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 Il Frantoio sits inland from Ostuni, on ground the Tanzarella family held for five hundred years before the Balestrazzi family took it over in the 1970s. The masseria's core dates to the sixteenth century, but underneath it is older still — an underground olive mill, a frantoio ipogeo, carved straight into the limestone, with three basins and millstones cut into the rock. The first was turned by a donkey walking in circles; the other two ran mechanically until just a few decades ago. That mill is why the place carries its name. Above ground, the estate runs across 72 hectares, 60 of them planted in olives — fifteen varieties in all, though the backbone is Ogliarola Salentina. Some 2,600 of those trees are attributed to roughly 1,000 to 2,000 years, gnarled survivors from a stretch of countryside locals call the plain of the millennial olives. Alongside them stand 1,600 younger trees, planted around thirty years ago, of Cima di Melfi and Frantoio varieties. The Balestrazzis put the whole estate under organic farming in 1991, well before it was common practice here. Their Tre Colline oil, pressed mostly from the old Ogliarola trees, became a Slow Food Presidium in 2020. Gambero Rosso gave the estate its Olio & Turismo award in 2022.
From the public record: masseriailfrantoio.it · fondoambiente.it · madeinmasseria.it · ostuninews.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.
A producer account takes a minute — name, mill, region. We attach this profile the same day.
Lab numbers, tree references, harvest dates, a photo — the tap-through form asks only for what buyers pay for.
Auction with a confidential reserve, or a fixed-price allocation. We review it and it goes live.
The catalogue goes to this list before it goes on the site. When the sale closes you get every hammer price from it — including the ones that disappointed.
Two emails. Then quiet until Sale No. 2.
