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Picking Olives, and Tasting Olive Oil in Italy

In some quarters this past holiday season, a popular gift was an elegant bottle of extra-virgin olive oil. The staple of the Mediterranean diet is not only the ultimate oil to drizzle over gourmet dishes -- it's also increasingly recommended for its health benefits.

In Italy, it's the season for the olive harvest, so NPR's Sylvia Poggioli went out to the Tuscan countryside to sample this year's vintage and learn how Italy's world-famous olive oil is made.

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Sylvia Poggioli is senior European correspondent for NPR's International Desk covering political, economic, and cultural news in Italy, the Vatican, Western Europe, and the Balkans. Poggioli's on-air reporting and analysis have encompassed the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the turbulent civil war in the former Yugoslavia, and how immigration has transformed European societies.