Olio d'Oliva e Frantoi Aperti 2025: The Olive Oil Harvest Season in Italy

How Italian olive oil went from Roman subsistence to the world's most valued condiment — and why the Greeks planted the first Sicilian grove 2,700 years ago

The olive's arrival in Sicily is one of the earliest documented agricultural transfers in Mediterranean history: Greek colonists from Corinth, Megara, and Chalcis planted the first Italian olive groves in the 8th-7th centuries BC, in the coastal zones of Sicily and southern Italy that are still the primary olive production areas today. The Roman olive economy: by the 2nd century BC, olive oil had become the primary non-grain agricultural product of the Roman Mediterranean — used for cooking, lighting, bathing, medicine, and religious ritual. The Monte Testaccio in Rome (the artificial hill in the Testaccio neighborhood, now a nightlife area) is entirely composed of broken Roman olive oil amphorae — approximately 50 million individual amphorae, the broken containers from oil deliveries to Rome spanning several centuries, creating a hill that is literally made of discarded oil-transport pottery. The medieval period: the Italian olive oil economy contracted significantly during the early medieval period (the abandonment of Roman agricultural infrastructure) and recovered only gradually through the medieval monasteries (the Benedictines were the primary olive growers of the early medieval period — the monastery gardens included olive groves as a liturgical and nutritional necessity). The contemporary DOP system: the 42 Italian DOP designations that protect specific olive varieties and regional production methods are the most elaborate quality protection system in the global olive oil market — the specific consequence of a 2,700-year Italian olive farming tradition.