OLIVE OIL - NATURE’S ENERGY FLOW
IS THE FUTURE OF MANKIND.
THE PROJECT
TRAPPETO SAN FELICE is a “young” memory-enhancement
project in the town of Presenzano near Venafro.
It represents a generational
challenge that binds enthusiasm to the bare rock thanks to a love of what is
good and beautiful and the wish to give
new life to the commitment of those who
have gone before us. A rediscovery of tradition in its ceaseless flux of
becoming.
PIETRAOLIVA
PIETRAOLIVA is Trappeto San Felice’s first
extra virgin blend, obtained from olives growing on centuries-old trees restored
to new life. Harvesting and milling are performed separately for each of the
different varieties before being brought together in search of the perfect balance
between flavour and aroma.
PIETRAOLIVA takes its inspiration from the eponymous
work by Joseph Beuys, representing a dynamic balance between chaos and order:
oil is energy, conserved in cold forms that interact to build reality: a
metaphor of life and a reflection on humanity.
PIETRAOLIVA is a top-class extra
virgin olive oil, obtained directly from the olives using only mechanical
processes. The aroma has light hints of fruit, with fine and delicate tones recalling
freshly mown grass, almond, and apple. On the tongue, it leaves a lively finish
with notes of oregano and tomato.
The town of Presenzano
Presenzano lies in an area well known in ancient times for the production of olive oil and trappeti, imposing limestone mills used for pressing olives. The most famous quarry was in Taverna San Felice.
TRAPPETO SAN FELICE is a “young”
memory-enhancement project in the town of Presenzano, near Venafro. It is an
identity-building project, which projects the memory of these places into the
modern world.
In Roman times Marcus Portius Cato, known as Cato
the Censor, mentioned Rufri Maceria (Presenzano) with its oil mills, together
with Pompeii and Nola, among the places in Campania where oil was produced by
artisans. This historic reference confirms the presence and systematic
exploitation of quarries, presumably for the extraction of limestone, as can be
deduced from the surviving remains of the oil presses. The most important was
the quarry of Taverna San Felice, still active today.
The
trapetum
was used to crush the olives during the initial phase of oil production, separating
the stone (
nucleus) and the bitter
liquid (
murca) from the pulp (
sampsa: worked separately using the
torcularium). This was a gentle
procedure: the grinding wheels were fixed “lightly” to avoid damaging the
olives and the ensuing destruction of the
nucleus.
Virgil mentions the
trapetum in his Georgics (II: 519), where he writes: “teritur
Sicyonia baca trapetis
”, meaning “the
olives of Sicyon are crushed in presses”.
Pressing ‘Sicyon’ olives (named after the town
near Corinth) was one of the activities that marked the rhythm of the seasons
for Virgil’s farmer as he worked the fields.
Roman Venafro, just a few kilometres from
Presenzano, boasted a flourishing economy linked to olive trees and their oil, launched,
according to legend, in the 4th century B.C. by Marcus Licinius, a man of
Samnite origin and a citizen of Venafro (hence the botanical name of the Licinian
olive).
Martial too bears witness to the fertility of the soil and the fame of
Venafran oil.
Most of the olive groves are located on the
slopes of Monte Santa Croce, about 400 metres above sea level in Venafro’s “Parco
Regionale Storico Agricolo dell’Olivo”, a protected area.
The
trappeti
not only preserve the mark of the strong, patient, and skilful hands of men, but
they have a spatial dimension more typical of religious buildings, something arcane
and solemn, made up of shadows and silence.
They are obscurely familiar spaces that invite
us to enter and relive them: they were built by fathers thinking of the future
of the generations to come.