The ancient olives of Visciglito

Spitting out an olive stone, let's imagine its potential - appreciate its origins - and ask what it is that we're nourishing

Spring in Italy is olive pruning time. I had a go last Easter, balanced up in the branches with a rusty saw. Its serrations snagged in the heavily knotted wood, and I sweated despite the cool air. It was hard work, but also technical - strategic - planning the shape of a tree which could well live a thousand years longer than I.

Easter olive pruning at the Giardino della Gioia
Photo: Sara Marzo

The ground ends up covered with clippings and sawed branches. Most go for firewood, or get burnt in situ.

But some end up in church. There's a tradition in Italy for Palm Sunday; instead of taking palm branches, farmers bring their olive prunings to be blessed. The lucky sprigs are used as decoration.

Why?

There's one theory that olive is used because it's simply abundant - but a walk through any southern Italian town will soon put to rest the idea that there's a lack of palm. Gardeners here stack date leaves outside their gates for the rubbish collection. So I think there's another reason, and it reflects the importance of the ulivo to the people here in Salento. After all, these churches where people bring their prunings on Palm Sunday were only built as they were thanks to the local olive oil industry. The price of lamp oil rose, and Salento sold barrels of its sunlight to dark cities such as London (where prices were set); the money went into baroque masonry, where it continues to energise the Salentine economy today.

So they love their olive trees here. Not because they're natural - a lot of ancient forest was cleared for oil cultivation - but because they shape life here. Inside and out; from the food to the terrain to the politics (more of which later). Looked at this way, it'd be odd if anything other than olive branches got blessed when the excuse arose.

Back in time:

from Strudà to Visciglito

So I'm not surprised, heading out to visit the ancient olives of Visciglito, when I encounter an old stone column surmounted by a messy spray of old trimmings, cable-tied to the cross on top.

Metal cross, pruning scraps, cable ties. Strudà

It's a logical sight, standing at the edge of town. It guards the passage from town to country, the place where the church and urban order meet something ...else.

Something just as old, and even knottier.

Estimated date of planting: 300 A.D.

This sight resets my sense of time; it subverts all normal expectations of how a countryside might look.

Right by the roadside. Barely out of the nearby town, and yet from a different world. A few miles from Lecce, but unknown - a perfect mystery for the human mind.

Girth: 8.5m

Walk or cycle the back roads here, and you'll see a lot of olive trees. They can get monotonous after a while, and attention passes them by. But every now and again, one makes it to outrageous old age.

This first is named: Iperione. Hyperion, a Titan, the High One. I'm not sure the name fits, as its stockiness is what impresses - all chest and sinew. Climbing up to sit in the branches isn't a vertiginous experience; it's notably comfortable, spacious, almost a tree house with no need for modification.

View from the crown

Leaving the present, stepping ever further out of time, I carry on up the road. My destination is Visciglito, a place abandoned by modernity. It seems less a destination than the other side of a wormhole.

I pass the last villa. From here on, there will be no human company all day. A kestrel slips across the windy sky. The road gets narrower, and a bare kilometer out of town asphalt runs to grit. Crunching on between dry stone walls, the sky huge, its breeze ever present, murmuring through branches. The last stretch must be made on foot - practically - justly. Anyone out to visit these strange trees starts to feel more a pilgrim than a visitor. Expect no cafés, no guides, no cars, no toilets, no gift shop and no vending machines.

No habitation at all, in fact. A construction site gate bars the strip of ancient track leading to the Masseria Visciglito. Its buildings, once an important complex with farms and a church, are all abandoned.

Blocked gateway to Visciglito, viewed from inside; the olive grove is visible beyond the gate

Opposite the masseria is a field of olives, bordered by a dry stone wall. There are trees of every age; some are still young. Some are green and appear healthy, if not very recently pruned. Some are clearly very old indeed.

The lizards who live in the walls here clearly don't see a lot of people, and they scamper terrified between the cracks as I step over their tumbledown home.

Nobody cares about boundaries here; not I, nor the butterflies nor the breeze which carries them. You can wander freely among the trees. But so too can the spittlebugs and leafhoppers, with their deadly passenger Xylella fastidiosa.

A shadow threatens the olive groves of Salento

A quick decline: Xylella

Thought to have spread from the Americas in imported coffee plants, the Xylella bacterium is touted as a grave threat to agriculture Europe-wide, mainly thanks to its ability to infect a wide range of host plants (oak, citrus and many others as well as olive). The Lecce area is the focus of this outbreak.

"The establishment of X. fastidiosa in Italy has been an agricultural, environmental, political, and cultural disaster." Science, 353(6297)

Once into an olive tree, it causes Olive Quick Decline Syndrome (OQDS); leaves and branches dry out, until rain knocks the dead leaves away. This disease is fatal, spreading through the tree to leave behind a twiggy skeleton.

Xylella was found in Salento in 2013, precipitating a furore which goes on today. The EC prescribed cutting down 11 million trees, an idea which was inevitably met with angry local opposition. The first cull, in 2015, was met by protesters chanting "Assassini!"

The infected zone expands northwards
Graphic by Infoxylella

While combating the spread, landowners and politicians have fought one another bitterly, both sides often sidelining a scientific contribution which has itself struggled with the phytological and epidemilogical complexity of the disease.

The fallout will be discussed for years, no doubt. In the meantime, trees which had survived up to two millennia have died.

Prognosis

It's likely the disease will spread. Already, France and Germany have found different subspecies of Xylella to the one currently ravaging Puglian olives.

But there is hope. Resistant strains of olive already exist; these might be grafted onto older trees, or planted to replace the dead.

Meanwhile, researchers have developed a treatment regimen which seems to save infected olives. The multifaceted challenge of insect, bacterium and environment requires a multi-step solution, controlling the spittlebug as well as the symptoms. But it seems likely that Italy will learn to coexist with the disease, controlling its disastrous effects without the need to raze every plant in the infected region.

Now this

In the meantime, the trees which stand - infected or not - seem only more important, given the fragility of their future. As for the ancient olives, so for every living species on this ailing Earth.

What can we do, beyond the trap of feeling only our own despair? Empathise with trees which continue to bear fruit - for the thousandth year running - even as they sicken and wither? What might it be like, consciousness at the centre of an ancient grove? Might there be something that it is like to be? Is there a centre, at the centre of a non-human network?

Fruiting every year for a millenium - how might it feel?

Or do the trees rely on us to go into their midst, to think for ourselves, to listen for our own answers between the sighs of the wind?

There are rooms deep within; internities to explore.

I'd suggest not bringing a tight timetable when you go to consult with these ancient beings.

Practicalities

• There is an online guide to monumental trees, with links to a precise map and gpx
• Nobody is likely to care about trespass
• Bring your own food and water (unless you fancy drinking from the old farm well!)

Approach

From the centre of Strudà, I headed north along via Osanna to the column with its cross. There, the left fork leads to Visciglito. The first really ancient tree, Iperione, appears almost immediately on your right. Carry on less than 1km to Visciglito; the abandoned masseria stands opposite a field of trees, some of them very ancient.

From Lecce, a section of Via Francigena follows the road SP337 out beyond Merine, passing close to Visciglito. For cyclists and walkers, the various Vie Francigene around here are well worth exploring. It might be possible (if you must) to park where the track turns off right from the SP337 towards Visciglito.