Each October, a bit 'of years apart, my family and those of my aunts, get ready for the olive harvest. "Olive harvest?!?" I hear you say. "Yes, my friends, we collect in order to make olive oil, the best olive oil in the world because it's the result of our hard work".

My grandfather, Lino Manfrotto, was a great entrepreneur, he has created from scratch the largest worldwide company for the manufacture of photographic equipment; arrived in the middle of his life, he decided to buy herself a nice house with a huge garden and with many olive trees. The grandfather is a nature lover and when it was already building new factories for the production of its products wondered "what plants I could put in the garden of my factories that do not need a lot of care and it is beautiful? Olive trees!" So we have a lot of plants that every year produce precious olives for their oil. Since each of us grandchildren celebrates 8 years old, must make its contribution to this job.

I think that this event is really cool, because it obbligated me and all my cousins to stay together doing some real labor. Luckily, in this period of the year, the temperatures rise to some degrease, and this makes our job more pleasant, because working outside in the cold it's one of the worst thing that you can do. Thanks to the weather, this experience it's still one of my preferite. The best part of those days of collection, it's the lunch, at this time of the day everybody run at my grandfather's kitchen, where a wonderful lunch is waiting for us: sandwiches of different types, eggs, pasta, different kind of meat, my grandma awesome roast potatoes and a delicious chocolate cake for dessert. After a great cup of coffee we are all ready to return to work.

Last year, my mother asked the mother of my father, "Mrs. Dora, would you like to spend a few days in the open air, and help us pick olives? We will repay you with a good amount of bottles of real extra virgin olive oil!". Grandma was happy, she had recently lost her grandfather and he needed to leave the house to stop constantly think about her poor husband, and so she accepted. In the afternoon of the second day, we were working along a low wall; you should know that the collection method requires that you stretch out under every tree to gather all the olives that otherwise would roll everywhere. The grandmother was looking upward and did not notice that her feet were very close to the wall; so close that she fell on the concrete path. Immediately she thought she had taken just a big hit; but in the days after she realized that it was much more. She had to go to the doctor and get a prescription for medicines. My mom would have wanted to go back and do not ask the grandma for help. Grandma, if only she knew how much pain she would have done she would have been much more careful about where she put her feet.

Few weeks after grandma fell I went to her house to see how she was feeling. When I got inside the house I immediately saw that she was feeling a lot of pain, but I didn'’say anything to her, because she's a strong woman and she hates when the other care for her pain.
At some point, I saw that it had arrived her one of the first bottle of olive oil. So I've asked her, "Hey grandma what you think about the new oil?". "The oil is very good,", she said, "but perhaps I'm not the best helper for these things, the next time, grandson, take up some for me too!".