The Story of Nico

While Nico Acampora talks about the first PizzAut restaurant, his son Leo and his daughter Giulia, his wife Stefania, and the forty-one autistic boys and girls who work with him, his eyes are smiling. Perhaps he learned it there, in his restaurants, to smile with his whole body. 

Neapolitan by birth, Nico has always lived in Lombardy, in that Milanese hinterland where things seem more difficult. And right there, in that urban periphery, a change made its way, and Nico took it upon himself. It all began that night when, a few years after receiving his son Leo’s autism diagnosis, he suddenly woke up and asked Stefania, “We have to open a restaurant run by autistic people.” And a dream began—one that, as he says, must not be trampled on. 

Certainly, it was not easy to begin, to take the first steps. When something begins, there is always someone who says it is impossible. And Nico was told so many times; many doors were slammed in his face, yet he never gave up. He knew his was not a utopia, but a dream to believe in and to make others believe in. He had seen his project come to life in little Leo’s hands as he spread tomato sauce on pizza with his mother. PizzAut, with its two restaurants, has turned from a dream into reality. Today, with six hundred thousand autistic people in Italy and very few opportunities that truly help them grow, PizzAut has become a beacon of hope for all those families who for so long have felt alone and in difficulty. Nico knows well that the road is still long. But his goal has never been to do everything. Rather, it has been to show that something—even when they say it is impossible—can be done, and done well.