“So we saved the forgotten fruits that were in danger of disappearing.”

“My story begins forty years ago, when my father began collecting fruit plants and objects from the farming world whose traces were now being completely lost, first in the area around Città di Castello and then in an ever-widening area that now includes Umbria, Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany and Marche. As a child I lived it as a treasure hunt, then it became a passion and finally my job: I graduated in agronomy and completed a doctorate on pears. This is really an activity very much akin to archaeology: we started by interviewing older farmers in the area, to collect their testimonies and memories; then we looked at other historical sources, such as archives, documents, shopping lists, cooking recipes, paintings. For example, in a painting by Francesco Melanzio da Montefalco we identified the so-called muso di bue apple, an apple similar to an upside-down pear, and three white cherries, very sweet and lacking in acidity, and we identified other fruits in works by Pinturicchio and Piero della Francesca. In particular, we focused on paintings made from the late fourteenth century through the sixteenth century, which are those in which fruit is best represented. Putting all this information together, we reconstructed dozens of ancient local varieties and, most importantly, tried to recover and save them. “