The olive that is ours.L'oliva che è nostra.
In the Sicilian of Castroreale, nustrali simply means "ours" — the native one, the olive of this place and no other. It is a rare cultivar slipping toward extinction, and the tree at the heart of everything Castruriali is working to save.
One olive, three names.
Like many native Sicilian cultivars, this olive has gathered different names over the centuries depending on who was speaking and where. To us and to the families who have always grown it, it is Nustrali. Its full varietal name is Castricianella (Castriciana Rapparina) — two catalogue names for one tree, a rare native cultivar found almost exclusively in the hills above Castroreale.
It is a hardy, small-fruited variety, well suited to the steep, free-draining volcanic terraces above Messina. Grown for oil rather than the table, it carries the green, peppery, faintly almond character that marks a true Sicilian extra virgin — and a depth that comes only from very old, very local roots.
Born of Castroreale.
Castroreale is a small hill town in the province of Messina, looking out across the groves toward the Aeolian sea. Its name comes from the Latin Castrum Regale — the "royal castle" — after the fortress raised here in the early fourteenth century under Frederick of Aragon. The tower that still crowns the town dates from that age — and beneath it the slopes have been worked for olives for far longer.
Sicily has been a crossroads of olive-growing for millennia, planted and replanted by Greeks, Romans, Arabs and Normans in turn. The native cultivars of each valley are the living memory of all that traffic — selected slowly, generation by generation, for the exact soil and weather of one place. Nustrali is most likely one of these: a local selection that took shape on the hills of Castroreale itself, carried forward by growers who simply called it "ours."
"Across Sicily, millions of olive trees stand abandoned — and among them, varieties found almost nowhere else on earth."
A variety on the edge.
As the old growers age and the young move to the cities, the groves that hold rare cultivars like Nustrali are being left to the wild. Without hands to prune, harvest and replant them, these trees stop being propagated — and a variety that exists only in a handful of valleys can vanish in a single generation, taking its flavour and its genetics with it forever.
Commercial growing rarely rescues them. The market rewards a few high-yield names planted everywhere, while the slow, small-fruited natives are pulled up or forgotten. Saving an olive like Nustrali means choosing, deliberately, to keep growing the thing that is harder and rarer — because it is ours and because once it is gone there is no getting it back.
Bringing it back to life.
Through Friends of Castruriali, we are reclaiming neglected groves around Castroreale and bringing the Nustrali back into careful cultivation — pruning old trees back to health, protecting the parent stock and propagating new ones from it so the variety has a future, not just a past.
Every bottle of Castruriali helps fund this work and anyone can take a more direct part: adopt an olive tree of your own through Friends of Castruriali and you restore a living root in Sicily — and a place in the story of the olive that is ours.