The Olive-Picking

On the second day of the olive-picking at Cornelia’s house, she arranges to meet us at the last bus stop at Piazza Tolentino and drive us up the mountain so we may witness the event. Her olives have for years been picked by the same Florentine family who run a small business—gathering olives and pressing the oil from them. Today they will be coming back with the first day’s pressing and will gather the remaining olives for the following day’s.

Cornelia and her son Marlowe, tall and very thin in his adolescence and growing taller by the moment, walk us through the vineyard and olive grove behind the house. The ground is wet and spongy from the recent rains; the little stream on the property flows briskly in its gully. Though the grapes have been harvested, a few shriveled ones remain, dried and forgotten on the stalk. Marlowe leads the way across the field, careful to point out to us treacherous roots or rocks or slippery places that we must avoid.

Below, in the valley, we see a panorama of farms. Their fields are criss-crossed by patterns of planting; from this distance the light and dark squares give the appearance of a giant game board.

The quality of light is a marvel—a haze hangs over the valley and Peretola airport in the distance, but it filters the sun in such a way as to soften and beautify whatever lies under its gentle touch. The terra-cotta-colored rooftops spread before us as far as we can see.

“You see why I love this place so much,” Cornelia tells us, as if an explanation were needed. “I need it as much as I need food and water.”

“Here they are,” Cornelia says, as we become aware of the noise of an engine laboring up the hill. A husband and wife and their young son arrive and park their old truck near the house. The woman and her husband together carry into the house what looks like a giant wine bottle of olive oil. They hold it by the two glass ears on its sides. Once it is set over the threshold, they exchange a few words and the husband leaves to begin his work, while his wife pulls the bottle further into the house. Cornelia and she speak in rapid Italian, having to do with the disposition of the other delivered bottles from the pressing. This one goes into the kitchen; the shed behind the house is settled on for the storage of the remaining oil.

I study the great jar of oil, greenish in color, with a slight sediment at the bottom.

“Do you really use that much oil?” I ask Cornelia, thinking of my kitchen cabinet at home with sixteen ounces of oil in it that will usually last me for six months.

“Oh, we use much more than this. Last winter the pressing brought us fifty-four litres of oil, and we are down to the last few inches by this time of year. Of course we give some away to friends, but mainly we use it ourselves.”

“But you are so thin! And Italians in general are thin! How do they manage it, with all that oil in their diets?”

“We walk a lot,” she says. “And besides, olive oil is good for you. We don’t worry so much like Americans do about this and that in our food.” She looks out the kitchen window and beckons us to see what is happening outside.

The husband has placed a white net beneath the olive tree next to the house and is already high up in it, standing on the rungs of a ladder and hitting at the branches with a stick. His son is perched on a lower branch, shaking the smaller branches around him.

As I watch, olives begin to cascade down into the net, flowing downhill like rivers of ebony. When I look up to the very top of the tree, I see hundreds of black olives still attached, shining in the sun. Many more must be hiding among the green leaves. As the boy and his father scrape and shake the branches of the tree, the woman gathers up the olives as they fall in a large plastic bucket. Lying there, in shades of black and dark red, they look like a child’s treasured marble collection.

“It seems so primitive to collect them this way, without any high-tech machinery,” I say to Cornelia. “They way they do it now must be the way they did it five hundred years ago.”

“And the way they press the oil from the olives between stone wheels is the same way they did it then, too. I am hoping you will taste it, there’s nothing like the first day’s pressing.”

She brings to the table a little bowl of carrot strips, bean sprouts, and fresh mushrooms. Then she presents us each with a small saucer holding an iridescent puddle of green oil in its center.

“Now be prepared,” she warns us. “It’s piccante—it has a real bite to it.”

I’ve never eaten a carrot with quite this much attention. The oil is alive with the taste of earth and sun, rich and sharp on the tongue. It coats the vegetables with a lovely sheen.

Joe agrees, it’s quite wonderful.

Outside, the family is working hard, moving the net from tree to tree, the man climbing the ladder, the boy climbing the lower branches of the tree itself, his mother gathering bucket after bucket from the catch of olives in the net.

Wine from grapes, oil from olives. In Italy I am always aware of the connection of food to earth, to sky. When I buy tomatoes in Italy, the stems are still attached, and my fingers come away smelling of the tart, pungent aroma of tomato stalks and leaves. In the USA, tomatoes taste like cardboard and cucumbers are polished by wax. All the produce at home smells of the plastic in which they are wrapped. It is no wonder Italians love their food with such passion and care for the bounty of the soil as if each fruit is a jewel.

We spend the afternoon with Cornelia, talking of books and the writers we love. Marlowe sits, long-legged in the corner, listening, and at one point says, in his fine British tongue, “I can never get my breakfast in the morning till my mother finishes her twenty pages of Dostoevsky. She doesn’t let anyone sit at the table with her when she’s reading. Even if it means I will be late for school.”

Cornelia admits her guilt. “I can’t do my day till I’ve read my pages. It’s my only quiet time.”

“I sometimes have to have a biscuit standing up in the kitchen,” Marlowe accuses her.

Cornelia laughs. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s my one vice.”

When I ask Marlowe if he ever speaks Italian at home, he explains that English is the language of the house, Italian of school and of speaking with his friends.

“It’s a bit of a trial,” Cornelia admits. “We don’t always know which country we live in. It isn’t so easy for non-Florentines here. Even though Paolo and I have been married for thirty years, each year he and I must go to the government offices and sign a document that he will support me and I will not become a ward of the country. Can you imagine doing this year after year?”

“But we always go to Oxford in the summers,” Marlowe adds. “My parents keep a small flat there. It’s where my mother and father met. And there I speak, of course, only English.”

“I don’t think I could ever learn Italian as well as you,” I tell Cornelia. “No matter how hard I worked at it, I’d always talk like a three-year old. That’s why it’s too daunting even to try.”

“It took me many years. But once you’re thrust into living here, you have no choice. You just jump in and try and hope people will be patient with you.”

Though we offer to take Cornelia and Marlowe to lunch in a nearby restaurant, she insists on serving us bowls of minestrone soup, pasta with garlic and basil drenched in olive oil, bread and cheese and fruit and panforte, that strange chewy Siennese confection she introduced me to when I first visited here.
As we eat from her hand-painted dishes, I tell Cornelia I am reminded of a story by Arturo Vivante called “The Binoculars.” This reminds Cornelia that I must meet her friend, Flavia, who knew him when he was a boy.

“Her villa is just down the road. I can’t take you there today, but I will call her and see if we can make a date.”

“I would love to do that.”

Just before Cornelia takes us down the mountain to the bus stop, she presents me with a miniature version of the great bottle of oil. In a small and delicately shaped container, with glass handle and curved spigot, with a cork at the top, she gives me a portion of the precious and glowing oil produced from her olive grove on the mountain.