Sicily, ITALY
Lost in Sicily, Found in Olive Country
Land in Catania at 8PM, pick up a rental, drive 2.5 hours to Centuripe, pitch dark, have an address to go but a non functioning GPS, no directions, no service. Daughters are exhausted and are asking when we're gonna eat?. Hell no, how would I know? We drive up a narrow road along the cliff. Giant rocks have tumbled across the road.. Result of heavy rains.Through the windshield daughter spots a pizzeria, dim light from inside. The town is dead, silent.
I park the rental by the curb and walk in to ask for some directions.A woman drops her conversation with the pizzaman without me saying anything she goes: “Bizzalionne”? How do I love this!! It’s November, thanksgiving is coming up in the US, but here it’s panettone season ahead of Christmas. YES! Four of us think with relief. She greets us, we buy three pizzas, one panetone and a bottle of wine. Marcella says “follow me, I’ll take you to the house”. We are behind her down a road with hairpin till we turn to a XVIII century Palazzo... baroque, grand and so cold.
When I wake up the next day, Maria Grazia and Mello are outside gazing at her extensive giardini, olive trees extending into the valley along the hill. Men, women are picking olives up on triangle ladders. Here and there, one calls another and they laugh, they sing. Some whistle. Elsewhere a few guys are using electrical rakes that shake olives onto an orange mesh fabric spread out among olive trees aligned in endless rows on the rolling hills and the silvery grey bark on the trees is tight like young skin. Helen and our kids are in the pool behind the house all afternoon.
Mello picks me up, and we drive down to a large grove of olive trees. We pick up a dozen large red plastic crates heavy with olives, load the van and rush to the mill in Catania.
Maria fifty something drives in a Jaguar over the rocky hill through the grove where we meet-not a truck or a quad, but a white XJ6. “It was my father’s”, she says. Though she holds degrees in botany and arboriculture, she isn’t cut out for a lab; she belongs on the rugged land with her trees. And she is busy all right with one thousand trees, fencing off olive thieves (yes, that’s real!), fires, droughts, tilling, pruning, trapping the dreadful flies that lay eggs in olives, harvesting and extracting olive oil. She produces three to four tons of olive oil per year.
I am envious of her work and the time warp she operates in.
She tells me what makes her olive oil unique. Groves are on volcanic ground, intensely rich in minerals and in full sun.. The permanent breeze chases parasites. Plenty of sun does too. The sky is royal blue, pure of any drifting clouds. Nocellara Etneo, that is the varietal of olive that makes this Sicilian evoo so unique, fruity, floral, and citrussy.
The time between harvest and extraction is under one hour, no oxidation of the olives, quick quick to the mill. Crushed in turbine, pulp pea soup color, large stainless mangers, thick opaque bright green dripping from a faucet. They fill a water plastic bottle and handed it to me. I pour some on the slight concave part of my hand between thumb and index and slurp the thick fluo juice, the olio nuevo. As the oil transits from tongue to throat a mild burn and a dense floral subsides untill a sense of density and nourishment drains through me. Nourishing and soothing. I write in my notebook “Artichoke and green apple”.
