Food & Wine
Italy and Salento Cuisine | Olive Trees | Olive Oil | Wine Tasting
Olive Trees
The cultivation of the olive has ancient roots; the fossilized remains of an ancestor of the olive tree were found near Livorno, in Italy, dating back twenty million years. However, actual cultivation probably did not occur in that area until the fifth century B.C.
Between 5000 B.C. and 1400 B.C., the cultivation of the olive spread from Crete to Syria, to Palestine and to Israel; commercial networking and new techniques then took it to Southern Turkey, Cyprus, and Egypt. Greece was the area where it was most heavily cultivated up until 1500 B.C. Then by the eighth century B.C., with the expansion of the Greek colonies, the olive reached Southern Italy and Northern Africa after which it was introduced to southern France.
Olive trees were planted in the entire Mediterranean basin under Roman rule and according to the historian Pliny, Italy had "excellent olive oil at reasonable prices by the first century A.D, the best in the Mediterranean," he maintained.
There are about thirty varieties of olives growing in Italy today, and each yields a particular oil with its own unique characteristics. Puglia is home to an impressive one-third of Italy's olive trees.
The olive trees in Salento are the envy of most of Italy, in fact, sadly, so much so that recently there have been cases where whole trees have been stolen to sell elsewhere.
