Harvesting Olives in Umbria

After gorging on Italian delicacies for days on end and getting in a few rows on the Po River, I departed Turin for my next farm: Cimbolello, a small agriturismo just on the border of Umbria/Tuscany near the clifftop hamlet of Città della Pieve. I was ready to get back to a farm. There is, after all, only so much truffle paste and fennel sausage one can eat.

Città della Pieve is quaint. It has the tiny cobblestone alleys and flowered window ledges one expects of small medieval Italian towns. Little bow-legged grannies hobble from the church in the early evenings, while thin youths slouch in front of cafès. Let me warn you, the mullet is big in Italy. I've seen some trashy tresses that out-do the hairdos I remember from my brother's hockey games in the '80s. Only a matter of time, my friends, before the hipsters stateside are letting their locks grow long down the back and calling it très cool. Bah. Not everything Italian is good.

I've spent only a few hours in the city proper, which is an easy walk from Cimbolello, the next farm on my WWOOF adventure. Cimbolello is run by Francesco and Luisa, a marvelous Italian couple who, I suspect, were hippies in their younger days. They have two sons: Sebastiano turns 18 in a few days and likes rocketing down mountains on his bike; Nicolo is 20, has a full beard, and listens to rasta music and Manu Chau. There is a huge white horse-dog named Freida and a couple of cats...one aptly named Killer. Chickens roam and peck, and a herd of obedient sheep bleat whenever they hear Francesco's voice.

My only work so far: harvesting olives. Some 175 trees needed to have their olives plucked; the olives would then be taken to the biodynamic/organic olive press 20 minutes away. This can barely be called work. We get up, eat breakfast, then haul off to the olive grove. We spread a net under the tree. Someone (usually me or Francesco) clambers up the tree to pick olives from the middle branches; the others (Luisa, Francesco's mother Karla, sometimes one of the boys, and Emma, a delightful Scottish chick who arrived a day before me) stand around the tree and pick.

The non-organic method of harvesting olives involves a machine that shakes the hell out of tree. It takes a few minutes, and roughly 30 percent of the olives don't fall. Sure, doing it by hand takes longer, but we get every olive. Reach, comb your hands down the dangling twigs, and watch as the black and green pellets rain to the earth below. Stretch, pluck, tip-toe for the high ones, pinch the stubborn olives from the branches. Watch out for Killer, who likes to climb the trees with you and swipe at your hands. Pause when you hoist yourself to the upper branches and see the clouds resting in the valley down below, or the sun spreading across the mountains in the distance.

And oh, the sunlight here! It doesn't merely bathe, it licks the landscape. Gold and hazy, it flirts with the coming dusk for hours, lounging across every leaf and blade of grass and brightening each hair on the back of your hand. Olives hail onto the ground, plunking on the wooden ladders and the tops of your shoes, and look glossy and fat in this light.

Raw, uncured olives taste like butt, though if you step on one by accident it's nice to smear it on your skin. And most of these olives are destined for oil, not the table. We picked and plucked, in dreamy sunlight and chilly, unseasonable cold, until we had enough to bring to the frantoio, the olive press. We loaded box after box into the Land Rover and the trailer, tied them down with cord, and slowly drove off to the frantoio. There, we dumped the olives into large plastic crates piled on the scale. Final total: 1,386 kilos. If I've done my math correctly, that's over a ton. Dappled green, purple, violet, they all get poured into a big trough. Up a conveyor belt, a vacuum sucks away the extra foliage and the olives are fed into a vat of water to be cleaned. Another spout shoots the olives into another trough, where they're sucked up a pipe and spat into the grinder.

I could watch the grinder for hours. It's a round sloped vat, about six feet in diameter, where two huge round stone wheels, powered by a machine, roll in circles to smash and grind and mush the olives to a colorful pulp. The smell in that place! It's so hard to write about smells. But this place smelled musty and green, like, well, concentrated olive oil. The pulp, when it reaches the consistency of rice pudding, is fed through a tube and squirted on flat mats. The mats, one by one, are piled onto a metal plate. After the pile reaches, oh, about four feet high, another metal plate is set on top and the sandwich is put into a compressor. The compressor compresses. Olive oil drips and oozes into yet another vat. Some water, some heat, and a centrifuge later, you have pure extra-virgin olive oil. It is opaque green, and tastes wonderful. Our first night with the new olive oil we made bruschetta, toasting slices of bread in the fireplace in the kitchen and rubbing garlic cloves on them, then drizzling the oil on top and eating while still warm. Mmmm. Much better than the chicken brain I tried at Ca' del Buco. I did say I'll eat anything, didn't I? (Though I will not be eating chicken brain again anytime soon...it did NOT, in fact, taste like chicken.)

More picking in the grove. More laughing---these folks are just hilarious. Emma is learning Italian and is quick with the one-liners. Francesco has some great stories, and what I don't understand in Italian (and I still don't understand a lot) Luisa is patient enough to slowly break down into easier Italian. We've talked about politics, words not to say in Sicilia, music, Word War II, and what the sheep are like in Scotland, to name a few topics. We've laughed to the point of tears, and just as often fallen into tranquil periods of silent picking and listening to distant horses whinney and dogs bark. Plucking and streaming olives onto the ground, into your hair, into pockets and hoods and pleats of clothes, olives raining from the sturdy trees and falling in drifts on the nets below. We pulled the nets, like strange finshermen hauling in a catch, and rolled the olives into a pile. The pile got dumped into plastic boxes, and we gathered our nets and spread them again under the next gray-barked, gnarled tree.

We finished Sunday evening, as the sun gave the trees one final lick and the evening air pooled around our feet. The second load---another 1,300-some kilos---went to the frantoio. With the harvest done, Emma and I took a couple of days off to visit her sweet German friend Christiana in Perugia, where I've developed an impressive chest cold. As the cold is progressing into a whopper of a headache, accompanied by coughing and a dripping nose, I will have to wait until next time to tell you about the outdoor Etruscan hot springs we bathed in one starry night, and the German hippie commune we went to last Friday for drinks with...(sneeze)...aw hell, I'd better get going. Sicilia next week, my friends, and though my pre-arranged farm just emailed me to say they can't take me, I'm not concerned. I have a list of other farms, a recommendation from another WWOOFer, and two fellow travelers who want to meet up down there. It will be awfully hard to leave Cimbolello, but move on I must. Sicilian oranges, I've heard, are great for colds.