Xylella fastidiosa is a bacterium that attacks all manner of plants. It prevents water getting to the leaves, so the plant essentially dies of drought. It probably arrived in Italy in 2008 but wasn’t really noticed until 2013, attacking a few trees around the town of Gallipoli in the Salento, the heel of the boot of Italy. Thanks to badly botched responses it spread, carried by spittlebug insects that live in the plants under the olives. By 2019, efforts to control the spread of Xylella were more or less abandoned, and the disease had killed 10 million olive trees in the Salento.

People – including me – thought it might be the death of olive oil production in the Salento and the rest of Puglia. In the past couple of years, however, literal green shoots of resistant olive varieties have taken hold, and with them the opportunity for a new industry focused on high-quality, profitable olive oil. To learn more, I went to visit Silvestro Silvestori, who runs The Awaiting Table cookery school in Lecce.

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