The “Assisi-Spoleto olive belt” is aiming straight for recognition under the FAO “GIAHS Programme” (Globally important agricultural heritage systems) of the FAO, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
These are agricultural heritage sites and systems found around the world, where sustainable agriculture combines with rural development and in which stewardship by generations of farmers, the use of appropriate practices, local knowledge and experience, and a deep relationship with nature are the elements that shape and adapt the landscape and the farming system to the subsistence needs of local populations.
The application was submitted by the promoting committee made up of the municipalities of Trevi (lead partner), Assisi, Spello, Foligno, Campello sul Clitunno and Spoleto, supported by the Umbria Region, the University of Perugia and Sviluppumbria.
Should the outcome be positive, it would be the first Italian territory to be included in this special project, a unique opportunity for its protection and promotion.
The benefits expected from securing recognition under the GIAHS Programme are manifold. Among them are an increase in the economic value of the oil produced along the belt, the social, cultural, economic and tourism-related enhancement of the territory, the protection of the olive’s biodiversity, and the conservation and restoration of a landscape at risk of “vulnerability”.
To enter the FAO-GIAHS programme, an assessment against five parameters must be passed: agricultural biodiversity, a system of local knowledge and traditions, a set of shared values, the economic subsistence of the population, and the distinctive and unique features of the landscape under examination.
It should also be remembered that the Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies has already granted recognition as a historic and rural landscape, with entry in the National Register of Rural Landscapes, Agricultural Practices and Traditional Knowledge, established by Decree no. 17070 of 19 November 2012.

The history

The reasons for the beauty and importance of this territory are borne out by a history that at times fades into legend. The first reason is that in that stretch of the Spoleto valley the enigma of the olive tree can be read and made tangible. What do we mean? It is well known to scholars that the olive tree originated in the Armenian region and that the earliest attested domestications are in Syria. From there the cultivation of the olive is said to have spread to Greece and, from the islands and in particular from the Attic plain, to have been diffused throughout the Mediterranean basin. Well, there is far from negligible evidence identifying the presence of olive cultivation in Italy from 1800 BC onwards. This would call into question the Phoenician-Hellenic importation of olive growing, at least in central Italy. But what is most interesting is that Umbria, forever divided between Umbrians and Etruscans, with strong influences from the Adriatic Greek colonies (the Syracusans of Ancona) and from the Picene peoples, comes to know, also as the “home” of the olive, its fundamental role as fulcrum, as hinge. And the influences on cultivation that can be felt here are several. The Etruscans certainly brought their skill in extracting oil, the Umbrians took up the use of oil from cousin peoples such as the Piceni, and from the Adriatic peoples came the impulse to cultivation. It was with Rome that Umbria saw the greatest expansion of the olive grove. It is established that Otricoli was the port of embarkation for the Umbrian oil bound for Rome, that in the imperial age there were a great many mills (one is still to be found in Spoleto), and that its very abundance of water made Umbria a kind of land of oil mills. It is no coincidence that in Rome the upper classes consumed Spoleto oil, and it is worth recalling how, from Pliny to Columella, all the Latin writers extolled Umbrian oil. The reason? It lies in the growing conditions. If it is true that in the Trasimeno belt and in the area of Orvieto, where olive growing arrived with the Etruscans, the climate is the Mediterranean one, in the Assisi-Spoleto belt the climate is continental, with cultivation pushed to the very limit of the olive’s range at 700 metres. This brought about the shaping of what we might call a specialty olive growing, which also conditioned the type of cultivar chosen: these are trees that must withstand low temperatures and that must yield fruit capable of protecting itself. This is why the belt of the Spoleto valley is in effect the homeland of the Moraiolo, a cultivar that gives olives of small calibre, but extremely rich in polyphenols and, above all, of high yield relative to the volume of the drupe. Likewise on this slope, though this is an addition of the eighteenth century AD, one finds trees of Leccino, a plant that better withstands the presence of the oaks that have always characterised the wild landscape of Umbria, and of Frantoio on the Tuscan model, interspersed with the Pendolino acting as pollinator. In this there is a resemblance between Umbrian and Tuscan olive growing, brought about in large measure not by the remote Etruscan heritage, which instead taught the Umbrians to domesticate the wild olive widely intermixed with the downy-oak forests, but rather by the Leopoldine reclamations and the new impulse given to the agrarian economy of the Arezzo area by the grand-ducal government. The planting that mantles the piedmont belt from Assisi to Spoleto with olive trees is the outcome of striking agronomic interventions and land reorganisations carried out in particular in the middle of the 1700s. The model was the one realised in Leopoldine Tuscany with the reclamation of the Valdichiana; this entailed the descent to the valley floor of populations previously settled in the piedmont belts adjacent to the plains. The steep lands, already given over to arable crops, were clothed in olive trees following the designs of the Accademia dei Georgofili, which in this way answered the needs of the increased rural population on the valley floor. The population thus had at its disposal a winter crop on which to employ the surplus labour freed up by the reclamations in the plain. Once the Valdichiana had been reclaimed and the surroundings of Cortona clothed in olive trees, the model spread throughout the Papal State, first onto the adjacent hills of Lake Trasimeno and, finally, along the piedmont belt of the “Spoleto valley”, where the reclamation of the alluvial plain and the harnessing of the watercourses were under way. In this way the pre-existing presence of olive trees, enclosed in the convent gardens adjacent to the inhabited centres or within them, was absorbed into the piedmont olive belt, following a unified project for the revaluation of crops, carried out in parallel with the reclamation of the valley floor; on the valley floor were concentrated the intensive cereal crops, punctuated by the rows of vines married to trees. But if this is what we inherit from the contemporary age, it is worth going back to when the Romans yielded the field to the barbarians. Immediately the cultivation of the olive, which is a plant that needs care, was abandoned. With the arrival of the Lombards there was even a sanctioning of animal fat as seasoning and unguent, so much so that oil was relegated to what we might call a phytotherapeutic use. It is the view of Massimo Montanari, one of the most profound scholars of medieval customs, that the early Middle Ages are marked by an energetic and cosmetic use of oil at the expense of the dietary one. The fact remains, however, that Umbria, and once again the Assisi-Spoleto belt, brought about a turning point. It is owed to Benedict of Norcia, the spiritual father of Europe and, not by chance, its patron, who, laying down the rule of Ora et Labora (to glorify Creation by cultivating it), teaching agronomic practices, revaluing cenobitism and re-establishing the convent communities, gave the olive once more the central role of witness of our civilisation that the Hellenic myth of the olive as the plant of Athena had bequeathed to the Mediterranean peoples.
It is thanks to the Benedictines that the Lombards learned to use oil and therefore to cultivate the olive, which within some fifty years became once again a central plant in the agrarian economy. According to a testimony of Gregory the Great, it was Saint Benedict himself who persuaded the Lombards to use oil, which from the fall of the Roman Empire until the middle of the sixth century AD remained confined to liturgical and energetic use (as unguent and as light). Gregory the Great recounts that Benedict taught some Lombards to extract oil from olives and that they were amazed by it. The fact remains that fifty years later the edict of Rothari, the first collection of written laws of the Lombards, laid down for anyone who felled an olive tree a penalty three times greater than that provided for anyone who had felled any other fruit tree. It is once again Umbria that protects the olive! From Benedict onwards the olive in Umbria begins to become the plant of identity. With one peculiarity: here the olive is not yet cultivated in the open field, but within the walls of the cities; at Trevi, at Campello, at Assisi. And it is the Benedictine convents that protect them in the hortus conclusus; from here will arise the “chiuse” that even today are synonymous with olive grove in the Spoleto valley. The olive thus becomes a symbol of wealth and even an element of identity and heraldry. One need only think of the thousand-year-old olive that grows over the gate of Spello, or of the Torre dell’Olio in Spoleto. It will be with the arrival of Friar Francis that the olive of the Spoleto valley takes on wholly sacred meanings. As for cultivation, it is from the Middle Ages that throughout the Spoleto valley, and still more from the appearance of the Franciscans, a peculiar structure takes hold that replicates in the field the idea of the hortus conclusus: they are the dry-stone walls, they are the lunettes, they are the terraces that wrest land from the hillside and entrust it to the olive, to which is given the task of being light, medicine and nourishment, but also the containment of the mountain. In this way there arises a kind of “engineering” of cultivation that unites the agrarian function with that of protecting the environment! And we are just after the year one thousand!!! Evidence of this evolution of olive cultivation is very abundant along the Spoleto valley.

The mountains and the piedmont belt of the valley seem naturally predisposed to receive consecrated places, characterised as they are by all the fundamental natural forms that can be traced back to epiphanies of the sacred: peaks, primeval woods, rocks, springs, caves. The area is marked by a rich presence of thaumaturgic and therapeutic sanctuaries, linked to the presence of springs, for the most part Christianised but founded on original pagan numinous sites.
In the “Spoleto valley”, the highest epiphany of the sacred linked to the olive, comparable to a founding myth, is enclosed in the cloister of thousand-year-old, gnarled and living trunks of the olive of Sant’Emiliano at Bovara di Trevi, consecrated by the blood of the martyr. The Passio recounts that, upon an olive tree, the Armenian bishop of Trevi was beheaded after being tortured in the waters of the Clitunno and in the countryside near the altars of the majestic oxen of Bovara (destined, according to the tradition attested by Virgil, to be sacrificed to Jupiter Capitolinus). The olive mantle that enfolds Trevi, the hill and the flanks of the Brunette, on which the town is set, appears as the evergreen and perennial gift of the sacrifice of the founding Saint, a patron made flesh in that spectacular ridge of trunks.
It is precisely along the axis that runs along the piedmont belt, and not along the hilly one opposite, that the most important protohistoric and historic settlement features present in the “Spoleto valley” are located. The major towns are Spoleto, which gives the valley its name, Trevi, Foligno, Spello and Assisi, and they are all arranged along the piedmont axes, which became thoroughfares with the consular Flaminia, the lower limit of the planting of olive trees; the latter, being rich in springs, proved decisive for the settlements in the age of Romanisation. The olive belt performs the function, primary today, of defining the space of the steep landscape of the valley rich in rivers.

The territory and the farming system

As we have seen, olive cultivation, though attested for at least 3,000 years in this part of Umbria, has undergone profound changes. What must be borne in mind above all is that along the Assisi-Spoleto belt the stratifications of the way of cultivating are all still present today and all still legible. The Apennine piedmont belt from Assisi to Spoleto is among the main olive-growing areas of the Umbria region. Cultivation is concentrated in the belt lying between 200 and 500 m of altitude, with peaks up to 600 m. In this belt there are more favourable thermal and atmospheric-humidity conditions than in the areas above and below, with a consequent reduction in the incidence of cold damage following the frosts that, unfortunately, periodically occur in Umbria. Indeed, such adversities represent the greatest limit to olive cultivation in our region. Rainfall of between 800 and 1,100 mm/year allows, in most years, good production to be obtained even without recourse to irrigation. The characteristics of the soils are highly variable, depending on the nature of the parent rock, and range from soils with a strong presence of skeletal material, less fertile, to soils with a more balanced texture and therefore endowed with good fertility. The soils richer in skeletal material, having a lesser capacity to store and retain water, create conditions of greater difficulty for the plants in drought years.

In the Assisi-Spoleto belt, besides the agricultural aspect, the olive groves are of considerable importance from the hydrogeological and scenic as well as cultural point of view. Indeed, the presence of the plants and the hydraulic-agrarian arrangements that are applied create more favourable conditions for the regulation of water and for the stability of the soil. Moreover, the trees are fundamental elements of the landscape, merging with the rest of the vegetation and with the works of man to give rise to striking decorative effects. In the Spello-Spoleto stretch there are olive groves with embankment arrangements or with “terracing” or “lunettes” built of dry-stone walls, which help to create an even more striking and distinctive landscape. Such works are an example of the great industriousness of the peasantry. The functions of hydrogeological and scenic protection performed by the olive grove, creating conditions unfavourable to the occurrence of calamitous events and favourable to the increase of Umbria’s tourist appeal, allow positive indirect economic effects to be achieved, such as the reduction of expenditure on natural disasters and the increase of revenue due to tourism. In the municipalities of the Assisi-Spoleto belt (Assisi, Spello, Foligno, Campello sul Clitunno, Spoleto east) about one million two hundred and forty thousand olive plants are cultivated, representing about 23% of the total cultivated in Umbria. The greater part of the olive groves is of the traditional type: irregular planting layouts, densities that are not always adequate, old plants with irregular and often multi-stemmed trunks (bush vase), in several cases, as we have seen, with “terrace” or “lunette” arrangements. All this makes it more difficult to obtain maximum yields and to apply mechanisation. There are also intensive olive groves established after the frost of 1956 and, above all, that of 1985. In these, the trees are arranged in regular rows, with distances between the rows and along the row varying from 6 to 5 m. In intensive olive groves it is easier to make full use of the productive potential of the trees, and all cultivation operations can be mechanised, in particular the harvest. The training forms most widely used are the vase and the bush vase in traditional plantings and the vase in intensive ones. The bush vase (multi-stemmed) derives, in most cases, from cutting back to the stump carried out following frosts, which have damaged the entire aerial part of the plants, and from the subsequent training of 3 to 4 suckers.
As regards cultivation technique, soil management is, in most cases, carried out by grassing over and 2 to 3 mowings a year done in spring and autumn. Grassing over, compared with tillage, presents important advantages: it prevents erosion and allows easy movement of people and machines, facilitating the carrying out of cultivation practices, in particular harvesting and pruning.
This cultivation situation, which today is largely the preserve of small growers who own limited plots, reads the evolution of the cultivation. The chiuse, like the terraces and in particular the lunettes (semicircular and wholly peculiar to this region of Umbria), are the legacy of monastic practices; the intensive row plantings are the legacy of the “revolution” of the 1700s; free-standing tree cultivation, on the other hand, is the revival of the Roman system in deference to organic cultivation, here moreover very widely practised, for the least possible impact on nature. The cultivation network that we can see today is therefore a kind of “time machine” of the olive, even if the most substantial part of the plantings can be traced back, in conception, to the early 1800s. Given the commercial value of the oil and its favour among the higher classes of the population, olive cultivation between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries tended to conquer ever wider areas, and the oil of the Umbrian territories was prized, 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 areas in view of the oil trade was very limited if not non-existent (at the end of the fifteenth century, however, it appears that Spoleto oil was bought by the Florentines). The sources show us how great attention to the spread of this crop is particularly present on the vast properties of the religious bodies. The harvest, which is the most demanding and costly practice, is in most cases, given the limited farm sizes and the structure of the olive groves attributable to the traditional type, carried out with assisting equipment. In some cases it is still conducted by hand, especially in the structurally more difficult olive groves. In intensive olive groves, on large farms or where contractors are engaged, it is carried out mechanically with trunk shakers usually fitted with an inverted umbrella for intercepting the olives gathered (full mechanisation).
The oil, thanks to the environmental conditions that characterise the Assisi-Spoleto belt, which, besides enhancing the positive attributes of the product, as we have seen, reduce to a minimum the incidence of attacks by parasites that can damage its quality (e.g. the fruit fly), and thanks to the varieties cultivated, in particular the Moraiolo, reaches very high, greatly prized quality levels.

The olive tree as an inspirer of culture

It is hardly worth mentioning here the fact that the olive in the Assisi-Spoleto belt constitutes a generator of culture. It would be enough to cite Giotto’s frescoes in Assisi, Perugino’s works in Spello, Benozzo Gozzoli’s landscapes in Montefalco to say how the olive is the magical “highlighter” of the Umbrian landscape through pictorial transfiguration. A “sensation” shared by all those who have crossed this Spoleto valley and have left testimony of their wonder. As Alberto Sorbini notes in “Studi Umbri”: “Even before the Grand Tour took hold, the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne arrived in Italy in 1581, and on his pilgrimage towards Loreto he crossed Umbria; thus he writes 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, when he happens to pass by 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 mid-height; it is a most delightful position, on that mountain, laden all around with olive trees’.”
Travellers, for the most part coming from northern Europe, where the olive does not take root, besides underlining the numerous presence of olive trees, are struck by finding themselves before plants of great size, which therefore give the impression of being particularly old. Thus, on his journey made in 1758, the Frenchman Pierre Jean Grosley describes, when he finds himself in the surroundings of Foligno:

“The flanks of the hills from where we arrived are covered with olive trees, whose antiquity demonstrates the excellence of the climate: nowhere have we seen trees of this species so old and, at the same time, so vigorous. Most of them are dismemberments of ancient trunks that have formed new trees adhering to the primitive root”. The French botanist André Thouin, in 1796, speaks thus of the surroundings of the Trasimeno: “An ancient forest of olive trees with long, narrow leaves, some of which are up to six feet in diameter and rise more than twenty-five feet, precedes Torricella, the frontier of Tuscany and the first village of the State of the popes”. Goethe, on his celebrated journey to Italy in 1786, in his hurried passage through Umbria to reach Rome, comes upon the olive harvest in the surroundings of Terni and notes: “Now (late October) the gathering of the olives begins. It is done by hand; elsewhere they are beaten down with poles. If winter comes early, those not gathered remain on the trees until spring. Today, on stony ground, I have seen enormous and very old olive trees”. And it is also worth citing Jacques Camille Broussolle, who writes in the mid-1890s: “The olive trees now make on the pale earth an immense, monotonous, dark stain. Yet how much poetry there is! Search on your palette for a note that recalls the mystery of this delightful hour; you will not find it! And if you forget to veil the drawing with pink, gently softened, then it seems to you that you are rendering, at least a little, that rare spectacle of the Umbrian sunsets amid fields of olive trees. Now it is winter! With the olives whose harvest has just been finished, the last leaves have fallen from the trees. But the olive keeps its own: it is the olive that, awaiting spring, will place in the landscape the perpetual note of tender, modest, mysterious green, without which the land of Saint Francis would no longer be green Umbria”.