This week I've been staying in Florence, Italy, with day trips to the town of Siena and Bologna, both of which are slightly north of Florence. It has been a nice change of scenery, as these towns are not only less crowded due to their smaller tourist populations, but also more nature filled! In Rome I noticed less greenery than I'm used to seeing at home, as I'm from Oregon, which is a very green place. This week I noticed a lot of courtyards filled with various flowers and trees, many of which I sat in and enjoyed. One courtyard in particular really caught my eye, the courtyard of the Santo Stefano church, in Bologna, Italy. I spent some time walking through this church before finding myself walking into a courtyard filled with olive trees! Olive trees, and moreso, their fruit, are very important to the culture of Italy, yet I hadn't seen many, so this was a nice surprise!
Olive trees (their scientific name is Olea Europaea) are a smaller variety of evergreen shrubs/trees. They can get up to twenty to fifty feet depending on their specific variety, but most of them are pretty short. The ones I saw were maybe eight feet tall, with pretty thin trunks, and long silvery green leaves that look like ovals that have been squished flat.
