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Published: November 3rd 2011
Dom After Long Flight
On the train from Roma to OrteHey Y'all,
We arrived in La Rocchetta about a week ago and what an amazing week its been! When we first arrived we were dazzled by the beautiful country side. My Italian is coming back slowly and I was able to order a coffee while waiting for Michelle to pick us up at the train station in Orte. She drove us to her beautiful home in Lazzio near Bomarzo. We met her and Claudio's amazing family and with their help have picked SO MANY olives! 😊 First we cleared the space around the trees of weeds; Dom weedwacked and I battled with many a thorn bush til it was clear enough for us to put nets down to catch the olives.
Once the ground around the trees was clear, we netted it and started picking. You want to be firm with the trees, but not too rough so that you take off too many leaves or a whole small branch! We have a ladder (la scala) but the best part is climbing up into the branches to reach the olives at the very top. I'm light enough to be able to do it, but after one of Claudio's amazing lunches
it can be a bit trickier. The olives are green, black and yellow and they are very bitter. There are a few trees that have "table olives" the kind that you soak in salt until you eat them. But most of the trees have different varieties of olives used for making olive oil. After we pick all the olives on a tree we pull up the net and put them into boxes. Then we load the boxes on a tractor (they are very heavy, the biggest boxes are 25 kilos) and take them to the car.
Once we have a about 400 kilos (900 lbs or about half a ton) of olives we take them in the car to the mill where they use a conveyor belt to sort out any extra sticks and then the olives are put into a centrifuge to separate the oil from the bitter water. The mill smelled fantastic! When you get the new oil back it is very green from the chlorophyl and has a nice really nice peppery zest to it.
For Halloween we carved a gigantic pumpkin, made paper masks and sang some songs and danced around a bit with
the kids ("the cat came back the very next day" was a huge hit). Then the kids went "trick or treating" to different doors in the house where we gave them a little candy. It's so much quieter now that their family has left to go back to school and work, but they will be back in a few weeks to help some more.
The food has been amazing! We've eaten so well, Dom's favorite has been Nero di Sepia which is pasta cooked with the ink of the squid and I really enjoyed all the different cheeses! We've also had polenta, pesto, and wonderful sandwiches, pizza and pumpkin soup. It's good we are working hard so we won't get too too fat.
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