In Cork my grandmother had a lip for the exotic: coffee beans from Reardens, Turkish delight from Hadji Bey, Benedictine from Woodford Bourne, figs from Cudmores, dates from O’Keeffes, and olive oil from “Dr Duncan” at JJ Walshe’s pharmacy, on Shandon Street.
Apart from occasionally applying olive oil to our ears and throats, she would cut a slice of bread, then anoint, season and guzzle it. Her excuse? “The hot foreign blood back the generations.”
Olive oil goes back the generations in Italy. Depending on which growers you talk to, the 2014 olive crop is either the worst in memory or the worst in history.
The latter is quite a claim, given that olive production in the territory dates from 800 BC, involving the Phoenicians and, later, the Greeks. Regardless of their ancient ancestry, today’s growers are having a hellish time. Nationally, output is down by more than a third, and trade associations are forecasting matching price rises.
The 2014 olive “disaster” is not confined to Italy. Spain and France are also affected. Some French growers harvested early, in October, to salvage what they could.
World supply
The Mediterranean countries of the EU produce more than 70 per cent of the world’s olive oil. The sparse, acidic harvest must be inducing recovery reflux in Messrs Renzi, Hollande and Rajoy.
The collapse has been caused by extreme weather and parasites. The mild winter, warm spring and, in Italy’s case, washed- out summer have made the grey-green groves the perfect host for the olive fruit fly and the olive moth.
In Montespertoli, in Tuscany, one wine and olive grower, Caterina de Renzis, says that "in Tuscany and Italy generally, we have strange and absolutely not-normal weather. On our farm we saved the wine – it's very good – because, miraculously, we missed the hail. The olives? No."
On a warm September 19th, within the echo of the angelus bell, a vengeful God opened a blue-black sky and power-hosed the province with several thousand tonnes of blue-white hail, the size and heft of golf balls on the hills, and of cherry stones on the flat. The ice storm ripped through towns and fields, eviscerating the market gardens of Pistoia. In languid Florence, museums and schools were evacuated. Waiters hauled screaming pedestrians off the street. The Uffizi Gallery was battered, the Biblioteca Nazionale inundated.
Biblical rain
Weird weather is becoming a feature of Italian life. This summer, biblical rain rather than blistering sun drove tourists and locals alike in search of sometimes urgent shelter. In autumn, parts of Liguria, Lazio, Tuscany and Piemonte slid, collapsed or disappeared under water. Even Milan and Rome haven’t escaped.
The now common headline "Bomba d'acqua" speaks for itself. The latest nubifragio (cloudburst) in Genoa and Carrara turned streets into rivers, sweeping away not just the dead in their coffins but also, as residents see it, their children's futures.
Poor planning, overdevelopment, underinvestment . . . All get the blame. But with rainfall in Liguria now at levels normally associated with the Himalayas and the Philippines, there is concern about extreme weather, and its frequency and violence.
“Climate change is not coming. It is here. But to go forward we must go back,” says de Renzis. “In 40 to 50 years, in the hurry to change, we made big mistakes, destroyed the work of generations. Now we must preserve that work not in museums but in the sustainability of our agriculture, in how we build, clean our rivers, manage our watercourses, climateproof our infrastructure. This is where investment must go. ”
De Renzis is a baroness by title but farmer in work and spirit. At her farm, Sonnino – once the Machiavelli family home and named for its later owner Sidney Sonnino, twice prime minister and a negotiator of Italy’s entry into the first World War – she is working with the local village and Italian and international universities to develop a global project in climate, rural regeneration and sustainability.
“It is a madness, or a diversion, to think of climate change as a future irritation, something that will happen in other continents,” she says. “It is here now in our olives, the rain, the landslides, the flooding. Since weather affects our food, it too will become political, of intense public interest. How we grow food; are we honest, is it safe, affordable, available to all?”
More rain
Not only in Italy. According to the US environmentalist Bill McKibben, in the planet’s one-degree warming we have increased moisture in the atmosphere by about 4 per cent on average, ramping up the danger of both drought and flood: the heat evaporates more surface water, and the evaporated water inevitably falls as rain.
An Italian friend sends a gift of his scarce new oil, a precious phial instead of the usual flagon. It travels well. I pour it “greengoldenly” over roasted peppers, thinking of my grandmother and hot foreign blood.
And how a new Noah, readying his dove, might steer clear of the Mediterranean.
