Olive Auction built this page from public records so buyers can find the estate. Its own people can claim it at no cost — complete the story, list lots, answer buyers.
After a claim, we confirm by emailEverything here comes from public sources — award lists, certification registers, the territory inventories. The rest of the story — the family, the grove, the real age of the trees, this year's lab sheet — only the mill can tell, and it is the part buyers bid on.
Masseria Appia Traiana sits right up against the old Roman road it's named for — the Via Appia Traiana, laid down two thousand years ago to move oil and grain from the port at Brindisi toward Rome. The farmhouse itself dates to 1889, built on 24 hectares of red Puglian ground outside Ostuni, where olives had already been growing for centuries before the first stone went up. Today the estate runs to more than 4,500 trees, and it puts roughly 700 of them at a millennial age — huge, split, twisted trunks that have grown wide and hollow with time. The ground under them is calcarenite and sand from the Pleistocene, and the estate points to that soil as the reason its oil carries such weight. The farming is organic, and the oil is certified under the Collina di Brindisi DOP. A few years back the estate started letting people adopt one of the ancient trees directly: each adopted tree sends its keeper 12 liters of its own oil every year, plus a photo and its exact coordinates, so every tin traces back to one specific trunk in one specific field. More than a hundred people have signed up.
From the public record: masseriappiatraiana.it · ulivisecolaripugliesi.it
Between Ostuni, Fasano and Monopoli, a regional law counts every ancient tree by hand, even as the disease that has reshaped Salento's groves moves steadily north.
Puglia's regional register held 343,738 monumental olives at its last official count in July 2021. Coldiretti put the press figure at 347,578 in 2023 and around 355,000 by 2024, some 250,000 within the Piana degli Ulivi Monumentali, the coastal plain between Ostuni, Fasano and Monopoli. None sit on Italy's national heritage-tree register, which under Law 10/2013 holds zero Puglia olives; the Piana runs entirely on the regional track of Regional Law 14/2007.
That law grants monumentality on one of three grounds: recognised historical or anthropological value, a trunk diameter of at least 100 centimetres, or 70 to 100 centimetres with other qualifying traits. An owner or council files a written scheda; the Commissione Tecnica's opinion, binding on any felling or relocation, leads to a provisional decree in the regional bulletin, thirty days for objections, then a definitive decree. The working register lives as a GIS layer on the regional planning portal, sit.puglia.it, an internal tool with no public search interface.
Two apps sit either side of that process and are constantly confused for each other. AppOlea is the citizen-reporting tool, the route by which an owner or a passer-by flags a tree for the census. App Ulìa is unrelated, a QR-code system tracing a bottle back to the specific tree its oil was pressed from.
The masserie carry the working memory of the numbers. Masseria Brancati, outside Ostuni, claims over 1,000 monumental specimens on 30 hectares, 800 formally registered, and presses Ogliarola alongside Coratina; its Grande Vecchio tree is put at some 3,000 years, never formally dated. At Fasano, Masseria Appia Traiana runs an adoption scheme delivering twelve litres a year per sponsored tree, from a claimed 4,500 trees.
South of the plain, Xylella fastidiosa has spread in a patchwork beyond its old containment line. The Salento core zone had its buffer cut from five kilometres to two in November 2024, while new outbreaks through 2025 reached as far as Gargano's Cagnano Varano and, by January 2026, Valenzano, putting the bacterium in all six Puglia provinces. More than 2.6 million trees have been uprooted; the University of Bari puts annual profitability losses at €132 million, near €3 billion since 2013. Replanting leans on resistant cultivars: Leccino and FS-17/Favolosa already established, Lecciana and Leccio del Corno added in 2024, though funds have processed only 440 of 9,000 applications.
A lot from the Piana carries its tree's DGR registration number and GIS position on the dossier and, this far north of Salento, a phytosanitary note confirming the grove has tested clear of Xylella fastidiosa.
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