Italian Pizzeria Owner Responds to a Discriminatory Online Review

Giovanna Pedretti is busy with the end of the lunch service in her pizzeria in Sant'Angelo Lodigiano when she answers the phone. She has little time between one order and another to explain why she wrote to a customer who in an online review had complained about the 'gay' neighbors and a 'boy in a wheelchair' not to return to her place 'unless he finds the human requirements that he lacked'. 'Look,' she explains to the Ansa between one order and another - 'I usually do not reply to reviews but when I saw these words, I thought that the mother of a disabled boy could read them and the val Brembana that is in me overflowed.' A firm stance also appreciated by the Minister for Disabilities Alessandra Locatelli. 'Thank you very much,' she writes on Facebook also addressing the other owner of the place, Nello - 'because you did not remain silent in front of a despicable and vile attitude. Thanks because you are two serious people and attentive to the next.' 'They made me eat next to some gays. I didn't notice right away because they were composed, and a boy in a wheelchair who was eating with difficulty' is the complaint of the user that triggered Giovanna's reaction. 'I was sorry but I didn't feel comfortable. Too bad because the pizza was excellent and the dessert great, but I will not go anymore.' The review, from this summer, was then deleted but the woman kept the screenshot with the criticism and her response and yesterday she published it on the pizzeria's Facebook page. The news, taken up on the local pages of the Corriere della Sera, quickly spread around the web. 'I wanted to point out that our restaurant is open to everyone and the requirements we ask our guests are education and respect towards everyone. Your words of contempt towards guests who do not seem to have bothered you - wrote the owner of the pizzeria Le Vignole, which for disabled boys and their families has been organizing a suspended pizza initiative for years - seem to me a gratuitous malice and quite unpleasant.' 'I would also like to point out that your annoyed look at a boy in a wheelchair did not go unnoticed... Having said that, in the face of these human and tasteless baseness... I believe that our place is not for you - she added - We do not select our customers based on sexual orientation and much less disability. I kindly ask you not to come back to us unless you find in yourself the human requirements that were lacking in your attitude.' The reactions were not long in coming: over two hundred comments under the post, all of praise, hundreds and hundreds of likes. 'No more customers came to the pizzeria, but that's not what interests me - explains Giovanna - I was pleased with phone calls, even from afar, for example the family of a disabled boy from Sicily. I repeat, I usually do not respond to reviews, but in front of these words my conscience said no. I do not have disabled relatives but why if something does not touch us closely do we have to turn the other way? There is a need to remove the backward mentality and put those who express it politely in a corner.'