In Maremma by David Leavitt Page B

American Mother’s Day—someone torched the Olivone, burning it to the ground. The town went into mourning. In particular the children, who had a tradition of walking to the Olivone for a picnic on the last day of school, grieved the tree’s passing. Ettore, Sauro’s nine-year-old son, asked if he could borrow one of our computers to write an essay called “The Olivone, Burned and No More.” For months afterwards, every time we ate at Il Mulino, Martino urged us to write a book about the Olivone. (The arsonist, alas, was never arrested, though his identity is known.)
    In Italy, politics often matter on a local level far more deeply than they do nationally. Almost immediately after the Olivone burned, dark rumors began to spread that one or another of the two political parties vying for control of the town (it was an election year) had been responsible for this barbarous and selfish act. As it happened, the mayor, who had won the previous election by one vote, was a member of the far right
Alleanza Nazionale. One afternoon (Friday, November 13, 1998), to our great surprise, he knocked at our door and introduced himself. For about ten minutes he outlined his plans for the coming year: the new library to which he hoped we might donate some books, the new sports ground, the roads he was going to have paved (ours included). Apparently he didn’t realize that while we were residents of Semproniano, we were not Italian citizens and therefore could not vote. Afterwards, rather delighted by his visit (there is always something grand about a mayor), we walked over to tell Delia and Ilvo that he had been by to see us. (He had not been by to see them.) “ Fascistone,” Delia said. As we soon learned, they, like all our friends here, were lifelong Communists, and were worried lest the mayor, with promises of paving, should lure us to his side.
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    DL at the Olivone (Photo by MM)

    In the end the mayor won the election—by far more than one vote. Our friends said that he had done so by spreading lies throughout the countryside, telling the farmers that if they voted for the Communists, the
ambientalisti (environmentalists) would set wolves loose to kill their sheep. Then the whole area could be made over into a preserve. Some hinted that it was in order to head off such a transformation that the Olivone was burned—a scenario we thought paranoid at the time, but that now seems highly probable.
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    Oliveto, Podere Fiume (Photo by MM)

    To Ilvo and Delia, the burning of a two-thousand-year-old olive tree was murder. In a town where oil was life, this great mother of a tree was looked to not only as a source of sustenance but a force of good. When Pina offered us oil made from the olives of the Olivone, we accepted it with an almost mystic wonderment, not because the oil tasted any different from any other local oil but because it came from the Olivone, which was born before Christ.
    Afterwards we tried to console ourselves with the knowledge that each of our own trees, though mere striplings, had the potential to grow into an Olivone. We had thirty-eight, which was just enough to produce a year’s worth of oil for two hungry people and a dog.

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    The Kitchen, Podere Fiume, “Our” Olive Oil on the Counter to the Left (Photo by Simon McBride)

    In Maremma no one picks olives before November 2 (All Souls’ Day), by which point the green has begun mottling into black. This is why Tuscan olive oil is so justly famous; Umbrians and Apulians, by contrast, wait for the fruit to fall before they gather it, which makes their oil more acidic. Usually it took us about three weeks, working six hours a day, to harvest our olives. Once we were done, we’d pack them in plastic crates and haul them to one of the two frantoi (olive presses), this one located in a warehouse behind the consorzio agrario. In the room through which you entered, tons of olives, either loose or in burlap