Months before the har­vest, Enri­co sus­pect­ed the worst.  His grove of 700 olive trees had been sub­ject­ed to an unusu­al­ly cool and wet August, ide­al breed­ing con­di­tions for the Bac­tro­cera oleae, a fly that deposits its eggs beneath the skin of olives.  The late Octo­ber har­vest con­firmed his fears: the flies had laid waste to his crop.

Enri­co didn’t press any olive oil this sea­son.  He wasn’t alone.  Pro­duc­tion in Enrico’s region of Umbria is off 45 per­cent, slight­ly worse than the nation­wide 35 per­cent decline. La Repub­bli­ca has dubbed 2014 “the black year of Ital­ian olive oil.”  In a coun­try where each inhab­i­tant annu­al­ly con­sumes an aver­age of more than 26 pounds of the gold­en nec­tar, it is a seis­mic cul­tur­al event, one more reminder of the exis­ten­tial threats con­fronting Ital­ian traditions.

Enri­co embod­ies those tra­di­tions.  A lean and strong man in his 70s, Enri­co lives in a stone house built in 1503, the year the infa­mous Bor­gia Pope Alexan­der VI died.  Umbria was ruled by the Pope in those days, part of the “pat­ri­mo­ny of St. Peter,” ter­ri­to­ry that com­prised about one-third of the Ital­ian Penin­su­la.  Its ves­tige today is the 109 acres known as the Vatican.

The house and the small farm on which it is built have sur­vived five cen­turies of upheaval, dur­ing which the Ital­ian penin­su­la was divid­ed between the Pope and a suc­ces­sion of for­eign occu­piers, con­vulsed by peri­od­ic upris­ings, embroiled in a war of lib­er­a­tion, ruled by a king and – after two dev­as­tat­ing world wars – gov­erned as a repub­lic riv­en by fac­tion and plagued by instability.

The patch­work of Ital­ian cul­tures has endured all of that and more. Those cul­tures flour­ish on tongue and palate.  Cui­sine, like the many dialects spo­ken through­out the coun­try, is local.  There is no “Ital­ian” food, just as there is no “Ital­ian” wine.  Enrico’s olive oil is as dif­fer­ent from the oil of Puglia as the robust Umbri­an Sagran­ti­no is from Tus­can Chi­anti.  The lasagna and piz­za that Enrico’s wife pre­pares are noth­ing like those you’d find in Naples.  In that benight­ed city, you can’t get decent porchet­ta (slow-roast­ed piglet).  Neapoli­tans suf­fo­cate their porchet­ta beneath a moun­tain of condi­ments.  Enrico’s porchet­ta, slow-roast­ed over a wood fire and sold at his small stand just out­side the city gates, is served the way God intend­ed: hand-carved to order with a bit of salt on fresh­ly-baked bread.

An Italian’s iden­ti­ty con­sists in such small dis­tinc­tions.  It is ground­ed first in fam­i­ly, then in local­i­ty, and last­ly in nation­al­i­ty.  Gen­er­a­tions of polit­i­cal fig­ures – from Garibal­di and Cavour to Vit­to­rio Emanuele to Mus­soli­ni to Andreot­ti to Berlus­coni – have sought to over­come the cen­tripetal effects of this men­tal­i­ty through polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic centralization.

But erect­ing a wel­fare state and adopt­ing the euro have pro­duced nei­ther eco­nom­ic growth nor polit­i­cal sta­bil­i­ty.  Accord­ing to a study by the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics, that wel­fare state, by pre­fer­ring the inter­ests of old­er Ital­ians over their chil­dren, has helped pro­duce a soci­ety in which four of five young adults still live with their par­ents and where the country’s youth unem­ploy­ment rate exceeds 43 per­cent. A grow­ing num­ber of young Ital­ians are for­sak­ing the coun­try.  Unlike nine­teenth and twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry emi­grants, they tend to be bet­ter edu­cat­ed and more high­ly skilled than their cohorts.

All of which has left the gov­ern­ment short cash.  Its debt now stands at 133 per­cent of eco­nom­ic out­put, which has been shrink­ing since 2011. It is able to bor­row at afford­able rates only because a troi­ka of multi­na­tion­al author­i­ties – the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank, Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund and the Euro­pean Union – has stood behind its debt.

Mat­teo Ren­zi heads the country’s third con­sec­u­tive unelect­ed gov­ern­ment.  Like his pre­de­ces­sors, he has so far failed to con­vince an unco­op­er­a­tive par­lia­ment to adopt labor and fis­cal reforms that the troi­ka has demand­ed as a con­di­tion of con­tin­ued assis­tance. Elec­toral reform, a nec­es­sary pre­lude to con­sti­tut­ing a gov­ern­ing par­lia­men­tary major­i­ty, remains equal­ly elu­sive.  One won­ders how this all will hold together.

Such mat­ters seem far from Enrico’s mind.  He con­tin­ues to tend his orchard and pro­duce his del­i­ca­cies, as his for­bears have for gen­er­a­tions.  He still serves up porchet­ta at his stand, shar­ing that duty with his wife, daugh­ter and two granddaughters.

His grand­daugh­ters, like many Ital­ians of their gen­er­a­tion, have fixed their gaze far beyond the Umbri­an hori­zon.  They are very tal­ent­ed singers who want to pur­sue musi­cal careers in Ire­land, the U.K. or even the U.S.  Though thor­ough­ly Ital­ian, they call them­selves the Irish Ros­es.

Enri­co will tread more famil­iar ter­rain, doing bat­tle against the forces of nature that destroyed this year’s olive crop.  The New York Times blames the pesti­lence on glob­al warm­ing, an apoc­a­lyp­tic force against which the aged farmer would appear help­less. Per­haps.  But La Repub­bli­ca recent­ly pub­lished a gov­ern­ment doc­u­ment that urged farm­ers on in “the strug­gle against the olive fly.”  The doc­u­ment was signed by Prime Min­is­ter Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni.  In 1926.

The strug­gle against the olive fly is but one skir­mish in the end­less war to pre­serve Italy’s pris­mat­ic cul­tur­al tra­di­tions.  Those tra­di­tions, like Enrico’s house, have stood through cen­turies of fick­le weath­er, bad gov­ern­ment and mis­guid­ed economics.

They will sur­vive this as well.