Part one:

As we say in Italy: after April, comes May. September is long gone,  the grapes have been harvested and our wine is secured in the vats. It is time to pick the olives! It’s November and in Tuscany you can tell just driving around the country side: hundreds of improvised  workers populate the hills around Florence. For about two weeks, whoever owns a “tongue of land” with olive trees on it is intent in  the ceremony of the olive picking. The fields workforce  quadruplicates. Accountants put on their gloves,  Surgeons take off  theirs and put on some boots, lawyers walk with ladders on theirs  shoulders and farmers look at all of them and shake their heads…

My family, of course, is part of the show. My parents bought an old barn in the late sixties with one hundred olive trees attached to the property. Today the barn is a house and the trees still produce excellent olive oil. It’s my mom’s job every year to check the tools. First the nets to catch the olives that fall from the trees. One of them is new, the other is old and ripped; it is probably the same one that my grandparents bought to replace the World War Two parachute that they used to use. We will use it this one last time, next year she will buy a new one… Ore will she? Next are the “manine”, little plastic combs in the shape of hands. Everyone should carry one: they run through the branches leaving the leaves, tacking the olives off. We also need two ladders and some gloves. In different parts of Italy, more recently, people have begun using motorized sticks that slap the trees and make the olives fall down into the net. We don’t use them. This system is valid for bigger plants and flat terrains. We live on top of a hill and our trees are only twenty five years old because of the great freeze of 1985 when all of them died from the intense cold. I also believe that there is something deeply wrong in the beating of an olive tree…..