An olive tree standing tall on a tractor adorned with fiscoli, discs used in olive mills during the pressing, stood alone near the medieval church of Spello, Santa Maria Maggiore. For the two days of Spello’s beloved olive oil festival, that tractor and others would roll through the backstreets, locals playing instruments and singing on the trailer and others singing and dancing in the street.

The songs in Umbrian dialect called cantarecchia (sing by ear) animated the festivities, celebrating the pressing of the olio nuovo (new olive oil). Mills all over central Italy were working long hours daily on pressing, mostly in November, though some pressing started in October this year. Early maturation was due to the extreme heat here this summer.

When Pino and I had harvested our olives in the late 1970’s, pressing was often in