Our story
It started with our Nonna.
Two brothers from Miami. A grandmother on the coast of Calabria. And the summer we finally stopped pretending we hadn't noticed.
— Vincenzo & Francesco
We're Vincenzo and Francesco — two brothers, born and raised in Miami, with our hearts split between two homes. Every summer of our lives, we packed our bags and flew back to where our family began: a small town on the coast of Calabria, in southern Italy.
That's where our grandmother has lived her whole life. Sun. Olive trees. The smell of citrus in the air. And a kitchen that never once stopped feeding people.
For years those visits were pure joy. Then, somewhere along the way, they started to change.
The summer we stopped pretending
Every year, a little slower
We noticed it in small things first. She'd sit down sooner. The afternoons got heavier. She'd finish a sentence and lose the thread of it.
Her doctor kept repeating the same words, visit after visit — blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol creeping up. And every time she talked about her numbers, there was a look in her eyes we had never seen on her before. Worry. On the woman who had never worried about anything in her life.
Here's the part that broke our hearts: she refused to do anything about it. Not because she didn't care. Because the only answer anyone ever offered her was a fistful of pills.
"Tutta chimica."
All chemicals, she'd say, waving a hand at the whole idea. She didn't want a life measured out in prescriptions. And honestly? We couldn't blame her.
Nonna, every single summer
So we went looking
We couldn't stand by and watch it happen
So we did what our family has always done when something needs solving. We went looking for a better way.
Vincenzo was studying medicine and had spent years around doctors, so we started asking every single one of them the same question: is there a natural way to support someone Nonna's age — the cholesterol, the blood sugar, the blood pressure, the energy — without the medicine cabinet?
Most of them shrugged. Until we sat down with a doctor in Italy who didn't. He told us about two things growing all around us, on the very coastline where our family is from, that people in our region had leaned on for generations.
Citrus bergamot. And olive leaf.
To the source
If it was going into our grandmother, it had to be the real thing
There was one problem. Real Calabrian bergamot — properly standardized, actually potent, the kind worth putting in your body — is surprisingly hard to get hold of. And expensive.
So we drove out to the groves ourselves. We met the families who have been growing and hand-picking bergamot on that coast for generations, shook hands, and built a partnership with them directly.
Then we took what the doctor taught us and designed something simple: one capsule, bergamot and olive leaf, dosed properly, easy enough that a 74-year-old woman who hates pills would actually take it.
And we gave it to the most important customer we will ever have.
Three months later
We watched our Nonna come back to herself
Every day for three months, she took it. And somewhere in there, something shifted.
She was up earlier. She stayed out in the garden longer. The afternoons stopped swallowing her whole. She started calling us to talk about nothing at all again, the way she used to.
We're not going to hand you a set of her lab numbers and imply you'll get the same ones — one grandmother is not a clinical trial, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. But we know what we saw that autumn. And it was enough to change what we did next.
Because she sat us down and asked one question we had no good answer to.
"Perché lo tenete per voi?"
Why are you keeping this to yourselves? There are so many people my age with the very same worries. Bring it to them.
Nonna, and she was right
What we built
Of course she was right. She always is.
So we took our savings — all of it — and poured it into getting the formula exactly right. The purest Calabrian bergamot we could source. Standardized olive leaf alongside it. And one rule we set on day one and have never broken:
Every milligram goes on the front of the pouch. Nothing hidden, nothing rounded, nothing buried in a proprietary blend.
Because the whole reason Nonna said no to everything else was that nobody would tell her straight what was in it. We weren't about to make the same mistake with her name on the box.
We called it Metabella.
In every softgel
The numbers we print, because she asked us to
Grazie, Nonna. This one's yours.
Standardized Calabrian bergamot with olive leaf. One softgel a day, every milligram printed on the front of the pouch — exactly the way she made us promise.
— Vincenzo & Francesco
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