Everything was unexpected: starting with what I found on this visit to the olive grove.
We are in Florence, just outside, a little to the north, right on the edge of the city.
We often talk about passion.
There is something different in this young man: pride and happiness.
The pride of belonging and the happiness of growing a new plant.
He tells me about the 1985 freeze. He wasn’t born, but he’s heard so much about it it’s almost as if he’s lived through it. The trees suffered a lot, they almost died. They haven’t produced for years.
Here’s how these extraordinary trees reacted: by multiplying. Which, if you think about it, is almost a metaphor for mankind: it multiplies in times of difficulty. Each tree has become two, three, four, even five. Five trees with common roots but bearing fruit as if they were really separate, an incredible production.
And then it happens that the trees have a name, so much so that it is said let’s go to the Tower, let’s go to the Japanese Studio, let’s go all the way to the Cathedral.
They are names that have been given for the surface they cover, the space they occupy.
“Why, isn’t it as big as a studio flat?: there’s the kitchen and here’s the sofa with the TV. Like at IKEA.”
You enter the house, you look around to understand how to live it; you enter the tree to figure out how to climb.
For now, oil is little more than a pastime: a family production of which I had a few kilos as a gift, as a sign of twenty years of friendship.
An extraordinary oil. Extraordinary because different. I was used to extra virgin olive oils from my region, Tuscany, strong, full, complex. This oil is very delicate, sweet, suitable for fine preparations. An oil that does not overwhelm the flavours: graceful and polite. Also suitable for making desserts, instead of butter.
Not for this bland; rather multiform and elaborate. A flavor to be discovered, to be “scanned” with careful tasting.
A pleasant visit, in the sun of a hinted spring.
Not happy, I took away a sprig of laurel scented.
Marcella Ansaldo © 2023
Photos by Marta Mariuz © 2023