Olive Oil Tourism Returns to the Colosseum as Italy Reopens

The Colosseum Archeological Park in Rome has announced the open­ing of its new Barberini Vineyards.

Beginning on May 28, vis­i­tors will be able to walk through the vines just as ancient Romans did 1,000 years before.

The restora­tion of the wine-grow­ing tra­di­tion on the Palatine Hill, right by the Colosseum, adds to the lat­est expan­sion of the olive trees that dot the park and allow local farm­ers to pro­duce Palatine organic extra vir­gin olive oil.

The park is cur­rently home to 189 olive trees, some of which were planted in the 19^th cen­tury and oth­ers in more recent times.

Together with the vine­yards and the bee-keep­ing activ­i­ties, the olive trees are meant to recover and bear wit­ness to the com­plex rela­tion­ship devel­oped through the ages on Palatine Hill between humans set­tle­ments and veg­e­ta­tion.

“When Ancient Rome’s expan­sion reached this area, the marshes around the hill were reclaimed, and on the top of it, the rich­est fam­i­lies began build­ing their vil­las and plant­ing their orchards,” Gabriella Strano, the land­scape archi­tect of the Colosseum Archeological Park, told Olive Oil Times.

“What we are doing now is to inves­ti­gate and recover that tra­di­tion and replant the veg­e­ta­tion that they had here,” she added.

The olive tree is Italians’ nat­ural con­nec­tion to Ancient Rome when most of the local econ­omy depended on agri­cul­ture.

“Pliny the Elder, in his Naturalis Historia, empha­sized the essen­tial role that agri­cul­ture played for the Ancient Roman peo­ple,” Strano said. ​“For him, the most rel­e­vant mis­sion for the Roman cit­i­zen was to focus on agri­cul­ture, which meant pro­duc­ing olive oil as well as bar­ley, oats, cere­als, wine and honey.”

In the long his­tory of the rise and fall of Roman soci­ety, through the Dark Ages until mod­ern times, the set­tle­ments on Palatine Hill and the veg­e­ta­tion under­went pro­found changes.

“The new vine­yard repli­cates those that can be seen in planime­try and pic­tures we have dat­ing back to 16^th and 18^th cen­turies,” Strano said. ​“The area was crowded with grapes; one was found by arche­ol­o­gists even on the top of the Domus Aurea, which was dam­aged by the roots of the plants.”

“For the vine­yard, we chose to plant the Bellone vari­ety because of Pliny’s writ­ings and because it was the wine drank by the emper­ors who since Octavian Augustus decided to live on the Palatine Hill,” she added.

Along with the olives and honey, local farm­ers will also har­vest and crush the grapes fol­low­ing Ancient Roman grow­ing instruc­tions.

“When we reached an agree­ment with the farm­ers asso­ci­a­tion Coldiretti to have them take care of the olive trees, we estab­lished that prun­ing would be done tak­ing into account the land­scape goals, not the over­all pro­duc­tion,” Strano said.

“Harvesting is done by hand,” she added, refer­ring to the sim­i­lar rules that gov­ern how the farm­ers trans­form the local olives into oil.

While dozens of olive trees dot the park or define the bound­aries of the arche­o­log­i­cal exca­va­tions sites, some are more specif­i­cally related to the hill’s his­tory. This is the case of three new olive trees planted right by the remains of the Temple of Minerva.

“The pine tree that grew there since the 19^th cen­tury recently died,” Strano said. ​“It was planted by Giacomo Boni, the super­vi­sor behind the most rel­e­vant reshap­ing and reset­tling works on the hill.”

“When it was removed, we decided to plant the trees once cher­ished by Domiziano, the emperor who wor­shipped the god­dess Minerva,” Strano added.

Domiziano, who also lived on the hill as his pre­de­ces­sors did, is cred­ited with fin­ish­ing the Colosseum in 90 CE.

The idea behind Palatine extra vir­gin olive oil pro­duc­tion is rel­a­tively recent, accord­ing to Strano. The idea was first pro­posed to solve the prob­lem caused by the olives when they fell off the trees and onto the pedes­trian paths each year.

Advocates of the idea saw it as an oppor­tu­nity to pro­mote 100-per­cent Italian olive oil, to set up edu­ca­tional work­shops and tast­ing classes and add a new kind of his­tor­i­cal expe­ri­ence for tourists.

“Olives, grapes, honey and other projects, includ­ing the work­shops with olive tast­ings and olive oil classes, are all meant to bear wit­ness to the Ancient Roman cul­ture,” Strano said. ​“In an arche­o­log­i­cal site, such as this one, cul­ture con­tin­ues to live.”

Before the Covid-19 pan­demic, the Colosseum Archeological Park greeted more than 22,000 vis­i­tors each day from all over the world.

“The insti­tu­tion felt the effects of the lock­downs, but we tried to be resilient and took advan­tage of this time to do the main­te­nance and develop works that had to be delayed before,” Strano said.

Park man­age­ment is now opti­misti­cally antic­i­pat­ing the relax­ation of the emer­gency mea­sures in Italy and the Covid-19 green-pass within the European Union.

“We are ready to greet all vis­i­tors now, to let them explore the park in absolute safety and respect of the san­i­tary lim­i­ta­tions,” Strano said.

• Colosseum Archeological Park