Horace's oil

The Castle lies within an olive growing farming estate, in the heart of the Tivoli Grand Tour area, among hills and rivers.

Here we grow our olive plants, here we beat them and pick up their fruits, here we extract the olive oil we use and serve.

Olive trees were planted extensively around Mandela by the monks of the Abbeys of Farfa and of Subiaco, who had been given control of the Valley by the Pope, from the 5th Century AD (that is after the fall of the Roman Empire), to about the year 1000 AD, when the feudal Orsini family took over.

The tradition of cultivating olive trees was there since Roman times, as we can read in Latin literature, and in the poet Horace’s writings.
This tradition has been kept up to this very day without interruption.
That makes centuries and centuries of experience in making olive oil.
That makes it taste so naturally savoury.
That makes us proud of producing it.

Take a look at the technical details of our olive oil.