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.
The Mela family has pressed olives in Sant'Agata d'Oneglia, in the hills above Imperia, since 1827. Their trees are Taggiasca, a variety said to have reached this stretch of Liguria with Benedictine monks around 1600, and the family's own terraces, called locally the Martine Fascei, climb to roughly 500 meters above sea level. For much of that history the olives went through the village's stone press, turned by hand before any motor took over the job. Seven generations of Melas have carried the mill through that change, from stone wheels to modern equipment, without dropping the habits that mattered: picking the fruit before it's fully ripe, sorting it the same day it comes down off the terraces, pressing it cold. The oil that comes out of the Martine Fascei groves, bottled as Cru Primo Fiore, carries the Riviera Ligure DOP, the certification that ties an oil to a specific coastline and a specific set of groves. The mill is where it always was, in Sant'Agata d'Oneglia, run by the family that started it, pressing fruit grown a short climb up the hill from where it's milled.
From the public record: frantoiosantagata.com · magnificofood.com · forbes.it · italiaatavola.net
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.
