The Soundscape of the Olive Grove: Listening to Puglia After Xylella

The devastation of Salento’s olive groves has been photographed from roadsides, drones and passing trains. Yet one archive remains largely unexamined: the acoustic life once held beneath those crowns.

The death of an olive grove is easy to recognise from a distance. Foliage recedes. Silver-green expanses acquire the colour of old rope. Branches lose their volume until the trees resemble drawings made directly upon the sky. Across southern Puglia, the progress of Xylella fastidiosa has usually been represented through such visible evidence: the desiccated crown, the uprooted trunk, the repeated vacancy of fields once occupied by trees.

A photograph can preserve the form of a vanished tree, but sound leaves fewer remains. It cannot easily retain the manner in which wind moved through a mature canopy, the distance from which a voice carried during the harvest, or the changing density of birdsong between a cultivated grove and an abandoned field. Once the physical arrangement of a landscape has been broken, its acoustics may survive only in faulty memory — and the olive grove had seldom been listened to systematically even before the epidemic began.

The first European outbreak of Xylella fastidiosa subsp. pauca was identified in Salento in 2013. The bacterium, carried principally through the region by sap-feeding insects such as the meadow spittlebug, colonises the vessels through which a tree moves water. Its arrival began an epidemic that reached well beyond the trees themselves: into farm income, local jobs, inherited custom, the very appearance of the peninsula.

A systematic review published in Landscape Ecology in 2026, following PRISMA methodology across the Scopus, Web of Science and CAB Abstracts databases, identified twenty studies of Mediterranean olive-grove soundscapes published between 2014 and 2024, most of them Italian in origin. The overwhelming majority approached the grove through ecoacoustics, addressing the biological signals of the various taxa present rather than the cultural or historical layers of sound. Traditional music, human activity and the acoustic marks by which a community recognises its own landscape remained almost entirely outside the literature. The omission matters because the olive grove was never silent countryside. It was an acoustic structure made slowly by cultivation.

I. An Architecture Made of Intervals

A mature olive grove does not resemble a forest. Its trees stand apart. Light reaches the earth between them. The canopy interrupts the open field without closing it. Trunks widen into chambers, fissures and dark internal shelves. Underfoot there may be grass, bare soil, fallen leaves or limestone. A dry-stone wall marks the boundary while providing cavities for plants, insects, reptiles and small mammals — and every element of this arrangement influences what may be heard.

The open distance between trees allows certain calls to travel. Dense crowns soften others. Leaves answer a weak wind with a dry, restrained susurration, unlike the heavier movement of oak or the continuous wash produced by pine. The wall returns a nearby sound while obstructing another at ground level. Even the treatment of vegetation beneath the trees changes the acoustic community that gathers there.

Soundscape studies have therefore proved useful in distinguishing forms of agricultural management. Research reviewed in the 2026 study associates traditional or organic cultivation with greater avian richness and higher measures of acoustic complexity. Agricultural intensification and mechanisation, by contrast, were found to constitute a serious threat to biodiversity, with the richness and complexity of recorded sounds broadly corresponding to the environmental quality of the agrosystem. Mechanisation adds its own frequencies, sometimes masking the quieter biological activity beneath. Such measurements are useful in detecting abundance, variation and interruption, though they translate a living place into indices and reveal only part of the grove’s history.

A microphone placed beneath an olive tree records more than an ecological condition. It enters an agricultural arrangement inherited through pruning, grafting, land division and repeated passage. What appears natural has been composed by human labour over many generations. The famous trees of Puglia acquired their forms through an exchange between biological age and continual intervention; regional law eventually recognised monumental olive trees for their historical, anthropological and landscape value, extending protection beyond their productive function. The grove was therefore an architecture without a completed plan, altered slightly each season, each generation receiving an acoustic space shaped by previous hands.

II. The Agricultural Year Had a Voice

Before engines spread through the countryside, agricultural work could often be located by ear. Pruning placed the intermittent strike of metal among the branches. During harvest, sheets and nets were opened beneath the trees. Ladders shifted against trunks. Olives fell through foliage, accumulated on cloth, then passed into sacks or containers. The voices of workers moved between neighbouring trees, approaching and receding according to the progress of the day.

The work should not be softened into pastoral entertainment. Olive gathering required long hours in damp autumn weather or winter cold. Bodies remained bent. Payment could be poor. The agrarian South carried relations of ownership and dependency rarely visible in contemporary celebrations of tradition, and singing belonged to this difficult economy rather than standing apart from it.

Field recordings preserved by the Archivio Sonoro della Puglia give this claim a face. Among the voices associated with the furnieddhi — stone shelters where harvesters took refuge and where different repertoires met and mixed — is that of Niceta Petrachi, known as la Simpatichina. Speaking to the researcher Enza Pagliara, she recalls the gathering of tobacco, coffee and olives, and the way the effort of the harvest was transfigured by a passion for the land and for singing itself.

The folklorist Maurizio Nocera, cited in the same archive, makes the point that matters most for how these sounds should be read. Such work songs were often not songs of protest, but reiterated poetic verses about love, sung alone by each worker from dawn until dusk: a collective means of exorcising the harshness of daily conditions. A courtship song performed among the trees belonged to the labouring day as surely as the sound of tools. Its private text was at once a survival strategy and a piece of folklore.

This distinction removes the songs from folklore’s decorative cabinet. They did not merely describe rural life; they regulated breath, accompanied repetitive motion, carried private speech across collective labour. Their setting affected their form. An unaccompanied voice moving through separated trees belonged to another acoustic world from the same melody amplified on a festival stage.

The harvest continued underground, in the hypogeal mills excavated into limestone across Salento. Their position below ground helped maintain the temperature required for the oil to remain fluid. Workers could remain within these enclosed spaces from autumn until spring, alongside the animals that powered the millstone. A mule or donkey, often blindfolded, walked around the central mechanism. Stone revolved against stone. Wooden presses strained under pressure. Liquid passed into settling pits cut from the rock. The seasonal life of the olive moved from an airy landscape into a resonant interior, where hooves, gears, human commands and the low friction of the millstone were compressed inside a chamber with few openings.

Much of the oil produced there was lampante oil, exported through Gallipoli for illumination and industrial use. Salento’s rural year was connected to distant cities through a substance made in darkness, then burned elsewhere as light.

The history of the olive landscape contains two distinct acoustic spaces: voices dispersed through the grove and labour enclosed within the subterranean mill. Modern accounts usually preserve their objects. Nets, presses, millstones and ceramic vessels remain available to museums. The sounds that gave those objects duration are harder to exhibit.

III. What Disappeared Between the Trees

The devastation caused by Xylella did not create silence. In many affected areas, the opposite occurred: sounds formerly softened by vegetation now cross exposed ground with greater clarity. A vehicle on a provincial road may seem nearer. Wind meets fewer leaves. Machinery carries across several abandoned plots without being interrupted by mature crowns. What was lost, then, is not sound itself but its former proportion — the balance between what once travelled easily through a grove and what was absorbed by it.

As foliage declined, habitat contracted. Old trunks remained standing for a time, though their ecological function changed. Insects associated with living wood or particular forms of ground cover encountered another environment. Birds lost shelter, feeding sites or perches. Research on peri-urban olive landscapes affected by the disease has found that the conversion of monumental groves into uncultivated ground brings a measurable worsening of the local soundscape. The loss of fauna associated with the old olive groves degrades the acoustic quality of the surrounding green space alongside its other ecosystem services.

Agricultural activity ceased in some plots; elsewhere it acquired the episodic noise of emergency — sampling, pruning, cutting, uprooting, soil management. The fight against Xylella has itself become a seasonal soundtrack imposed on the fields year after year. In 2026, the Regione Puglia again required superficial soil operations across designated municipalities to reduce juvenile vector populations, with ploughing, harrowing, milling or mowing assigned spring deadlines according to altitude. These measures answer a phytosanitary necessity, but they also show how the epidemic continues to reshape the ground beneath the trees, season by season.

The loss of canopy also changes the thermal conditions in which sound is produced and heard. Insect activity, human work, wind movement and the timing of animal calls respond in different ways to heat. A landscape can remain recognisable on a map while losing the relations that once made it habitable.

This is especially evident in Salento, where olive cultivation had become nearly continuous across large territories. One grove answered the next; their edges met roads, masserie, quarries, villages and surviving patches of Mediterranean vegetation. The epidemic broke that continuity unevenly. Some trees died where they stood, some were removed, certain fields returned to scrub, others awaited new cultivation.

The resulting soundscape is neither the old grove nor an empty field. It occupies an unstable interval between ecological states, one poorly served by the language of silence. Silence suggests a clean removal. Xylella has produced something more difficult: the persistence of familiar outlines after their former acoustic life has thinned away.

IV. Replanting the Audible Landscape

Not every acoustic trace of the epidemic lies beyond human hearing by accident. Some of it was always there, simply pitched below the threshold of the ear.

The meadow spittlebug, Philaenus spumarius, the principal vector carrying Xylella between olive trees in Apulian orchards, does not communicate through sounds a person standing in the grove could perceive. Like many small insects, it exchanges signals as vibrations travelling through the stems and leaves on which it stands. These signals are used during mating, when a female calls and establishes a duet with a responding male.

Entomologists using laser vibrometers to record the signals directly from leaf surfaces have found that male and female repertoires each consist of three distinct vibrational signals. Pair formation begins with the calling signal of a receptive female and continues until a duet is established and the male reaches her on the plant. Researchers working on the insect have proposed turning that private channel against it. Continuous low-frequency broad-band noise has been shown to disrupt pair formation, apparently by preventing the insects from locating one another. This opens a possible route towards vibrational mating disruption without the use of pesticides.

The implications extend beyond vector control. Under the name of biotremology, a field now extending soundscape ecology towards what has been called the vibroscape, the insect responsible for spreading the disease has become the subject of the most literal act of listening produced by the epidemic. Not birdsong, not wind through leaves, not the memory of a harvest song, but the courtship signal of a small insect, amplified from silence and answered with engineered noise.

The archive this essay has been arguing for already exists in one narrow, technical corner: inaudible, exact, aimed at controlling a population rather than understanding a landscape. Puglia’s acoustic response to Xylella has proceeded at different scales that have scarcely been considered together. One concerns the ecological and cultural soundscape of the grove. Another enters the vibrational world of the vector itself.

Research presented at the fifth European conference on Xylella, held at Mola di Bari in June 2026, offered cautious evidence of progress in resistant cultivars, vector management, biological control and monitoring. The recovery of olive cultivation is no longer discussed solely as an abstract hope. Field trials and longer studies, including the vibrational work described above, are beginning to supply practical knowledge for affected territories.

New trees can restore production. Age is another matter. A young plantation lacks the cavities of monumental trunks, the broad crowns developed through decades of pruning, the irregular distances inherited from older systems of cultivation. Its ecological communities will assemble gradually. The sound of harvest may return within a few years; the acoustic depth of an ancient grove requires a longer duration.

Restoration is not futile. It simply answers a different question from the one usually asked: how much of the previous landscape should be reconstructed, which agricultural forms can remain economically viable, and what room will be allowed for ground vegetation, birds, insects, old walls and uncultivated margins. A recovered soundscape would emerge from these decisions, revealing whether the new olive country had become an orchard alone or a habitat again.

The 2026 review calls for the identification and protection of the olive grove’s characteristic soundmarks, using a term developed by R. Murray Schafer for sounds through which a community recognises a place. In Puglia, the work needs to begin before memory supplies a false coherence to what has been lost.

An acoustic archive of the post-Xylella landscape should record several conditions separately: a surviving monumental grove, trees in active decline, a field of dead standing trunks, cleared land, young resistant plantings, manual harvest, mechanised harvest, an abandoned hypogeal mill, a working modern press — and, where instruments allow, the vibrational exchange beneath a single leaf. Manufacturing Mediterranean atmosphere is not the purpose. The task is to document differences in audibility at every scale the landscape possesses.

Recordings collected over years might reveal a recovery invisible to ordinary photography. They might also register another failure. The olive tree has long been used as an emblem of permanence; Xylella exposed the historical weakness concealed by that emblem. The trees were ancient, but the landscape holding them together remained vulnerable to trade, pathogens, political delay, agricultural economics and ecological simplification.

To listen after Xylella is to encounter that vulnerability without reducing the grove to ruin. Dead trees still alter the wind. New shoots shelter insects. Work resumes unevenly. The landscape has entered another historical form, though its eventual character remains unsettled.

The question is whether Puglia will recognise the acoustic inheritance of its olive groves — audible and inaudible alike — while there is still time to hear the difference.

Further Reading & Sources

Primary and Documentary Sources: Regione Puglia, official Xylella emergency portal, phytosanitary measures and Piano d’azione per contrastare la diffusione di Xylella fastidiosa in Puglia 2024–2026; Regione Puglia, Regional Law no. 14 of 4 June 2007, Tutela e valorizzazione del paesaggio degli ulivi monumentali della Puglia; Archivio Sonoro della Puglia, Fondo Brizio Montinaro, recordings and documentation concerning olive-harvest songs and other forms of Salentine work singing; Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione, Itinerari Digitali, historical materials on Salento’s underground olive mills and the lampante-oil trade through Gallipoli.

Research Sources: Irene Escudero-Fuentes, Isabel María Ayala-Herrera and Virginia Sánchez-López, “The Soundscape of the Olive Grove: A Systematic Review within the Mediterranean Context,” Landscape Ecology 41, article 33 (2026); European Food Safety Authority, proceedings and reports from the Fifth European Conference on Xylella fastidiosa, held at Mola di Bari in June 2026; R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World; selected studies on Mediterranean ecoacoustics, olive-grove biodiversity, agricultural intensification, acoustic complexity and the ecological consequences of canopy loss.

Editorial Note

This article was developed as an Audible Landscape essay, combining ecoacoustic research, rural history, historical geography and documentary sources concerning olive cultivation in Salento.

Hwael Mag distinguishes the findings of soundscape ecology from the essay’s wider historical interpretation. The proposition that Xylella has altered an inherited structure of audibility — changing the reach of voices, wind, machinery, birds and seasonal labour across the countryside — is an original Hwael Mag critical argument. The related idea that an olive landscape cannot be acoustically restored simply by planting new trees also belongs to this interpretation: production may return within years, while cavities, mature crowns, ecological continuities and remembered forms of work require a longer duration.

The essay does not describe the post-Xylella countryside as silent. Such language would conceal the more complicated reality of exposed ground, altered sound propagation, interrupted habitats and newly dominant mechanical or roadside noise. It also avoids presenting the former olive economy as an untouched pastoral world. Harvesting and underground milling belonged to demanding systems of labour whose songs carried fatigue, social dependence and private expression through shared working spaces.

Xylella is treated here as one force within a broader transformation. Agricultural intensification, abandonment, changing temperatures, traffic, mechanisation and land-management decisions continue to shape what can be heard in Puglia’s olive country. The acoustic landscape remains historical because these pressures accumulate within it.

Last revised: August 2026