The Good Life & the Good Olive Oil
Photos and words by Katie McKnoulty
The sun finally comes out after a grey morning picking olives. Someone gets out the portable speaker and plays the kind of cool, vaguely indie music I or any New Yorker or Londoner in their 30s would listen to at home or work any day of the week. It's just that we’re listening to it here, in a field full of olive trees, in the Tuscan countryside. Francesco, who’s running this show, notices this golden, surreal moment too and turns to me and says, "People sometimes look down on agricultural work... but I mean, look how much fun we’re having!”
I'd come here to Tuscany to stay with Francesco Piattelli and his girlfriend, Francesca Gambato (Fra + Fra as they sign off their emails). I wanted to see and photograph the harvest of their 4.5 hectares of olive trees in the heart of the Toscano IGP denomination, and their olives, ready to be hand-picked and pressed. Their new venture is Agricola Maraviglia: a small-batch, organic, sustainably-made olive oil to be sold direct from their farm in Tuscany to consumers online all over the world.
Like myself, the couple gradually swapped big city life (New York in their case) for something much smaller, a farmhouse just outside the town of Monte San Savino in Tuscany, Italy. At first they visited half the year. Now with the pandemic, they’re here year-round in Tuscany.
"I realised that this (New York City) was not a sustainable way of life for me, for my energy, my stress levels... I could feel it; this is not what or how I wanted to live. And especially work-wise I wasn't feeling satisfied, I wanted to do something that was more aligned. I decided... first I'll stop and then I'll figure out what I want to do."
Francesco started with the creation of Maraviglia Conscious Living, where yogis and meditators would gather in the summer to taste a bit of that calm, good-for-the-soul Italian countryside life, along with Francesca's traditional-Italian-meets-plant-based cooking daily.
This gave Francesco a chance to come home to himself.
"I came here because I wanted to slow the pace of life, I was like 'OK I'm going to start this retreat centre that can also be a bit of a temple for myself and a hub to bring together people that I like.' And then living there, you see every season, you see the trees, they bloom and they fall and the energy is just so palpable and so strong... The love for olives and nature, it came after. It's something that surprised me."
When I visited in late October, the leaves and the weather had turned, so the focus too had turned to the business of making olive oil. Francesco and Francesca had gathered friends and family ready to work; they stayed together in the retreat centre and picked olives for eight hours a day for those few weeks of the harvest. Returning tired and hungry after sundown each evening, we'd share a big, communal meal around a long table with lashings of fresh green olive oil on top of everything. We'd go to bed by 10 pm every night in preparation for another day. Lunches were out in the field over a fire, or at home devouring Francesca's heavenly yet down-to-earth culinary creations.
I saw firsthand how hands-on the process of olive picking really is, something I'd never stopped to think about in my many years consuming it. I learned that you don't so much pick olives as you do shake and comb the trees, either with a machine if you're going high-tech, or with a mini rake in hand if you're going analogue. You then catch the falling olives with huge nets spread out on the ground below.
The race to try to pick the olives and divest each tree of its bounty as quickly and efficiently as possible is always on if you want to get those good, early harvest green olives everyone seemed so fixated on.
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