The oil from Molise: a breathing live body

A book by Luigi Caricato about an Italian region endowed with an ancient oil tradition. Protagonists: the territory and its inhabitants

by Antonella Casilli

Illustration by Angelo Ruta

“Silence, please, be quiet: the oil is breathing. Do not disturb the sleep of a living matter”.
Slowly, but intensely, in The breath of the olive oil. Journey amongst the olives of the Molise , Luigi Caricato travels together with and for the reader among the Molise olive groves, in a bilingual (Italian English) edition.

Introducing this book, the reader would kindly allow me a brief personal digression.
I do not believe in the forced reading; it is a contradictions in terms. How could a pleasure be also an obligation? Reading is a pleasure that takes place whenever the reader feels that the book was written for himself.

Luigi Caricato, versatile journalist and writer, has the great ability to make accessible arguments that, in all the preceding olive oil literature, were difficult to address to.
Caricato carefully explores many arguments that concern oliveculture. He starts with the prehistory of the Molise region, paying attention, in particular, to the local geography because, as he says: “Nowadays, the producer is someone that is able to read and to interpreter the territory, drawing, in this way, the deeper and more concealed soul of it”.
The knowledge of the land, Caricato says, it a central matter given that “it is impossible to get elsewhere something that the land keeps in reserve for itself”.

Together with the local history and geography, Caricato, through a clear global outlook, presents the culinary and healthy characteristics of olive oil. As Caricato stresses, “only when the lands in which production takes place will be well-known and experienced, it will be possible to tribute to the oil the true predominance position over all the alimentary fats”.
In facts, he reminds that the oil fat component is comparable with fats present in the mother’s milk, therefore, by consuming a good olive oil, one is sure to use both a high quality product and a preventive medicine preparation.

I conceitedly entered the content of the book. I apologize to the experts for this, it is not my sector. However, I can deal with the Caricato writing. Caricato works remember to me the girlhood when, while reading Austin, I was always fascinated by the wide choice of worlds. This attitude, in Caricato, is not pretentious but is functional to involve the reader in the narration.
This demonstrates that, when one is talented, he expresses his attitudes in everything.