For centuries, Italian agriculture produced an abundance of fruit. Today, Italy is still a major producer of pears, but only four varieties of them are still found. A century ago, there were hundreds of varieties. Six centuries ago, many different kinds of fruit trees grew in the country, among them apples, plums, grapes, pears and cherries.
Isabella Dalla Ragione, who lives in rural Perugia, Italy, has made it her task to help restore the agricultural biodiversity of the abundant fruit trees for which Italy was once renounced. Though industrial agriculture has succeeded in creating a few productive varieties, they have a simple genetic pattern no longer capable of dealing with challenges such as drought and climate change.
Her father, Livio Dalla Ragione, taught art at a local university and was a pioneer of a rural farm and food movement in Italy that focused on planting local fruit tree varieties that had been abandoned. Together in 1989, she and her father founded Archeologia Arborea, which focused on researching the lost fruit tree species. Livio died in 2007, but Dalla continues their work.
In 2006, her research led her to a palazzo about 10 miles from her home that had housed the Bufalini family. They were major Umbrian landowners in the 16th century. There, she found boxes of old paper records that inventoried the Bufalini crops.
When she took a closer look at the ceiling of the palazzo that featured the 16th century fresco by Cristofano Gherardi, she found something even more revealing. The fresco showed Prometheus delivering fire to humans. Many ancient fruits she had been studying in the Bufalini archives were part of that painting.
In the November 2024 Smithsonian Magazine article The Fruit Detective by Mark Schapiro, Dalla is quoted as saying, "I put together that the art was at the same period of time as the documents. For me, it was an incredible connection." The fruit trees she and her father had spent much time growing were descendants of fruits from that centuries old time.
To help advance her work, Dalla earned a PhD in biodiversity from the University of Perugia in 2017. Her doctoral thesis involved analyzing the genomes of hundreds of pear varieties. In that process, she discovered that older pears from the 15th century and earlier had more genetic diversity than today's varieties have. Greater diversity helped the fruit adapt to shifting conditions through the centuries.
In his article, Schapiro wrote, "They might not produce as much per tree as modern varieties, but their traits helped them survive new pests and changing weather conditions, meaning they produced fruit more steadily over decades and even centuries."
Dalla continues to spot ancient fruit in centuries old paintings, and she is determined to continue her work of bringing back an abundance of the fruit that once thrived in Italy centuries ago.
