– Mucus face mask, cough syrup –
Merlino and brothers Michele and Giuseppe Sansone set up the company outside Sicily’s Palermo 10 years ago, researching snail farms in Greece, Spain and France before coming up with their innovative breeding system.
“We now train others who want to follow in our footsteps, we’ve helped about 100 producers open in Italy so far,” says Merlino, adding that others have come to learn from abroad, largely from Albania, Slovenia and Bulgaria.
“We’ve become the reference point across the country and beyond for this type of breading system.”
The mahogany-striped Aspersa Muller Madonita snails crawl over one another as they head to lay their eggs.
The breed is a Lumaca Madonita speciality: it was bred here from French and Sicilian species and is known not only for its dark colour but also its hard shell. The snails are eventually headed for the pot and shell strength matters.
With five breeds in all, the company currently has over two million snails on site in Campofelice di Roccella, and the mating season is a free for all: the molluscs are hermaphrodites with both male and female reproductive organs.
The breeds farmed here are ready to reproduce at around six months old and only lay once before being sold on.
The process from coupling to collecting the eggs and dispatching them to a laboratory which packages them for sale takes 50 days. The eggs are carefully selected, with only white and well-rounded ones making the cut.
And it’s not the only snail-based product on offer: the molluscs’ mucus, said to regenerate and repair the skin, is made into a face cream, tapping into a booming market.
The popularity of snail slime as a beauty treatment has soared. The mucus was used from Ancient Greece to the Middle Ages to cure skin infections, stomach ulcers and as cough syrup – a remedy still found today in some parts of the world.
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