The Good Life & the Good Olive Oil

Photos and words by Katie McKnoulty

A young Italian couple living in New York swapped the big city for smalltown Tuscany, establishing an organic, sustainably-produced Tuscan olive oil business.

The sun finally comes out after a grey morning picking olives. Someone gets out the portable speaker and plays the kind of cool, vaguely indie music I or any New Yorker or Londoner in their 30s would listen to at home or work any day of the week. It's just that we’re listening to it here, in a field full of olive trees, in the Tuscan countryside. Francesco, who’s running this show, notices this golden, surreal moment too and turns to me and says, "People sometimes look down on agricultural work... but I mean, look how much fun we’re having!”

I'd come here to Tuscany to stay with Francesco Piattelli and his girlfriend, Francesca Gambato (Fra + Fra as they sign off their emails). I wanted to see and photograph the harvest of their 4.5 hectares of olive trees in the heart of the Toscano IGP denomination, and their olives, ready to be hand-picked and pressed. Their new venture is Agricola Maraviglia: a small-batch, organic, sustainably-made olive oil to be sold direct from their farm in Tuscany to consumers online all over the world.



Francesco, left, Francesca, right, in Monte San Savino, Tuscany.

Like myself, the couple gradually swapped big city life (New York in their case) for something much smaller, a farmhouse just outside the town of Monte San Savino in Tuscany, Italy. At first they visited half the year. Now with the pandemic, they’re here year-round in Tuscany.

"I realised that this (New York City) was not a sustainable way of life for me, for my energy, my stress levels... I could feel it; this is not what or how I wanted to live. And especially work-wise I wasn't feeling satisfied, I wanted to do something that was more aligned. I decided... first I'll stop and then I'll figure out what I want to do."


The table set for lunch at Maraviglia, in between olive picking in the fields.

Maravaglia, perched on a hill outside the town of Monte San Sevino in Tuscany, a retreat centre in summer.

Francesco started with the creation of Maraviglia Conscious Living, where yogis and meditators would gather in the summer to taste a bit of that calm, good-for-the-soul Italian countryside life, along with Francesca's traditional-Italian-meets-plant-based cooking daily.

This gave Francesco a chance to come home to himself.






Tuscan kale fresh from the vegetable garden.


Quince tree at Maraviglia.

When I visited in late October, the leaves and the weather had turned, so the focus too had turned to the business of making olive oil. Francesco and Francesca had gathered friends and family ready to work; they stayed together in the retreat centre and picked olives for eight hours a day for those few weeks of the harvest. Returning tired and hungry after sundown each evening, we'd share a big, communal meal around a long table with lashings of fresh green olive oil on top of everything. We'd go to bed by 10 pm every night in preparation for another day. Lunches were out in the field over a fire, or at home devouring Francesca's heavenly yet down-to-earth culinary creations.




The olive-picking crew on a lunch break out in the fields.




Lunch back at Maraviglia, eating dishes made by Francesca with ingredients from the garden: tuscan kale and pecorino crostini toasts, radicchio and ricotta tart and fresh green salad, liberally drizzled with Agricola Maraviglia olive oil. 

I saw firsthand how hands-on the process of olive picking really is, something I'd never stopped to think about in my many years consuming it. I learned that you don't so much pick olives as you do shake and comb the trees, either with a machine if you're going high-tech, or with a mini rake in hand if you're going analogue. You then catch the falling olives with huge nets spread out on the ground below.

Olive Oil Made Differently

While this is the same picking scene you see all around Italy this time of year, after the grape harvest but before mushroom and truffle hunting season, these particular olives are destined for a slightly different course.

The trees are nurtured, organically, year-round by Francesco himself. Once picked with care, early and green, they are rushed to the mill to be cold-pressed into oil within 24 hours of picking to ensure freshness.

All this care and attention results in olive oil with a strong flavour all its own. I’ve learned since living here in Italy that this is the secret to Italian cooking – good quality olive oil with its own flavours makes simple dishes taste incredible.

Maraviglia’s direct-to-consumer model puts a new spin on an old idea.

Francesco referred to it as "Glocal": a localised, “mini-farm” product and business selling directly to a very international audience via online channels.

Here in Italy, at least away from the big cities, they’ve been doing this direct-to-consumer thing since forever. Italians have their local winemaker, their ironworker, their shepherd who makes the good cheese, their butcher who raises his own animals. But the reach of these makers usually ends with the local area.

Because most of us don’t have our own direct ‘person’ to go to, we end up buying low-quality, industrial products from supermarket brands. But the modern world is beginning to work up an appetite for something real. We want to buy the good stuff, straight from the good people who made it. And with the internet, this is becoming more and more possible.

Our generation and the generation after us (à la Greta Thunberg and the school strikers) started with a pretty broken world, where the rules we were taught to follow were no longer applicable by the time we were old enough to live by them.

We can see and feel the full extent of humanity's rapid destruction of its own home over the last hundred years. But what are we doing about it? Are we, the younger generations, leading the world towards a new way? Francesco weighed in.

"We're seeing that there is this shift. And even business-wise and on the economy side, sustainability and the environment are one of the main topics... Conscious living, being aware of the food you eat, the seasonality of the food; this is a trend. It's big and it's going to get bigger. And business-wise, young people will be doing something (work-wise) that's more connected with the world that they live in and nature. They're going to be able to pay their bills. And the world is going to be healthier."

The online part of all this is integral, it's why we can imagine all these new ways of doing things. People like Francesco, with a mix of small-town roots and big city experience and networks, can create a new kind of business out of something that is traditionally agricultural work, thankless work. “Everyone that's older comes to me and says, 'Oh you're crazy to become an agricultural worker!' I'm not crazy. I'm not a kamikaze. I'm doing this because I love it and it's fun. But also because I can live off of it comfortably... There is a business, there just has to be a new model."