Helen Mirren has made a public appeal to scientists to find a cure for an insect-borne disease which is laying waste to ancient olive groves in southern Italy.
The Oscar-winning British actress spoke out after the disease Xylella fastidiosa destroyed 21 million olive trees in 12 years in Puglia, the region in the heel of Italy where she owns a farmhouse.
“After more than ten years, no one has yet succeeded in finding a real solution to the spread of Xylella,” she said.
Mirren in Salento, Italy. She is an adviser to the Italian non-profit organisation Save the Olives
VANTAGE
“Everyone needs to wake up and understand the scale of this growing tragedy. My hope is that these olive trees can be saved. We cannot lose a 1,000-year-old patrimony.”
Mirren, 80, spoke in Tricase, a small town in heart of Puglia at the launch of a new book of photographs of southern Italy, Il Mezzogiorno by Uli Weber, to which she has contributed an essay on olive trees.
Her 500-year-old farmhouse in nearby Tiggiano, which she bought with her American husband Taylor Hackford, has been at the epicentre of the Xylella epidemic, which has killed off around a third of the 60 million olive trees in Puglia, some nearly 1,000 years old.
Mirren with her husband, Taylor Hackford. They owns a farmhouse in Puglia, where olive trees have been devastated by the disease
MARILLA SICILIA/MONDADORI PORTFOLIO/GETTY IMAGES
The disease arrived in Italy in 2013 from Costa Rica. It is spread by flying insects that feed on the plant and is marching north in Puglia, a region that produces half of Italy’s olive oil.
“All around our masseria [farmhouse] there are thousands of acres of dead olive trees, thousands,” Mirren told the Golden Globes website in 2023.
She said that she had lost her 80 trees to Xylella but replanted the Favoloso variety that has proven to be resistant to the disease. The actress is an adviser to the Italian non-profit organisation Save the Olives, which brings together agronomists, farmers and researchers.
With no cure yet found, the experts are breeding new Xylella-resistant cultivars and training local farmers in how to graft them on to the ancient, gnarled trunks of centuries-old olive trees. The technique only works on trees yet to be infected, making their job a race against time as Xylella approaches Ostuni in Puglia, an area which boasts the biggest concentration of centuries-old trees in Italy.
The battle against Xylella was hampered a decade ago by social-media fuelled conspiracy theories in Italy that blamed multinationals for infecting trees because they wanted to introduce new genetically modified trees.
“It’s a huge disaster. And I don’t think Italians are really sufficiently conscious of it,” Mirren said in 2023. “I know there are articles from time to time in newspapers, but to me, it’s like losing this beautiful building. If this building was, you know, crumbling and collapsing, you’d say, ‘no, wait, we have to save this beautiful building’. If the Colosseum in Rome was falling into the ground, you’d say, ‘we have to save this’,” she said.
“These trees had been through world wars and all the history of Italy. They are the history of Italy.”
Dining and Cooking