Italy's first woman knifemaker never sought the title. She built it one day at a time, in a workshop in Pattada, heating ram horn and putting an edge on blades beside her husband. Her name is Maria Rosaria Deroma, and this is her story.
A craft that had never known women
To grasp the weight of that first, start with the place. Pattada is the capital of the Italian knife: here the resolza has been handed down for generations, and for more than a century it was handed down among men only. Blacksmiths, knifemakers, shepherd patrons. No woman had ever made a blade.
In 1985 Salvatore Giagu and Maria Rosaria Deroma learned the craft in the workshop of an old blacksmith and opened their own. The beginnings were the real kind: an old family garage, the essential tools, a radical choice for the time.
Until then, knives in Pattada were made alongside hoes, billhooks, shears and farm tools; they chose to devote themselves to knives alone. The two of them, at the same bench.
It was not a helping hand around the shop. Maria Rosaria learned the whole cycle: horn chosen and shaped, steel ground, the tempering, the fitting, the polishing. The complete work, the kind that makes a person a knifemaker.
The lady of the knives
The gesture that tells her story best is the working of horn. Ram and mouflon horn reaches the workshop raw and dull: it must be heated, straightened, shaped, brought to a polish until it reveals its amber veining. It is work that forgives no haste and rewards sensitive hands, and in forty years her hands have worked thousands of them.
The press took notice over the years. In 2018 the Sardinian daily La Nuova Sardegna dedicated a portrait to her, "La signora dei coltelli", the lady of the knives: the photograph of Italy's first woman knifemaker, who never stopped working while her first became part of the history of Italian craftsmanship.
The dates that carry her signature too
Every milestone of the Giagu workshop carries two names, hers and Salvatore's.
In 1991 came the seven designs filed in Rome: seven original forms inspired by Sardinia, still in production today. In 1995, for the workshop's tenth anniversary, the two founders organized the First International Custom Knife Exhibition in Pattada: over fifteen thousand visitors in a town of three thousand, and the seed of what was to come.
That seed grew in 2011, when the family founded the Museo Culter, Italy's first international knife museum, in the Giagu-Deroma building. It is worth reading twice: the museum that keeps Italy's blade tradition carries a woman's surname in its name.
The relay
There is a picture no other workshop in the world can offer: Italy's first woman knifemaker working at the same bench as her daughter.
Letizia Giagu, born in 1998, chose her mother's craft and is today a master knifemaker of the workshop: a knowledge learned by watching, repeated until it became her own, passed from hand to hand.
Beside her, Adriano, an engineer trained at the Politecnico di Torino, leads the workshop into its second generation, and Aurelia turns horn into jewellery with Giagu Design. Gabriele, the youngest, grew up in the family workshop like his siblings and learned the basics of the craft, though he has since chosen other paths. A whole family raised around that bench, and at its centre a woman who never needed to claim any of it.
For those who come this far
Whoever commissions a Giagu knife today receives a piece born of that school: patience over horn, the refusal of series production, the idea that a knife takes six to twelve months because it must be made well, not made fast. And anyone passing through Pattada can see it all first-hand, at the Museo Culter and in the workshop on Via Vittorio Emanuele, where Maria Rosaria still works.
Forty years on, the title of Italy's first woman knifemaker is still hers. Her greatest achievement, though, is another: proving that this craft has no gender. Only patient hands, and hers changed it for good.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Italy's first woman knifemaker?
Maria Rosaria Deroma, who in 1985 founded the Giagu workshop in Pattada, Sardinia, together with Salvatore Giagu. She is the first woman in Italy to have practised artisan knifemaking as a complete craft, from horn working to blade grinding.
Does Maria Rosaria Deroma still work in the workshop?
Yes. Together with Salvatore she works alongside the family's second generation: Adriano, who leads the workshop, and Letizia, who has taken up her mother's craft. Every piece is still made entirely by hand, in the historic centre of Pattada.
Can you visit the Giagu workshop in Pattada?
Yes: the showroom and workshop on Via Vittorio Emanuele are open to visitors, together with the Museo Culter, Italy's first international knife museum, founded by the family in 2011. Every commission begins with a conversation, in the workshop or from afar.