La Tuscia

The Tuscia is the part of Lazio north of Rome that centres on Viterbo: tuff hills between Lake Bolsena, the Cimini mountains and the sea. Olives have always grown here, and the mills are small ones that press the olives of the surrounding villages and sell almost all of their oil direct. Ours is one of them: Villa San Giovanni in Tuscia, since 1905.

Caninese, the olive of these hills

The local cultivar is called Caninese. It takes its name from Canino, the town on the western side of the Tuscia, and it is the most common variety around Blera, Vetralla, Barbarano Romano and the neighbouring villages: small olives, hardy in the cold, with a low oil yield in the first weeks of the harvest and a higher one later in the season. This olive gives our Settembre, a single-cultivar first-pick oil; the batches milled later in the season, together with Frantoio, Leccino and Moraiolo, become the blend with the blue label.

One clarification for anyone searching "Canino olive oil": there is a Canino PDO, which protects the oil of a defined and certified area. Our oil does not carry the PDO mark. It is mill oil, with the cultivar, the village of harvest and the lot number declared on every bottle, and with a price set at the mill, not on a supermarket shelf.

Where the olives come from

Most of the olives we mill are brought to us by growers of the area: Blera, Barbarano Romano, Vetralla and Villa San Giovanni in Tuscia. Our own groves are small, at Pian Gagliardo and Fontanacce in the municipality of Blera, and they are in organic conversion: until the conversion is complete their oil cannot be called organic, and we do not call it that.

The olives are milled within 24 hours of delivery and cold-extracted below 27 °C with a centrifugal separator. The oil is sold unfiltered ("grezzo") or filtered. The lot code printed on the bottle leads back to the milling date and the origin: you can look up your lot here.

The mill in Villa San Giovanni in Tuscia

The mill is at Buche della Rena, a few minutes from Blera and Vetralla and an hour from Rome. During the season, from late September to December, it is open from 7 to 19 for growers bringing olives and for anyone who wants to buy freshly milled oil. In 2026 milling started on 21 September. How we work and how to get here.

What Tuscia oil costs

Lazio does not appear in the official producer-price surveys, because Tuscia oil rarely passes through wholesale markets: it is sold at the mill. Our prices, VAT included: the blend at €13.75 per litre in every format, from the 3-litre bag-in-box to the 5-litre tins; the single-cultivar Caninese Settembre at €20 to €26 per litre depending on format. For the national picture, with European Commission and ISMEA data updated to September 2026, see our page on olive oil prices in Italy.

Where to buy it

Direct at the mill, or online with shipping across Europe, to the UK and to the United States, the exact cost calculated at checkout. The new 2026 oil is back in stock from mid-October.

• Settembre, single-cultivar Caninese from the first pick
• All formats: bottles, tins and bag-in-box