[eng] This dissertation analyses the use of the olive in the oeuvre of Robert Graves (1883-1958) as
an emblem of love and rootedness. As a consequence of the dramatic advance of
industrialisation, many Victorian and Edwardian intellectuals visited the Mediterranean to
encounter the last vestiges of antiquity. Those travellers expressed their fondness of the olive
tree in their writings and considered it an epitome of the nature and culture of the area.
Decades later, Robert Graves moved to Majorca and presented his own point of view of the
Mediterranean and the olive. The aim of this paper is to scrutinise the role of the olive as a
symbol of fruitful and eternal love, as well as rootedness of the ancient world and Majorcan
identity in the work of Robert Graves. In order to achieve this, Graves’s poetry and short
narrative has been analysed, and data has been gathered from a variety of books and articles
by several scholars and British travellers from different centuries. Finally, I suggest that
while travel writers opt for other symbols during Graves’s time, he recovers the use of the
olive as a token in order to preserve the classic way of producing literature.