Santa Maria Navarrese, where the neighbouring limestone mountains fell dramatically, abruptly to the sea, was settling into its out-of-season evening when I rolled in as the sun was setting. I found a hotel for twenty-five euros. The night receptionist, Luca, was a teacher by day working with acutely handicapped children. He pulled out a map of the town and drew crosses to mark the ancient olive trees. None of which, he assured me, were in danger.
‘We respect them.’ The following day was his free time and I engaged him to give me a tour of the region. He smiled, ‘Every bay, inlet, rock and tree has its tale to tell.’
I decided that I would spend my last couple of days here and took a walk before the light disappeared to tour gli olivastri and get a brief sense of this sleepy fishing village waking up to tourism. I passed a café where a bunch of red-faced Brits, burned by the sun, were drinking beer and loudly discussing the prices of local properties. The olive trees were groved in a central, public square and encirling a white medieval church set metres from the beach. And, indeed, they told a legendary tale.
Once upon a time there was a princess, the Princess of Navarra, whose marriage in Spain had been arranged by her father. She was not happy, did not wish to marry the man chosen by the king, but no amount of pleading would change his mind so at the eleventh hour she set sail in the dead of night with a small band of Basque sailors. Their navigations were due to take them to the foot of the peninsula of what is today Italy, but they were driven off course in a terrible storm, along this eastern coast of Sardinia, caught up in the maelstrom of the Bentu de Soli wind. Their ship was all but destroyed near the Monti Insani. But they did not lose their lives and once they were safely ashore they took refuge beneath a wild, centenarian olive. To offer up her thanks to God for saving her life and that of her sailors, the princess requested that her able-bodied seamen build a humble church that stood within the shade of the olive that had given them shelter. After the church had been constructed, in 1052, the remaining olive trees were planted. Each today stands a proud thousand years old. And perhaps there had been others, too, that have since been felled for the pagan rituals Andreo had spoken of? After, I walked the bow-shaped esplanade, enchanting in the crimson light, looking out upon a turquoise-turning-purple sea in which a series of islets lay.
*
This was a region of olives, figs and carobs. The Sardinians of this oriental coast prided themselves on a way of life that had always been lived in harmony with nature. That was until the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Until that time, these monumental limestone cliffs had been carpeted in holm oak, Quercus ilex, and heathen olives but they fell foul of the carbonari, the charcoal-burners, who demolished thousands and thousands of acres of trees. Luca had borrowed a jeep from his brother which allowed us to climb up into the Gennargentu National Park to a barren plateau, the Golgo, where wild animals, horses, boars and pigs, survived on little. We trekked along stone paths laid down by the charcoal-burners who carried their charred, porous produce directly to the shores, descending to inlets where they themselves loaded up the boats bound for Italy. We sighted several long-haired goats scaling cliffsides and Luca took me to see a couple of abandoned shepherds’ huts alongside their beasts’ pens. They were ingenious. Circular bases of shaly limestone upon which stood the conical hut fashioned like a wigwam out of long, slender juniper faggots. One had a door taken from a shipwrecked boat. Somehow or other, the shepherds lit fires within them to cook and keep warm and they made their cheeses there, too, from the milk of their herds. We crossed small bridges, flexible not solid, also constructed by the shepherds from juniper wood.
‘There are no sheep here any more,’ explained Luca. ‘The deforestation caused by the carbonari as well as the acute water shortages due to changes in the climate have made it impossible for them to feed and survive.’
The few shepherds that remained lived in towns, no longer for months on end in their juniper huts. They kept herds of goats on the mountains now, not sheep. The goats could access underground springs that flowed from beneath the seabed into coastal caves.
‘But surely, it’s salt water?’
Luca shook his head. Along this Mediterranean coast there were sweet water springs beneath the seabed that found their way up on to the land within the cave formations.
The limestone cliffs were potted with caves, many still to be discovered. One had housed a gargantuan fig tree at the water’s edge, gone today, but its roots still bore witness to its original stature. Here was where the monk seals used to take refuge from the storms. They were hunted along this coastline by fishermen who came over from the island of Ponza. Today, they have disappeared altogether from these waters.
The area was a living library of myths, legends, rare old tales, forgotten pasts set against an undisturbed dark, fairytale heart; the striped hues of the water, the unusual formations of rocks, soaring pinnacles, rocky pencils, outcrops, heads, creatures. The Gulf of Arbatax had been a sheltering harbour in Roman times, inland were the remains of Stone Age settlements, the nuraghi, scattered everywhere across the island; elsewhere was a hidden harbour that could not be detected from the sea. It was occupied over the centuries by pirates or else by native vessels determined to keep the looters at bay. Tales of prehistory, of corsairs, bandits, shepherds taking to the gun, kidnappers … Young Luca, who loved his land with a quiet and dignified passion, was a repository of romances, contes, folk tales and secrets.
‘And Saint Peter was here.’
He came to Baunei – the town’s name can probably be traced to the Phoenicians. Baun: ‘fortified place’ – because the townspeople were in fear of their lives. A giant was terrorising them. The Lord’s Shepherd stalked the giant and banished it into a bottomless pit from where it could never return. The pit really exists. Su Sterru, one of the deepest chasms in Europe. A church was built up on the high plateau, San Pietro del Golgo, in honour of the saint who saved these people from the destructive forces of the giant. No sighting of the monster has been claimed in many a century. Still, the farmers and villagers go to Peter’s church once a year, end of June, dressed up in local finery, to give thanks to him for saving them and their harvests.
I asked Luca whether he believed in giants and magic, whether he was a practising Catholic and what he felt about spirits.
‘I believe in God’s goodness,’ he said. And, yes, he believed in the power of spirits. ‘When you work with youngsters as physically and mentally disabled as those I spend my days with, the spirit is the driving energy, the light.’
‘Do you think that such energies inhabit trees and stones?’
‘On this island, myths abound. Stone rings here, burial sites there. Nature and spirits have always been linked.’
I did not doubt it.
It was time to leave, time to cross back over to the mainland and make for Tuscany, my last port of call. I took the motorway north and rode back into Olbia to find that the evening ship had been delayed. It was a beautiful late afternoon. Breaking the surface of the water were smoothed, round granite stones, underbelly pink, resembling whales’ backs. Occasionally, with the water’s sway, they looked as though they were surfacing and diving. I whiled away the time by the dockside reading and staring at my photographs of the olive tree. The face was there, no doubt about it.
Tuscany, to the province of Pistoia, to Pescia, the town where Pinocchio was born. Gone was the intense dry heat of the Mezzogiorno, gone were the pagan mysteries, prehistoric forests and tree spirits of Sardegna. Tuscany was a softer land, genteel with its pencil-thin cypresses and tumbling geraniums. Men rode bicycles in country lanes where scarlet poppies grew from the flanking stone walls, the occasional ochred palazzo, usually converted into a hotel, could be glimpsed on hilltops, osterias were everywhere. The air was powerfully perfumed with the scent of freshly cut laurel which hedged the properties and roadsides. This was not really the rural Tuscany I remembered from my twenties. The authenticity of the region had been compromise
d, overwhelmed by its commercial success, but it remained pretty nonetheless, particularly in late springtime.
My directions, received from the horticulturist by email, were to meet him on the road between Lucca and Pescia outside a garden centre (not his) where bonsai olive trees were being propagated. He was a contact of a contact given to me by Francisco. He would be in a sky-blue car, celeste, not just blue. A man of precision, of details, then. Attilio was a nursery owner, an olive-grafting specialist who created and patented new varieties. His, unlike the centre I had visited in Puglia, was a family-run affair but one that had gained distinction and a reputation throughout Italy and beyond. He (like every other Italian I had arranged to meet with) was late. I hung about outside a mechanic’s yard, opposite courtyards of miniature olive trees until eventually a sky-blue car with a grey-haired man in royal blue shirt and a toffee-coloured cocker spaniel pulled up.
‘Sorry, lady, to be late. Two centres with the same name. Let’s go, you follow.’
We wound down lanes of olive groves, then more olive groves, past Pinocchio parks, restaurants, gardens and garages, got caught behind an exceedingly fat couple wedged in a Piaggio three-wheeler that had broken down and driven the tailing traffic into apoplexies of hooting and screaming – I was back on the mainland! – until eventually we pulled into Attilio’s nursery where the grafting was in full progress with a team of locals who looked as though they had not had a break in a hundred years.
‘What you have to know is wherever else you have been, whatever they have told you, we, here, we created grafting. Think of Cato, Pliny, Columella, book five of De Re Rustica … all agricultural geniuses, all Italian, before and around the time of Christ. In Pescia, we have perfected a system that is exclusive to us. Others in Spain, Greece, Turkey, even Puglia, copy us. We graft in the spring and by autumn the trees are already beautiful. My teams consist of three, usually one man and two women. They work from sunup till sundown and they graft three and a half thousand trees a day. We keep the grafted stock in seedbeds, not outside in pots. Let them tell you what they like elsewhere, they come here, to me, to Attilio’s nursery, for their required grafted rootstock.’
All the while Attilio was talking at me his two teams were cutting and splicing behind us, on their knees or on tiny stools, beavering away. I had never seen a group look so exhausted. Attilio, who with his aquiline nose had the head and shoulders of a Roman Caesar, was clearly driven.
‘The Romans planted the rootstock further apart … we bring them closer.’
‘How many trees or potential trees here?’
‘Seventy thousand in every thousand square metres. None are potential trees, lady. We rarely have a failed graft here. And these trees will be out in the farms at five years old and delivering fruit the next season.’
‘But I understood that olive trees take up to fifteen years before they fruit.’
‘Don’t you understand, lady, that is one of the joys of this business. A stone or sucker planted directly into the earth takes fifteen years. As it has done throughout history. It has to learn the process of flowering and fruiting. It teaches itself. But a grafted tree has the genes of knowledge within it. There’s the beauty. It does not need to take a decade beyond its initial growth stage to teach itself to propagate. It is born with that knowledge. Think of it this way: a child born in the wild must fend for itself, but those with parents are taught what the adults have already acquired. That is a part of the genius of this form of plant propagation. Did no one tell you that? The French know nothing about growing trees!’
‘In Sicily and Puglia, I…’
‘The Sicilians are Africans,’ he dismissed with a wave of the hand. ‘And as for the Mezzogiorno. They call it midday but it’s not. It’s midnight down there. They live in the Dark Ages. The Mafia would not make a living up here. We are cultured people.’
I was a little taken aback by this very tall gentleman’s lively opinions.
‘Do you eat lunch? Let me show you my trees, my treasures, and then we’ll have some lunch. Leave your car here.’
I slipped alongside him, followed by his docile spaniel, into the sky-blue car and we shot off, leaving the teams hard at their graft.
His own groves were all young examples, varieties that he himself had created.
‘This is an improved clone of a variety of lecchino olive. I have called it Minerva. And here, a created variety known as Diana. She gives excellent oil. From a pendolino came Zeus. And so on. I have baptised them with classical Greek names to honour Athene, you see.’
At least he had a good word to say about the Greeks. ‘Do you think of yourself as Roman, Tuscan or …?’
‘My family has been here around the hills of Lucca for five centuries; I am an Etruscan, I hope. Italy is a pretty country but not serious. Now, let me introduce you to Urano, Uranus! With Urano I am creating a new variety. The trees are small, so easy to harvest, no climbing up ladders or investing in expensive picking machines. Finish with the bacchiatura!’
‘Bacchiatura?’
‘Beating down, olive gathering with the use of poles. Picking, though, is not the problem. With tall trees, it is the pruning. It is a time-consuming nuisance. And Urano will give large quantities of fruits from a small, manageable crown. It used to be in Tuscany that the trees were taller, pruned to a goblet shape, but finito. Now we create shorter trees.’
It was midday. The sun was shining, the dog was scampering in and about the flowering daisies at the heels of Attilio. I stood and looked at the trees. Every one of them an original, a new variety. Attilio was also gazing, hands clasped behind his back like a member of royalty.
‘This is a beautiful garden filled with young olive trees. It is not a Spanish factory,’ he sighed. ‘Small trees are the future,’ he mused. ‘Dwarfed rootstock. Intensive farming and gathering. Spain has changed the mentality of olive farming. Super-intensive, that’s the way it’s going.’
‘And quality?’
‘We can achieve that, too …’
‘But?’
He threw both arms in the air as though finished with the subject.
‘What do you consider, Attilio, will be the lifespan of these trees? Do you think they will live forever or almost forever? An enhancement to the landscape, knobbly elders, round the Mediterranean basin?’
He turned and drilled a look into me. I caught a glint in those fierce blue eyes. ‘There you have it! Twenty years and then we’ll dig them up and plant again with the next newly invented variety. If the shelf life of the oil is short, dig it up, marry it with another rich in polyphenol. These trees are children to me. I am sixty-eight.’ (He did not look it.) ‘If I am still around in eight years’ time, do you know what I dream of?’
I shook my head.
‘I dream of seeing the children of these crossings. The future is the new system.’
‘And the statelies, the trees from the traditional methods of growing?’ My mind flashed back to Sardinia, to that face. Was it perplexity, incomprehension, I had read in the expression of that three-thousand-year-old girl? An instinctive, visceral understanding that factory farming was destroying a method that respected and fed the land? Had she a sense of the magic and truth of things …?
‘I hope there will be room for traditional farming as well as the call that comes from competing with Spain. Tradition alongside super-production. But you don’t have to be a traditionalist to love your trees. I love these trees. I come here every day, even Sundays, to check on them, my children. Now, basta! It is time for the restaurant. What do you think, lady? Andiamo mangiare!’
Across the table in the Osteria di Pinocchio, Attilio cut a more mellow figure. He drank his red wine and asked me about my travels. When I mentioned the olive laboratory in Algeria, he laughed.
‘My father sold that place half a million trees.’
I told him that I had been sorry to cancel the last leg of my Algerian journey due to weather inaccessibility.
‘You know, lady
, this is what I do for a living; I followed my father into agriculture. My dream had been to be an explorer, but I was bidden home to run the nurseries. Here in Tuscany we produce twenty thousand tons of pure Tuscan olive oil a year but we sell eighty thousand!’ He laughed and poured more wine. ‘We are in the land where Pinocchio was born. Telling lies here is a regional occupation.’
‘Have you been lying … ?’
‘No, no, but people cheat. Italy is corrupt. Tuscany, too. If I were young I’d start again elsewhere but my wife would never leave the grandchildren. So, I stay and make the best of it.’
‘Don’t you have a dream left?’ I dared, considering as I said it that it was perhaps indiscreet.
His emperor’s face cracked into a wrinkled smile. ‘You speak of Algeria. Have you heard of Tassili N’Ajjer, way down in the southern Algerian Sahara?’
‘Yes, of course. I had wanted to see the cave art. In prehistory, that desert was a savannah. I had been fancying that perhaps olive trees grew there, back in those lusher days.’
Attilio nodded. ‘They did, and they still do. In spite of the desert conditions there are mountains down there that still support certain examples of Mediterranean flora including myrtle, a variety of cypress and, most importantly, a wild olive variety known as Olea laperrini. It needs next to no rainfall and it is the sister of Olea europaea. It could be a good rootstock for our europaea. I want to go there, take cuttings and fruits. In Ethiopia, there is Olea chrysophylla. Another sister of europaea …’
‘Ethiopia, way down south along the Rift Valley!?’
‘Yes. I want to find those wild virgin strains, bring them back to Italy, graft them with europaea and create an olive tree that is desert-resistant, drought-sturdy.’
The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2) Page 40
