Olive oil – the liquid gold

Today, we mainly use olive oil for cooking, for cremes and soaps. In the 17th and the 18th century, it served as a replacement for paraffin in oil lamps. The olives were stored for a long time before they were pressed, thus they had a large acidity and optimal burning characteristics.

In the Apulian village Gallipoli, the olives are processed and pressed in underground olive mills. The mills were carved in the rocks and guarantee an optimal temperature for the storage of the olives. Once there were more than 35 underground olive mills and 2,000 cisterns for the lamp oil extraction. With the discovery of paraffin oil, the olive oil was displaced as burning material. But the production of olive oil went on and today, Apulia is famous for its excellent olive oils.

The traditional olive harvest

The olive trees in Apulia are centuries and even thousands of years old and can be harvested three or four times in a year, what happens from March to November. Ten to twelve kilos of olives are needed to produce one litre of native, extra-virgin olive oil! The natural product “olio d’oliva extravergine” has a pleasantly fruity smell of fresh olives, tastes nutty on the palate and sweet on the tip of the tongue. The colour can vary from brown-greenish to golden yellow.