Posted on January 25 2011 Categorized in: Featured, World of Olive Oil By Lucy Vivante Olive Oil Times Contributor Reporting from Rome Mariella Gualtieri lives in the seaside city of Vasto in the Abruzzo region of Italy. She grew up northwest of Vasto, in a small town called Pollutri. Here, her great grandfathers worked with olives: one as a miller, and the other as a merchant selling olive oil. Nicola Mariotti, the merchant relative, didn’t sell it in his town, or even nearby, because everyone had their own olive oil. His business revolved around selling olive oil in the mountain towns of the Abruzzo, where the climate is too cold for olives to grow. Mariella’s paintings of olive culture center on the harvesting of olives, but also include such tasks as the pruning of trees. From the age of eleven she was involved in the annual harvest. She remembers a man who had been hired to help with the harvest, and seeing Mariella’s small hands shivering in the November air, he