The olive tree, beyond its ecological aspects, carries a solid connotation as a “plant of civilisation” – to use Fernand Braudel’s happy expression – which defines and delimits the space of the Mediterranean. Oil, wine and wheat are the three products that have characterised the diet of Mediterranean peoples since antiquity. The olive holds a place of the first rank among the plants that give the Mediterranean world its unique character, in its agrarian landscape, in its eating habits, in its symbolic, cultural and religious aspects. Oil was used not only as a condiment: it figured in the pharmacopoeia, in the care of the body, as fuel for lighting and, finally, as an essential component of religious rites. Nor should the eating of olives be forgotten, even though our knowledge on this point is very fragmentary. Among the testimonies, fragmentary as we have said, we will cite only the physician and botanist of Gualdo Tadino, Castor Durante, who in his Tesoro della sanità, of 1586, suggested eating olives at the end of the meal to aid digestion, observing moreover that in central Italy they were widely consumed at every stage of the meal, paired with every dish.

We do not know for certain whether the cultivation of the olive, which is not a native plant, was, as far as Umbria is concerned, an Etruscan import, while the Greeks are believed to have brought it into cultivation in the south of Italy. On these hypotheses, however, scholars do not agree: some maintain, on the basis of finds of olive stones, that the first cultivation of the olive can be traced back to the Bronze Age (about 1700-1500 BC). Not all parts of Umbria are suited to the crop, chiefly because of the needs of the young trees, which must be planted in hill belts at altitudes between 250 and 500 metres and in soils that drain easily. This is why the olive appears in well-defined areas of the territory, especially on the hills sloping down towards Lake Trasimeno and on the mountain slopes between Assisi, Trevi and Spoleto, as well as in the hilly zones near Todi and Orvieto.

In Roman times, olive growing in southern Umbria is documented by archaeological excavations that have brought to light numerous production facilities attached to rustic villas. Such is the case of the oil mill at Tripozzo, in the municipality of Arrone, datable to the first half of the first century AD, and of the one at Eggi, near Spoleto, of uncertain date. The numerous villas identified along the course of the river Nera, in the territory of Narni, were also certainly devoted to the production of oil and wine between the first century BC and the late imperial age. Likewise, in the villas discovered in the territory south of Orvieto, set along the left bank of the river Paglia at altitudes between 100 and 400 metres above sea level, the sections used for making wine and oil have been identified. Just as it is established that the ancient river port of Ocriculum (near present-day Otricoli) on the Tiber served to carry Umbrian oil towards Rome. We may say that Roman cooking, as we know it from the few surviving documents, was a cuisine that “dripped with oil”.
The fall of the Roman Empire and the invasions of the so-called barbarians brought a period of standstill in olive growing, not least because the new peoples who entered the Peninsula from northern and eastern Europe had a diet different from the Mediterranean one, centred on the triad of butter, beer and meat. It should nonetheless be said that, in the passage from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, oil kept its cultural value intact, both as a consumer good and as an instrument indispensable to the liturgy: for sacramental anointings as much as for feeding the votive lamps. The tradition of sacred lighting from lamps fed with olive oil found precise prescriptions in Carolingian legislation, among them the perpetual upkeep of the lamps in holy places. The traditional growing of olive trees on land belonging to religious communities was in all likelihood driven by these motives too, besides the ecclesiastical rules that banned the use of animal fats for more than a hundred days a year. Many scholars, such as the food historian Massimo Montanari, hold that in the Middle Ages the principal destination of olive oil was not alimentary but liturgical.
The presence of the northern people of the Lombards in many areas of the peninsula, Umbria among them, in some measure conditioned – at least in the early phase of the occupation (late sixth to seventh century) – the use of oil, both in the liturgical sphere (the Lombards were pagans) and in eating practice. The Lombard world’s original distance from the consumption of oil comes down to us through a telling episode in the life of Santulus of Norcia, recorded in the Dialogi of Gregory the Great, at the turn of the sixth century: according to the account, Santulus intervened miraculously on behalf of some Lombards who had tried in vain to extract oil from the milled olives. Only half a century later, within a general process of acculturation of the Lombard people, a provision contained in the Edict of Rothari set the penalty for felling an olive tree at three times that imposed on whoever cut down any other fruit tree.
In any case, in Umbria as in other areas the consumption of oil was not, except among the elites, a structural presence in people’s daily diet (at least outside the Lenten period), while far more widely used were lardo and the strutto rendered from the pig. Olive growing was relatively intense but of circumscribed, essentially local importance; the aim, at most, was self-sufficiency for the town.
In fourteenth and fifteenth century sources the olive grove is most often mentioned on “enclosed” lands, frequently tied closely to the built-up area and at times even inside the walls, as at Assisi and Trevi, while in those from the late sixteenth century onwards the olive often appears mingled with arable or fallow land. Given the commercial value of oil and its favour among the higher ranks of the population, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries olive cultivation tended to win ever larger surfaces, and the oil of the Umbrian territories was appreciated, especially on the great market of Rome, although it should be stressed that in sharecropping areas such as Umbria the olive-growing specialisation of certain zones for the oil trade was very limited, if not non-existent (at the end of the fifteenth century, however, the oil of Spoleto is recorded as being bought by the Florentines). The sources show us that great attention to the spread of this crop was especially present on the vast properties of religious institutions. For example, in one of the few recipe collections that have come down to us, the one concerning the monastery of San Tommaso in Perugia, between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, compiled by Maria Vittoria del Verde, it emerges that of the 170 surviving recipes, in 40 oil is an ingredient for cooking and in 14 a dressing; strutto appears in 13 for cooking and in 4 as a dressing; lardo, finally, is used three times for cooking and 7 times for dressing. These figures confirm the urban use of oil, clearly prevailing over the other fats. Speaking of consumption in monasteries, it should also be remembered that the lean days of the liturgical calendar amounted to more than half the year; and it is worth recalling too, a fact of no small economic weight, that very often the monastery itself owned the olive groves from which the oil for internal consumption was obtained. Even though a very persistent commonplace continues to present Umbrians as great consumers of oil, it is worth restating the “class” nature of the dietary consumption of olive oil, and the divide between urban and rural eating, characteristics that endured until recent times. Oil was a precious good to be used sparingly, so much so that spilling it was held to be an ill omen. Of the importance of olive growing in the region, such as to shape its landscape, the many travellers who passed through Umbria have left their testimony.
Even before the Grand Tour took hold, the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne reached Italy in 1581 and crossed Umbria on his pilgrimage towards Loreto; he writes thus of the surroundings of Terni: «beyond, the hills more cultivated, inhabited, and among other things so thick with olive trees that nothing is more beautiful to behold», and further on, as he passes beside the slopes of the hill on which Trevi stands: «The fact is that it is a town built on a high mountain, and on one side it stretches along the slopes to half way down; it is a most delightful position, on that mountain, laden all around with olive trees».
The travellers – mostly coming from northern Europe, where the olive does not take root -, besides noting the abundance of olive trees, are struck by finding themselves before plants of great size, which therefore give the impression of being particularly old. Thus writes the Frenchman Pierre Jean Grosley, on his journey of 1758, finding himself in the surroundings of Foligno: «The flanks of the hills from which we arrived are covered with olive trees, whose antiquity proves the excellence of the climate: nowhere have we seen trees of this species so old and at the same time so vigorous. Most are offshoots of ancient trunks that have formed new trees clinging to the original root». The French botanist André Thouin, in 1796, speaks thus of the surroundings of Trasimeno: «An ancient forest of olive trees with long, narrow leaves, some of them up to six feet in diameter and rising more than twenty-five feet, precedes Torricella, the frontier of Tuscany and the first village of the Papal States». Goethe, on his celebrated Italian journey of 1786, in his hurried passage through Umbria on the way to Rome, comes upon the olive harvest near Terni and notes: «The olive harvest is now beginning (late October). It is done by hand; elsewhere the trees are beaten with poles. If winter comes early, the olives left unpicked stay on the trees until spring. Today, on stony ground, I saw some enormous, very old olive trees». The German poet’s passage reminds us of the system of picking by hand, known as brucatura; only the highest branches were beaten with poles – methods still practised today -, but olives were also gathered from the ground, in which case the quality of the oil obtained was markedly inferior, better suited to lighting than to nourishment. The harvest season began between November and December, but could carry on right through the winter.
The olive trees contributed in no small measure to creating that image of “green Umbria” which from the second half of the nineteenth century enchanted travellers and became a distinctive trait of the territory. One example among many is what the French writer Jacques Camille Broussolle wrote in the 1890s: «The olive trees now make upon the pale earth an immense, monotonous, dark stain. And yet how much poetry! Search your palette for a note that recalls the mystery of this delicious hour; you will not find it! And if you lose yourself in veiling the drawing with pink, gently softened, then you seem to render, at least a little, that rare spectacle of Umbria’s sunsets amid fields of olive trees. Now it is winter! With the olives whose harvest has just ended, the last leaves have fallen from the trees. But the olive keeps its own: it is the olive that, awaiting spring, will set in the landscape that perpetual note of tender, modest, mysterious green without which the land of Saint Francis would no longer be green Umbria».

Works consulted

Anelli, P. (ed.), Il dono e la quiete. Il mare verde dell’olio. V Colloquio internazionale Homo edens, Spoleto-Spello-Perugia, 27-29 April 1995, Irrsae dell’Umbria, Perugia 1999.

Brugnoli, A., Varanini, G. M. (eds.), Olivi e olio nel medioevo italiano, Clueb, Bologna 2005.

Casagrande, G., Gola e preghiera nella clausura dell’ultimo ‘500, version and etymological notes by G. Moretti, Edizioni dell’Arquata, Foligno 1989.

Desplanques, H., Campagne umbre. Contributo allo studio dei paesaggi rurali dell’Italia centrale, edited by A. Melelli, Quattroemme, Perugia 2006.

AA. VV., Olio e vino nell’alto medioevo. Spoleto, 20-26 April 2006, 2 vols., Fondazione Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, Spoleto 2007.

Sorbini, A., (ed.), La vite e l’olivo in Umbria piante di civiltà, Edimond, Città di Castello 2007.