Unique landscape

The “Assisi-Spoleto Olive Belt” is an Apennine piedmont landscape stretching for over 40 kilometers. It is a unique, unrepeatable heritage that involves six municipalities in the province of Perugia: Assisi, Spello, Foligno, Trevi, Campello sul Clitunno, and Spoleto.

The enormous and unmistakable presence of the cultivation of the olive tree (9,000 hectares of land and almost 1,500,000 plants) is the millenary result of a culture of a non-spontaneous nature. The olive tree in the “Assisi-Spoleto Olive Belt” (also called the “Spoleto Valley”) is an artificial, unnatural presence. The olive groves covering the slopes, the arrangement of the plants, the low walls, the species cultivated, the production system, and the traditional settlements show a landscape undergoing a constant evolution. Every change takes place thanks to man’s intervention with a constant respect of the balance of tradition and innovation.

The presence of the olive trees, down through the centuries, has had a considerable importance from the cultural, artistic, architectural, landscape, and hydrogeological standpoints. Today the “Assisi-Spoleto Olive Belt” is one of the principle olive-growing areas of the Umbria region.

Olive tree cultivation was originally foreign to the area, and was brought in with difficulty and protected continuously and constantly. For this reason the “Assisi-Spoleto Olive Belt” territory is an example of a “living cultural landscape”, i.e. a “combined work of nature and man”. This expression illustrates the evolution of human society over time, and man’s capacity to adapt based on the influence of the physical constraints and/or the opportunities offered by the natural environment and the social, economic, and cultural forces of the territory.

The very word for “landscape” in Italian (“paesaggio”) implies artificial human intervention on nature. This meaning is contained in the verb pangere (to plant), from which the word paesaggio, together with patto (pact), paese (country), paysan (farmer or peasant), and pagina, which originally meant vineyard, comes. In keeping with this root word, the term used in Umbrian farming dialect for the olive tree is “piantone”. The landscape, or “paesaggio” is therefore the result of interventions on the environment capable of humanizing and giving it a “second nature”, the result of “culto, coltura e cultura” (cult, farming, and culture).

The “Assisi-Spoleto Olive Belt” is an incredible example of evolutionary cultural landscape in Umbria. In this territory is rooted the culture of oil, and it appears as an extraordinary encounter of nature with the work of man, based on the cultivation of this plant species and the production of extra virgin oil. The site is a unique display of a living cultural tradition. Its exceptional character lies in the capacity of the community to transform the marginality of a territory into an opportunity for common growth, identity, and cohesion, creating an totally unique and universal landscape of value.

The “Olive Belt” landscape is the exceptional result of a memory of “how to do” which has been transmitted and developed from antiquity down to today, and which represents the center of the territory’s social-economic life. The continuing pursuit of improvement of the production cycle still leads today to the production of quality oil that is appreciated worldwide, thanks to a rich heritage of knowledge and techniques based on the profound knowledge of the olive tree species cultivated for centuries and their capacity for adaptation to the environmental conditions.