If I were in Sicily, I’d be picking lemons and making lemonade. But this is the Maremma, daarrrlings, and here the last weeks of autumn are olive harvesting season.

For the born and bred Maremmani, there is something infinitely comforting about an olive tree. Forget all those religious connotations, the olive tree to the Maremmano is like the Welcome to Las Vegas sign to high rollers, bachelor parties and fans of Siegfried and Roy… it means home.

Every Maremmano has one in his garden, even if said garden is a tiny, almost non-existent plot dominated by the kids’ plastic blow-up pool, like mine is.

But last weekend, a year’s worth of hard work and careful growing came to fruition… fruit-ion, get it?… when we had our annual olive harvesting day.

To clarify, the olives didn’t come from my tree. My tree never seems to do much else than look pretty. Maybe it’s my inexpert growing skills… Luckily, my father-in-law has the green thumb and more than a handful’s worth of beautiful olive trees.

Just so you know, the Maremmani are extremely selective when it comes to their olive oil. Believe me, they will whine your ears off whenever they are forced to use substandard olive oil, which includes ALL brands of olive oil sold in Australia… even the expensive stuff.

My husband insists good olive oil is one of the things he misses most whenever he’s in Australia. That, and coffee and thin crust pizza. But I digress.

With the olives literally falling off the trees, I bundled the family off to nonno’s house to lend a hand. My father-in-law grows two kinds of olives, green ones and black ones, in abundance. So his trees were bursting with olives, each of which had to be carefully picked and collected.

Ever the mad scientist, my father-in-law has invented his own system to catch the olives as they fall – he uses an umbrella, turned upside down and spiked into the earth.

Luckily, last weekend was another surprisingly clear and warm day in the Maremma because it took us a couple of hours to pick each and every olive off the trees.

The Maremma in autumn never ceases to surprise me. You expect it to be cold, rainy, windy and all together grey and miserable, especially this late in the year, and yet, almost everyday is bright and inviting.

You wake up to find a cloudless sky and the sun beating down on you so strong that you could be forgiven for thinking it’s warm out. Of course, it’s barely 20°C, but  the sun is so bright, it warms the room instantly. It’s one of the reasons why I think autumn is such a fantastic time to visit the Maremma. The days are reliably dry and rarely windy.

The temperature is also admirably steady, never colder than 12°C, so you can get in a hell of a lot of sightseeing without the heat and crowds of summer. In some coastal towns, the weather is so warm and nice, you don’t need a jacket even now at the end of November!

But back to the olives. With scratched hands and an incredible sense of satisfaction, we bundled up the last of the olives to be taken to the mill.

I think one of the most charming things about the entire olive picking experience wasn’t actually picking the olives, but what happened afterwards when the olives were crushed.

Less than a decade ago, the average Maremmano would take his grain to the mill to be ground into flour, his milk to the local cheese maker to be made into cheese, his grapes to the wine press to be turned into wine.

Unfortunately a lot of these traditions are dying out. Few people grow their own grain or grapes or have their own goats or sheep anymore. But they still have their olive trees.

My father-in-law took his olive oil to the presses in Semproniano. They handed him back three five-litre bottles of olive oil. He came home brimming with joy, not just because he had his own olive oil, but because the men at the press told him his olives were some of the best they’d seen all season.

In exchange for their services, my father-in-law gave the men a share of his olive oil.

Personally, I love the sense of community that surrounded this act. It’s so appealing to think that in 2011, there are still people who grow their own olives knowing they can take their fruit to the presses to be crushed into olive oil for free.

Plus, I got to take a bucket’s worth of olives home to salt-cure. Hopefully, in three weeks’ time, they’ll be wonderfully wrinkled and ready to eat!