L’Olivo di Sant'Emiliano: A 1,800-Year-Old Symbol of Umbria's Olive Tradition

Umbria’s old­est mil­lenary olive tree is sit­u­ated in the ham­let of Bovara di Trevi, an ancient town on the famous Olive Path con­nect­ing Spoleto with Assisi, less than an hour south of the regional cap­i­tal of Perugia.

L’Olivo di SantEmiliano is over 1,800 years old and con­tin­ues to thrive a few hun­dred meters from the 12^th-cen­tury Benedictine Abbey of Bovara.

“La Passió says that Bishop Miliano, after suf­fer­ing var­i­ous tor­tures, was tied to a young olive tree and beheaded in the year 304,” Daniela Rapastella, the head of Trevi’s cul­ture and tourism admin­is­tra­tion, told Olive Oil Times.

Miliano came to Italy from Armenia. His name was Italianzed to Emiliano when Pope Marcellinus con­se­crated him. After his exe­cu­tion, he became the patron saint of Trevi.

“For the local com­mu­nity, L’Olivo di Sant’Emiliano is a sym­bol of strong devo­tion because it is linked to the city’s patron saint,” Rapastella said.

Indeed, the mil­lenary tree has recently been reg­is­tered as a pro­tected tree and fenced off so tourists can admire it with­out dam­ag­ing it.

“Historical facts and pop­u­lar beliefs state that the olive tree has sur­vived sev­eral frosts over the cen­turies, always bear­ing abun­dant fruit,” she added. ​“It also resisted the most intense frosts, which instead caused the dry­ing out of almost all the other olive trees, some of which were more than cen­turies old.”

According to Rapastella, locals con­tinue to har­vest olives from the tree and mill them into unique olive oil due to the olive tree’s ancient genet­ics.

“The Sant’Emiliano olive tree, accord­ing to the scholar Guido Bonci, is genet­i­cally placed in a tran­si­tion posi­tion between the Olivastro and Moraiolo cul­ti­vars,” she said.

Moraiolo is the dom­i­nant olive vari­ety in the region, mak­ing up more than 60 per­cent of any extra vir­gin olive oil pro­duced under the Umbria Colli Assisi-Spoleto Protected Designation of Origin cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

While there is grow­ing debate about the accu­racy of cer­tain dat­ing meth­ods for ancient olive trees, Rapastella is con­fi­dent that author­i­ties fol­lowed the best sci­en­tific processes to obtain an accu­rate age.

She said researchers took sam­ples from the root sys­tem to iden­tify the old­est part of the tree. The old­est por­tions of the truck have long been dam­aged by par­a­sites and removed via the slu­patura, or strip­ping, prun­ing tech­nique, elim­i­nat­ing decay­ing parts of a healthy tree.

“However, I can­not exclude that even older mate­r­ial may be found in another part of the roots,” she said.

Leading experts in the field radio­car­bon-dated the root core sam­ples, deter­min­ing that the tree was about 1,830 years old with a mar­gin of error of 260 years. This puts the date of its ger­mi­na­tion between 96 BCE and 425 CE.

“This age is extra­or­di­nar­ily inter­est­ing because until now, it was believed that the max­i­mum age of olive trees at this lat­i­tude could not exceed 1,500 years,” Rapastella said.

“It is impor­tant to pre­serve thou­sand-year-old olive trees because they are a direct source of the longevity and per­sis­tence of agri­cul­tural cul­ture and local tra­di­tions,” she added.