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 Brancati sits in Contrada Brancati, on the plain between Ostuni and the sea, on ground that was already old when the fortified farmhouse went up in the 1500s. Under the buildings is a hypogeum mill, carved into the rock, that historians trace back toward Roman and even pre-Roman use. The Brancati family came down from the Veneto in the 1400s to grow and trade oil with Venice and Genoa, and the estate has since passed through the hands of the Rodio family, who now run it across seven generations. Thirty hectares hold more than a thousand ancient olive trees, and around eight hundred of them are entered in Puglia's regional register of monumental trees under law 14/2007, qualifying by trunk diameter of at least a meter measured at 1.3 meters up, alongside their documented age and history. Two are named: the Grande Vecchio, twisted into a spiral and attributed to roughly 3,000 years, present since the Messapian era, and Capanna, attributed to roughly 2,000 years, its circumference at the base running past ten meters. A small underground museum keeps the old millstones and tools where they were used. The estate was among the first in Puglia to trace and certify oil pressed directly from monumental trees, farming organically and pressing Ogliarola Salentina and Coratina separately, each bottled on its own, both recognized in the Flos Olei and Gambero Rosso guides.
From the public record: masseriabrancati.com · frantoionline.it · cucineditalia.com · pugliacon.regione.puglia.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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Lab numbers, tree references, harvest dates, a photo — the tap-through form asks only for what buyers pay for.
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