sant’Anna appears to have been one of them.
What remains
What survives is rare: not a single object, but a coherent group of bottles which, taken together, document an entire working life. Brand, family, address, products, licences and chronology are preserved in paper, glass and wax.
From these objects alone, a lost corner of Lucchese economic and social history comes back into focus — a small distillery, run by the Del Buono family, supplying spirits to its local world from Sant’Anna, Lucca, for at least two crucial decades of the twentieth century.