When I was a child, farmers would keep olive oil under lock and key
Maurizio Maggiani
When I was a young lad, I remember that farmers – not the landowners, mind you, but the labourers working on the farms – would keep their bottle of oil under lock and key, and on the few occasions when they would take it out, they would handle it with the same care that a priest has when administering the last rites. Nowadays, like never before, when I look at the shelves along the supermarket aisles, with their vast array of extra virgin olive oils on display, I realize how much things have changed in just a few decades.
Maurizio Maggiani
Excerpt from “Un bastimento carico di olio” (A shipload of oil), an article by Maurizio Maggiani, printed on November 23, 2014, in the Italian newspaper Il Secolo XIX
