Frantoio Ipogeo Perrone

Beneath a street of Specchia, reached by a stair cut into the rock, waits the machinery of an older economy: the Frantoio Ipogeo Perrone, one of the trappeti dug below the town between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, where mules turned millstones and workers lived by lamplight from November to spring.

Why it matters

Specchia was one of the most active olive-oil centres of the Salento, and its wealth still lies under the streets: a network of hypogean mills — trappeti — carved from the calcarenite between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Perrone mill takes its name from the street it faces and forms part of Specchia's network of underground oil mills. Millstone, presses, basins and animal stalls survive in the underground spaces. A steady temperature of about nineteen to twenty degrees helped keep oil from solidifying.

What to notice

The mill's sequence included a vaulted room and a stair cut into the rock, leading to the hypogeum three to five metres below street level. A mule turned the stone millwheel; presses and basins separated oil from crushed olives. Olives entered through openings in the vault, and workers rested in niches beside a hearth and animal mangers. The trappitari worked under a nachiro, who supervised shifts and the final separation of oil from impurities.

Context and history

The mills belong to the long olive civilisation of the Salento: the municipality dates the town's underground mills between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, and describes them as historical testimony to the enormous oil production of past centuries. The mills were excavated in soft calcarenite, an economical alternative to building above ground. Their underground temperature of about nineteen to twenty degrees aided the separation of oil from vegetation water. Crushed olive paste was pressed in juncus-fibre baskets called fiscoli, and oil flowed into decantation pits until the nachiro judged the taglio complete. After long restoration the Perrone mill has been returned to the community as a site of Salento industrial archaeology, and it now anchors the underground itinerary that gives the borgo one of its most distinctive attractions.