DISCOVER ITALIA!

Liquidgold

Just inland from the glitz of San Remo is a secret world of steep mountains and pretty villages which, as Fleur Kinson discovers, is home to arguably the world’s best olive oil.

Wordlessly smiling, the old man in the faded red overalls hands me a plastic cup. He gestures at the thick green column of oil tumbling from the trumpet-shaped spout and I realise he’s inviting me to take a dip. I plunge the cup into the opaque stream of oil, squeezed from tiny, wrinkled olives just moments ago, and tentatively raise it to my mouth. An astonishing scent of marzipan hits my nose before the liquid slides to my lips and starts singing on my tongue. It’s like tasting the green heart of the tree itself: sap-like, woody, nutty, vegetal. A peppery warmth tickles the back of my throat as I swallow. “E delizioso,”I gasp. I’m in the empty, mountainous hinterland of the Italian Riviera, sampling one of the world’s great olive varieties. Carefully cross-bred by monks five centuries ago, the Taggiasca olive is grown only in western Liguria, in narrow spaces

snatched from the steep landscape. Here mountains are made into ziggurats by the intricate terraces that climb their slopes. Low dry-stone walls shore up the highland staircases, and eight million olive trees cling to the thin strips of flat land they create. The arrangement is broken only by medieval villages, spilling decoratively down the odd patch of hillside. Sleepy now, but well-kept, these tiny mountain villages once teemed with life. Built inland to elude the piratical raids and sea-battles that bedevilled the coastline, they housed thriving communities which made a decent living producing – among other things – good wine and topclass olive oil. Both are still made here today – and in pretty much the same way. The thin, tricky terraces defy the mechanised techniques of modern agriculture. All that’s changed is that the harvesting prongused to coax the olives off the trees now has an electric rotating head, and the tumbling oily fruits are carried away by buzzing Api carts ratherthan by donkeys. ®

June 2006 ITALIA! 33