Large farms or estates may well still have their own mill (frantoio) and indeed the bulk of the photographs on these pages are from a local estate, but many growers will cart off their olives to the local frantoio comunale to be pressed.
Timing is crucial here - once the olives are picked they will be spread out on the floor and turned daily to stop them from decomposing, but the fruit really need to be pressed within a week or so picking and you need to make sure that you have booked your spot at the mill well in advance.

The minimum weight of olives needed for your own press is around 250 kilos, otherwise your olives go into a communal pressing and you receive a percentage of oil in return. The cost of pressing is minimal as the mill owners make money from selling on the residue of the pressing to the large producers who will extract the remaining oil in ways far less traditional.

So, the olives are weighed and tipped into the first container. From here they are passed over a 'blower' which will remove any leaves and small twigs that remain. They may well be given a rinse in running water before going into the stone mashing pit to be ground into a coarse paste by slowly rotating enormous stone wheels.

These will nowadays be electrically powered, but there are still working mills that are entirely water-driven and it is (of course) maintained that these mills produce an oil of higher quality. The photographs in our example show the old workings of a frantoio that was entirely horse-powered. Well, mule-powered then.