It has been five years since I have been in this place, but I could not feel more at home: sitting on a stone terrace, overlooking the olive grove, the town of Seggiano, and a Tuscan kitty named Beast by my side.
I have been in Italy 24 hours, but this is the moment I feel like I am truly here. The sky is robin-egg blue, the sunlight is streaming through the olive trees illuminating them silver, my feet are cool on the cobbled porch, and the only sounds are olive pickers rustling the branchesin nearby groves.
There certainly is a beauty to Tuscany that is unparalled: rolling hills descend into deep valleys and yet each hillside is covered with steep fields of wheat, vines or olive trees. And despite a scorching summer with extreme temperature and no precipitation, the grass, the trees, the hillsides are all green.
The olives are just starting to turn from green to a deep purple - in a few days all the trees will be ready to pick, so in the meantime, we are bottling and labeling in a small warehouse in nearby Castel de Piano. These days of indoor work are not active moments, yet still fill me with a sense of awe as our small team of eight, bottles and labels hundreds of olive oil bottles by hand. These were completed today with the intent purpose of being shipped to the U.S., and I couldn't help feeling some amount of pride thinking that maybe my fingerprints will find their way to friends and family who pick up a bottle of Seggiano olive oil for themselves.
