ABSTRACT
The field, which contained some olive trees centuries old, was one of several terraced slopes on a hill facing south over Florence. Ilex woods are indigenous in Tuscany, but a great part of this forest had been of sweet chestnut. The local name for the lane that led to it might best be rendered ‘Wee Baas Loan,’ ‘little balls’ being a tuscan phrase for chestnuts. The earth between the olives, ploughed each year, had been sown in the previous season with a tall, blue-flowering medick or lucerne. The oil from the fields is among the best in Tuscany, and infinitely better than some commercial mixtures sold abroad as Lucca oil. The difference in Tuscany between sun and shade is the difference between tropical and arctic.
