The Lucca Olive Oil Festival, held during the first weekend of February this year, is a new incarnation after a gap of a few years since the previous olive oil expositions and likely to become a regular annual occurrence once again.
The event was held in the splendid premises of the Real Collegio (photos below) located behind the Basilica of San Frediano and was organized by the City of Lucca and Fausto Borella, an indefatigable evangelist for premium Italian olive oil who established the Maestro d’Olio Academy in 2008 to teach students entering the hospitality and tourism industries everything there is to know about the best olive oil in the world.
In 2013 he began publishing an annual guide book called Terre d’Olio that describes over 150 of the most accomplished olive oil producers across central and southern Italy and also incorporates his tasting notes on their best extra virgin olive oils across various categories.
For 7 years we were next door neighbors of Fausto’s Academy on Corso Garibaldi which is one of the reasons, together with her great passion for Italian olive oil, why Elena enrolled there over a decade ago, graduating in 2016 as a Level III Maestro d’Olio before continuing on to become a Sommelier in 2019. Since then she has often assisted Fausto during the festival days including this year in her capacity as sommelier.
The Lucca Olive Oil Festival, rechristened as ‘Lucca Olive Oil You’ is part of the project ‘Lucca 365, a Destination for every Season’ which was publicly launched in Rome recently to highlight the calendar of events that aims to make Lucca a year-round internationally important cultural and tourist destination.
For the mayor of Lucca, Mario Pardini, this is exactly the type of event he wants to put on the calendar in order to grow the city’s profile. My personal view is that more winter events are to be welcomed, assuming that they can serve to rebalance the summer traffic rather than being purely additive. I have long been an advocate of increased winter tourism on this website because then visitors will see the real and very different Lucca that we residents get to experience when they have all left.
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The dietary advantages of olive oil are widely known but not in fact well understood and on the opening day of this month’s festival there was a greater emphasis on the health benefits of olive oil, perhaps the single most important ingredient in the much lauded ‘Mediterranean Diet’. Dr Peterson of Penn State University flew in to make his presentation titled ‘Extra Virgin Olive Oil: A Pillar of Health for All Ages’.
This was followed by other food related presentations including an interesting one by a Japanese chef, Masaki Kuroda, on the marriage between different types of sashimi and monocultivar (monovarietal) olive oils.
It has been clear for several years from the export data of premium olive oil that there is increasing interest in Japan for the highest quality Italian olive oils, especially those derived from a single olive variety.
The enormous advantage of this event for attendees and for us personally is the ability to taste a wide range of extra virgin olive oils from all of Italy’s major olive growing regions and buy a year’s supply of premium olive oil without having to leave our home town of Lucca. We always make new discoveries and for us this year it was two of the three Abruzzesi olive oils of Tommaso Masciantonio that grabbed our attention, both of them monovarietals.Â
The first, Crognale, is made exclusively from the Crognalegno olive and is well suited to the Abruzzo climate given its high drought tolerance. The second, Intosso, is from an olive of the same name that until recently was close to extinction and is very local to the Casoli area of south-eastern Abruzzo. According to the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity this olive performs best in the rich limestone gravel that is characteristic of the Laroma plain of the Maiella foothills.
When tasting the Masciantonio Intosso oil we find ourselves in broad agreement with the Slow Food description of olive oils made exclusively from the Intosso olive, ie an intense green fruit aroma, with notes of cut grass and freshly picked artichokes. Intosso typically produces a strongly flavored oil that perfectly balances bitterness and piquancy, with hints of green peppercorns, fresh walnut and sometimes tomato leaves. We're now including a visit to the frantoio of Tommaso Masciantonio on our Abruzzo History & Nature Tours.
We were pleased to see our favorite northern Umbrian producer, Decimi, at the event and there was another notable Umbrian attendee, Marfuga, from the eastern area of the region between Spoleto and Trevi. Marfuga is a producer with a lineage that goes all the way back to the time of Napoleon and whose oil we have been looking forward to tasting and purchasing for some time and when the opportunity arises we will pay them a visit.