by Mueller, Tom
Francesco didn’t miss a beat. “No. We argue every day,” he said. “Every single day!” And when the laughter, a shade nervous, subsided, he added, with a quick, testing look at Saverio: “Disagreeing, sharing different opinions, deciding together the best way forward—that’s the best way to collaborate, no?”
For all his university training, Francesco clearly shares his father’s visceral enthusiasm for olive oil. His earliest memories also concern the family mill—such as the time, as a three-year-old, when he fell asleep in a little nest between sacks of olives, and slept through the increasingly despairing cries of his family as they searched for him amid the whirring blades and grinding wheels.
“If you’d come a couple of weeks earlier, or later, you’d be eating a completely different meal,” Francesco said, looping a green ribbon of Arcamone oil over a big bowl of a half-dozen different wild-looking greens, most of which I’d never seen before, and whose names he knew only in the local dialect, not in Italian: cuolacidd, spunzál, sevón, cicuredd. “We pugliesi are demanding about these things,” he continued as he stirred the glistening leaves. “We try to eat only vegetables and fruits that are in season. Many Italians are the same. They prefer fresh things from local gardens to the brown, tired-looking produce in supermarkets, even when local crops cost more. So why don’t they buy their oil the same way? Olives are a seasonal fruit, and olive oil is a fresh-pressed fruit juice—it’s best shortly after it’s made, and goes downhill from there. Why on earth do people buy expensive vegetables like these, and dress them with the cheapest oil they can find?”
De Carlo oil flowed for the rest of the meal, gushing over the burrata, a rich, curdy cousin of mozzarella, and pooling in the little cups of the orecchiette pasta with boragine, a wild herb. At first I thought the De Carlos were showing off for me, but I soon saw that they used olive oil this way every day, choosing from the four different oils on the table the one that best fit each dish they were dressing. Saverio sloshed so much Tenuta Torre di Mossa, the family’s pepperiest oil, over his grilled lamb that the others giggled and pointed. He bobbed his head and smiled happily, the first smile I’d seen from him. “I’ve spent my whole life making oil, but I can never eat enough of it. What other job gives you this?”
He handed me the oil, and I poured some over my lamb. As if it had catalyzed subtle chemical reactions in the meat, I tasted dense new flavors which I hadn’t noticed in my previous, unoiled bites: the rosemary and santoregia Grazia had used to season it, the browned fat, the light charring from the olive-wood grill—each flavor had a new depth and intensity. The meat even felt different, more supple and juicy. This oil wasn’t just a condiment, but had entered into the dish.
When I observed this, Francesco snorted. “Try telling that to a chef!” He explained that he’d recently given an oil-tasting course in Naples to twenty head chefs of prominent restaurants, most of whom had shown the most abject ignorance about olive oil. “Each of these guys ran a top-flight restaurant, right? Some had Michelin stars. They had highly developed palates for wine and for foods of all kinds. But every last one of them was using a refined olive oil or a cut-rate extra virgin in their kitchens, and even on their tables. They’d been using bad oils so long that they didn’t even know what a good oil tasted like.”
Grazia, who had been silent for some time, spoke with sudden force. “Then we’ve got to teach them. The road we’ve got to follow is la cultura: educating people about good oil is the only way out of this crisis. Because once someone tries a real extra virgin—an adult or a child, anybody with taste buds—they’ll never go back to the fake kind. It’s distinctive, complex, the freshest thing you’ve ever eaten. It makes you realize how rotten the other stuff is, literally rotten. But there has to be a first time. Somehow we have to get those first drops of real extra virgin oil into their mouths, to break them free from the habituation to bad oil, and from the brainwashing of advertising. There has to be some good oil left in the world for people to taste.”
She stood and went into the kitchen to get dessert, leaving a sudden silence in the room. Everyone seemed to be thinking about what she’d said, and what she’d omitted: that if the economics of oil-making don’t change soon, no one will be left to make real extra virgin oil. Not even the De Carlos.
WRITING AROUND A THOUSAND years after the perfume factory on Pyrgos was destroyed, Homer tells of Odysseus’s hair-raising nighttime shipwreck off the island of Scheria. The hero manages to swim ashore, and drags himself up the shingle in the dark, taking shelter in a thicket of olive trees where he is safe from bandits and wild beasts. Next morning he wakes to the sound of Nausicaa and her handmaidens playing ball on the beach, and asks them for help. They give him a jar of olive oil, which he spreads over his naked, salt-encrusted body, while they stand at a distance, trying not to stare. Then Athena, goddess of olive oil, makes the man who had seemed to them plain and somewhat scruffy appear as tall and handsome as a god, with sleek, sculpted shoulders and glistening ringlets. Nausicaa starts plotting to marry him.
Olive oil entered its golden age with the Greeks, who held the olive tree sacred and used the miracle of its oil in an almost incredible variety of ways: as food, fuel, skin lotion, contraceptive, detergent, preservative, pesticide, perfume, and adornment, as well as a cure for heart ailments, stomach aches, hair loss, flatulence, and excessive perspiration. One of olive oil’s most conspicuous uses in antiquity was to make the skin softer and more sensual. Greek hosts gave their dinner guests a supply of oil, scented with pressed flowers and aromatic roots, which slaves rubbed into their feet, bodies, and hair; glistening faces and hair were images of conviviality and high spirits. The gods themselves demanded similar pampering. Cult statues like the enormous bronze and ivory effigy of Zeus at Olympia were regularly anointed with oil, not only out of reverence but, as Pliny the Elder says, to protect their metal parts from corrosion.
Oil was the economic lifeblood of many Greek city-states. “People were prepared to spend the same amount of money on olive oil back then as they do on petroleum today,” Nigel Kennell, a specialist in ancient history at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, says. “And governments went to great lengths to ensure a steady supply of it.” The histories of Athens and Sparta, those famous enemies and polar opposites, are interwoven with the olive tree. The Athenians put themselves under the protection of Athena, goddess of the olive, and jealously guarded the ancient olive tree which, they claimed, she had planted on the Acropolis, and which they saw as a totem of their city: in 480 BC it was burned by the invading Persians, yet green shoots soon sprang from the charred stump, reassuring the Athenians that their city was destined to flourish again. Cuttings from this tree, planted nearby, grew into the moriai, a sacred olive grove tended by a special caste of priests and harvested by virgin boys. Plato held his famed Academy in their shade, and the Athenian playwright Sophocles praised the mysterious, almost supernatural quality of the olive tree as “not planted by human hands, but self-created”; none could destroy it without divine punishment, Sophocles wrote, “for it is watched upon by the all-seeing eye of Zeus Morios, and by Athena of the shimmering blue-gray eyes.”
These mystical images reflect more pragmatic realities in Athenian society. Olive oil commerce helped build the world in which the plays of Sophocles, the philosophy of Plato, and the other artistic and intellectual triumphs of Periclean Athens took shape. Solon passed laws encouraging the cultivation of olives as well as the production and export of oil, and outlawed the felling of more than two trees per year. Aristotle, in the Constitution of the Athenians, went further, declaring that anyone who was convicted of cutting down an olive tree should be put to death. The winners at the Panathenaic Games, the athletic festival held every four years in Athens in honor of Athena, received as their prize not only enormous quantities of oil (up to five tons), but a tax exemption on oil exportation as well. Top Panathenaic prizes represented considerable fortunes, because the oil trade was lucrative.
Plato himself financed a journey to Egypt by selling a batch of oil, probably made from his own trees.
Oil was likewise a vital economic resource in Laconia, land of the Spartans, whose fearsome war machine was bankrolled largely by oil revenues. Olive oil brought out the less spartan and laconic sides of their character. In the seventh century BC, the Spartans introduced the first organized sports culture in Greek society, systematically training their young men in competition, physical activity, and same-sex segregation in order to make them better warriors. The Spartans were also the first to perform sport in the nude and to anoint their naked bodies with olive oil, customs which were soon adopted in other parts of Greece. Some scholars, like Nigel Kennell, link them with the rise of bronze statuary in the sixth century BC. “A tanned athlete, shining in the summer sun, covered with oil, would really resemble a statue of the gods,” Kennell says. Other researchers believe that this ritualized anointing, with its overt celebration of the male body in glistening nudity, contributed to the spread of homosexual love in the Greek world. “The oil on a gleaming, tanned, healthy body was a literally ‘flashy’ adornment,” says Tom Scanlon, a professor of classics at the University of California, Riverside. “Oil heightened the body’s erotic charge, and encouraged male same-sex desire and pederasty, first in Sparta, then throughout the Greek world.”
For all their differences, by the fifth century BC the Athenians and the Spartans agreed on one thing: the generous use of olive oil in those cornerstones of classical society, the baths and the gymnasium. “The Greeks could not conceive of bathing or having athletic activity without olive oil,” says Nigel Kennell. “It was not a luxury, it was a necessity.” So much so, in fact, that when supplies of olive oil were cut off by barbarian raiders at the end of the empire, the baths and gymnasia closed. The Greeks used oil as fuel to heat water and light the gyms and bathhouses themselves, and as an essential ingredient of certain sports, like wrestling and gladiatorial combat (the classical Greek verb aleiphein, “to anoint with oil,” also meant “to exercise in the gymnasium”). Above all, bathers and athletes, often assisted by slaves called unctores (“oilers”), slathered their bodies with ample quantities of oil; after exercising, they used thin metal blades called strigiles to scrape away the oil, together with a residue of dirt and perspiration. Perfumed oils were considered so precious and curative that bath and gym attendants even collected these scrapings, called gloios, and sold them to patrons as medicine. This oily residue was also scraped from the bronze and marble statues that adorned the baths, and from the walls and floors as well, suggesting both the quantities of oil thrown around by the bathers, and the sensory density of a day in the ancient world. “I think any Greek or Roman town of the time would have been olfactorily challenging for us,” Kennell remarks.
Just how challenging? What did all this smell like? What scent wafted from Odysseus’s shoulders and hair that Nausicaa found so irresistible, as he walked toward her down the beach, as handsome as a god (or as a bronze statue in the baths)? We now have fairly reliable answers to these questions, thanks to some archaeological sleuthing by Maria Rosaria Belgiorno and her colleagues at Pyrgos. Using chemical and toxological tests including the Halphen–Grimaldi method, Liebermann’s reaction, and Bloor’s mixture, they analyzed the dense, viscous residues stuck to the bottom of the pottery receptacles in the perfume factory. What emerged was a rich bouquet of aromatic substances that had been used in the perfumes, which included rosemary, anise, coriander, bitter almonds, bergamot, essence of terebinth, pine resin, laurel, myrtle, marjoram, sage, lavender, chamomile, and parsley.
Having identified the active ingredients of ancient perfumes, Belgiorno decided to recreate them, using the same tools and materials as in Bronze Age Cyprus. Working with Angelo Bartoli of the Antiquitates Center for Experimental Archaeology, a research institute near Rome, she made exact replicas of the terra-cotta amphorae, alembics, and other equipment found during the excavations. Aided by a Cypriot pharmacist with a passion for local wildflowers, Belgiorno obtained some of the same natural aromatics she had detected on pottery at the dig, including rosemary, lavender, and wild rose. She studied perfume recipes in works by the classical authors Dioscorides, Pliny, and Theophrastus, collected several liters of rainwater, and persuaded the Pandolfi, a noble family from Perugia who own large olive groves, to make some onfacium, an olive oil which the Romans pressed in August from green olives, whose extremely low free acidity and high natural antioxidants provided the ideal base for perfumes.
Then Belgiorno and Bartoli set to work. They filled a number of potbellied amphorae with olive oil and rainwater in equal parts, added one of the aromatics Belgiorno had identified to each container, and set them to decoct on a low fire. Gradually the essential oils steamed out of the plants and entered the oil. After five days the water had evaporated, leaving little pools of pure, scented oil.
Belgiorno, who often uses her own Iron Age perfumes, says that their olive oil base melts into the skin and leaves a lush, healthy gloss, unlike the drying and tightening sensations caused by the alcohol-based perfumes of today. (Alcohol-based perfumes, with their greater sterility and longer shelf life, replaced oil-based scents in the late nineteenth century, and natural perfume aromas were supplanted by cheaper synthetic scents made in laboratories.) She laments the loss of an entire world of natural fragrances, and continues to hunt the forests and upland meadows of Cyprus for more of the plants used by ancient perfumers at Pyrgos. And she remembers the strange sense of déjà vu the first time she and her Italian and Cypriot colleagues dabbed their new wild lavender oil on their wrists and throats. “It had a clean, fresh, slightly masculine fragrance, very different from the fruity aromas of today’s perfumes,” she says. “It was a scent we all recognized—an ancestral perfume that was a part of all of us. It was like the scent of the Mediterranean.”
Odysseus smelled like this.
OIL BOSSES
Olea prima omnium arborum est. [The olive tree is first of all the trees.]
—Columella, Roman agronomist, De Re Rustica, Book V
The olive tree, what a beast! You can’t imagine how many problems it has caused me. A tree full of color, not too big, and its little leaves, how they’ve made me sweat! A breath of wind, and the whole tree changes its tonality, because the color isn’t in the leaves, but in the space between them. An artist can’t be great unless he understands the landscape.”
—Pierre-Auguste Renoir, letter to Paul Durand-Ruel, 1889
On the south bank of the Tiber, just across the river from Rome’s seven more famous hills, is an untidy knoll 150 feet tall and over half a mile around at the base, covered with a thin pelt of grass and a few trees, one of those odd bucolic relicts that give much of Rome a countryside feel even in the heart of town. During the Middle Ages this hill, called Monte Testaccio, was the scene of riotous banquets, and a carnival ritual in which a cartload of pigs was driven off the mountaintop and crashed to the ground below, where hungry, knife-wielding locals fell upon the unfortunate beasts. Nowadays it is lively only at night, thanks to the trendy restaurants, sushi bars, gay nightspots, and bleeding-edge dance clubs dug into its base around the perimeter. While I was in Rome to interview the Italian agriculture minister about olive oil imports, I visited Monte Testaccio, which is a testament to olive oil importations on a vast scale. As I climbed the steep upper slope, something crunched now and then underfoot, like thick seashells at the beach.
“Testaccio” derives from the Latin word testa, meaning potsherd, and the hill crunches when you climb it because it is composed of 25 million amphorae, dumped here by the Romans between the first and third centuries AD: Monte Testaccio is the classical world’s biggest midden. Each amphora held about seventy liters of olive oil, imported from southern Spain or North Africa—in all, Monte Testaccio represents something like 1.75 billion liters of olive oil, which was distributed free to Roman citizens as part of a food subsidy known as the annona. Monte Testaccio is the largest
known olive oil dump, but every other city, town, and army camp in the empire had a smaller version of its own. Standing at the summit of this mountain of olive oil bottles and looking out over Rome’s rooftops, you understand that olive oil was every bit as vital to the ancient economy as petroleum is today. “Petroleum” is from petra and oleum, Latin for “olive oil from a stone.”
If the Greeks celebrated the aesthetic and spiritual aspects of olive oil, the Romans, as Monte Testaccio suggests, concentrated on its commercial possibilities. In parts of the empire, per capita consumption was as high as fifty liters a year, and the Romans turned olive oil into an international cash crop. Agronomists like Cato and Columella codified the practice of olive cultivation. They identified twenty different olive cultivars, and distinguished several quality grades of oil; the best, they agreed, was oleum viride (“green oil”) made from half-ripe olives, while oleum maturum (from mature fruit) was less desirable, and oleum cibarium (“fodder oil,” the Roman version of lampante) from spoiled olives was suitable only for slaves. The Romans planted large groves in North Africa, southern Italy, and Andalucía, the source of most of Monte Testaccio’s amphorae, and built huge, high-throughput mills with batteries of a dozen or more enormous lever presses. (The tall masonry housings of these presses, which still dot certain areas of the Maghreb like megaliths, are so stately and tall that early British explorers in the region mistook them for religious monuments.) The Romans set up commodity markets in oil prices in major ports, and formed specialized guilds in the oil trade, ranging from olearii, small retailers in olive oil, to progressively larger-scale diffusores and mercatores, to negotiatores who sold oil in bulk throughout the empire. Roman cargo ships crisscrossed the Mediterranean loaded with oil.