Tradition and the 21st Century
I know Italy's supposed to be a land of contrasts, but this is stretching it a bit. Up on the roof, Elio is bolting some massively-intimidating and probably massively-expensive electronic gizmo to the TV aerial and trying to get a line-of-sight to an antenna in Casoli which, by some process I don't even pretend to understand, will give us WiFi.

At ground level meanwhile, nets are being spread under our olive trees to gather up the year's harvest. True the olives are nowadays are carted off for processing packed up in plastic sacks, rather than in panniers on the back of donkeys, but the process of getting the olives off the trees - around here at any rate - is still done by hand in pretty much the same way as it has been for generations.

I Say Our Olive Trees, But…
…it'd be more accurate to say the olive trees that happen to grow around our rented house. This, as you might know by now, is in the hamlet of Ascigno - about 4 miles from the old hilltop town of Casoli - in the Abruzzo region of central Italy. The house, about 50m from our nearest neighbour, is off a back road to Pianibbie and bordered on two sides by farmland. On the other two sides is 'the garden'. Or more accurately, a little fragment of land that hasn't been ploughed. But which does have half-a-dozen olive trees.

Some Musings About The Olive
The scene is x-thousand years BC. A Neanderthal is passing an olive tree and notices glistening black fruit hanging temptingly from its branches. 'Hmmm', thinks our ancestor, 'these look pretty tasty and they're a damn sight easier to catch than a mammoth. I think I'll eat one. Blecccchhh ! That's just horrible ! Last time I ever try one of those things !'

or 

'Blecccchhh ! That's just horrible ! But I think I'll pick them all anyway and soak some of them for several weeks in salt water until they become edible. Or if I knew what lye was, I could soak them in that instead. And I'll crush the others until oil comes out and then I'll take the oil and rub it on some bread with some salt and maybe a touch of garlic and call it…oh, I dunno…bruschetta'.

The moral here is that eating a ripe olive off a tree is something you only do once. The unwaveringly inedible result is an equal mix of disappointment and mouth-puckering blecccchhh. But I'm just fascinated by the thought processes and endless trial and error that eventually made the olive palatable by dunking it in salt water and ultimately, thanks to the wonder of evolution, the Dry Martini.

Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch…
We have WiFi. Just like that. Having fed a cable into holes drilled through wall and ceiling, (of a rented house ? Hey ho - there goes my damage deposit), Elio plugs it into the Ethernet port of my Mac, which sort-of churns away to itself for a few moments and then obligingly goes online. The benefits are two-fold. I can now run this blog and our burgeoning venture providing Abruzzo holidays for couples only and ensure our holiday rental villas all have WiFi access too.

And outside, the olives are being stripped off the trees at an impressive rate. Before they begin,  I've wished the pickers, all local farmers, a smilingly-acknowledged buona raccolta. Now, nimble as a herd of chamois, they've clambered into the trees, wedging ladders into the branches to reach the top-most fruit. I said the harvest was done by hand, but that's only half-true.

Bright blue electric cables are fed from tractors up into the trees. These in turn power rotating brushes which the pickers use to delicately strip the olives off the branches and send them cascading into the nets below. But there are a lot of olive trees to work and a tractor can only power a couple of these rotating brushes, so other pickers use nothing more hi-tec than cut-down old garden rakes. And if you own just a few trees and can't beg or borrow a neighbour's tractor and whizzing brush for a couple of hours, you will genuinely hand-harvest your crop with your rake and your fingers. A tree takes about twenty minutes to brush; just a little longer to pick.

A Lesson Well-Learned
And we're watching all this with more than just casual interest, because our own little piece of Abruzzo, the acre or so that'll hold our own house, the holiday-for-couples rental villas, the swimming pool and the garden, comes with seven olive trees. Not really enough to produce an endless supply of virgin, cold-pressed oil - besides, as I've already mentioned  - with Martina's Mum making the best olive oil in the world ever, to try would be a bit pointless - but more than enough for heaps of delicious, perfectly-prepared olives for us and our villa guests to enjoy. And if you're here in November, you can even help us pick them !

Oh, Go On Then
Admit it. You really do want to know how to cure an olive, don't you?

(Click on pictures in text for larger images)

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 10:21 am and is filed under Daily Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.