L'Italo-Americano

hung in a cool outbuilding for the winter. The growers who still do it obtained Slow Food presidium status in 2011. What shaped the oddest tomatoes of Sicily was the absence of water: around Paceco, in the province of T r a p a n i , a n d o u t t o w a r d Erice and Valderice, the piz- zutello grows on heavy clay with no irrigation at all, a small fruit tapering to the point that gives it its name, with dry, fine flesh; it is the tomato behind pesto tra- panese and the local pizza origanata, and the ones des- tined for winter are picked as they begin to turn, threaded onto twine in bunches called pennule, and hung. Inland, in the Bilìci valley, the same p r i n c i p l e p r o d u c e d t h e siccagno – from siccagni, dialect for grown dry – har- v e s t e d f r o m m i d - J u l y through August across Mari- anopoli, Villalba, Valledolmo and Sclafani Bagni, where the provinces of Caltanissetta Vesuvian family eats fresh, untreated fruit in February. Naples scatters them over pizza and puts them up in jars as pacchetelle. The DOP certification came in Decem- ber 2009. P u g l i a w o r k s t h e s a m e t r i c k o n t h e c o a s t a l s t r i p between Fasano and Ostuni, where the Regina di Torre Canne has been grown since the late eighteenth century. It i s a r o u n d t o m a t o o f a n o u n c e o r s o , d e e p r e d a t m a t u r i t y , a n d i t t a k e s i t s name from the sepals that lift i n t o a l i t t l e c r o w n a s i t ripens. The wells along that s h o r e d r a w u p b r a c k i s h water, and the salt is credited with the fruit's sweet-and- sharp flavor and its formida- bly thick skin. Seedlings go out in late March and the harvest runs from July into A u g u s t , a f t e r w h i c h t h e tomatoes are threaded onto cotton string, three strands tied together with hemp rope i n t o a r a m a s o l a – o r ramasàule, in dialect – and and Palermo meet. Dry farm- ing costs a grower a great deal of yield, and the practice was nearly abandoned before a f e w p r o d u c e r s , a m o n g them Francesco Di Gesu at Villalba, went looking for surviving local seed and put roughly five acres back into production, selling passata, triple concentrate and dried tomatoes. W h e r e S i c i l y b r e d f o r drought, Calabria bred for b u l k , a n d t h e B e l m o n t e tomato of the coastal hills around Cosenza, a province that still accounts for some seventy percent of the crop, c o m e s i n t w o s h a p e s : a cuore di bue of about a pound, and a Gigante that runs two to three pounds, w i t h s p e c i m e n s c l o s e t o seven pounds on record. It ripens to an unusual pale pink, ribbed and often still green at the shoulders. Local tradition holds that the seed c a m e h o m e i n t h e e a r l y 1900s in the pocket of a Cal- a b r i a n w h o h a d b e e n t o America. Since 2003, each f r u i t h a s c a r r i e d i t s o w n m u n i c i p a l d e n o m i n a t i o n sticker, and the town eats it in thick slices dressed with olive oil, sea salt, oregano or basil, and chili. The most consequential r e s c u e h a p p e n e d a r o u n d Naples in the mid-1990s, when researchers combing the Agro nocerino-sarnese, a c r o s s t h e p r o v i n c e s o f Naples, Avellino and Salerno, w e n t l o o k i n g f o r w h a t r e m a i n e d o f t h e o l d S a n Marzano gene pool and selected some thirty histori- cal ecotypes still viable in open fields. Thin-skinned, low in acid, they hold their flavor after processing better than the industrial hybrids that displaced them, and they are picked from July to the end of September. The revival of these toma- toes tells us a lot about the importance of keeping alive the relationship between a crop and the environment that influenced it through time; because if each of the varieties we mentioned still survives, it's because genera- tions of growers understood their value long before the market did. Flanders recorded a fruit that was red, yellow, golden a n d b r o w n , r i b b e d a n d pointed as often as round. Pomi d'oro, golden apples, was a plain description, since a great many of the early ones really were yellow. O n t h e s l o p e s o f t h e Somma-Vesuvio complex, across roughly 1,200 acres in t h e p r o v i n c e o f N a p l e s , g r o w e r s s t i l l r a i s e t h e pomodorino del pienno- lo, a small oval berry that never passes an ounce, with a sharp little point at the end the Neapolitans call the pizzo and a skin thick enough to seem like a defect. The vines get little water, and the pyro- clastic soil left by the moun- tain's eruptions gives the fruit its acidity. The skin explains itself at harvest, w h e n w h o l e c l u s t e r s a r e b o u n d t o g e t h e r i n t o o n e heavy hanging bundle, the piennolo, and left in an airy room where the tomatoes go o n r i p e n i n g f o r s e v e n o r eight months, which is how a F or centuries, Ital- i a n t o m a t o e s w e r e a n y t h i n g b u t u n i f o r m . They came in dif- ferent shapes, colors, sizes and textures, each adapted to a particular landscape and climate. Many of these vari- e t i e s n e a r l y d i s a p p e a r e d when modern agriculture began to prefer tomatoes that were easier to grow, trans- p o r t , a n d s e l l , b u t t o d a y , g r o w e r s a c r o s s I t a l y a r e bringing some of the coun- try's most unusual tomatoes back from the edge of extinc- tion, each one telling a story of place and adaptation. P i c k a C a n e s t r i n o d i Lucca off the vine in August and it looks like a tomato that has gone wrong: lop- s i d e d a n d d e e p l y r i b b e d , more basket than sphere, which is exactly what the name says, as it comes from canestro. The shoulders stay green when the rest of the fruit has gone red, and a scat- ter of fine cracks runs just below the stem. It weighs five to seven ounces, occasionally two-thirds of a pound, and cut open, it gives up little water and hardly any seed, just dense sweet flesh with almost no acid behind it. Families around Lucca and Capannori grew it in their kitchen gardens for genera- tions until the hybrid costo- luti arrived in the 1960s, uni- form and sturdy enough to s u r v i v e a t r u c k , a n d t h e Canestrino nearly went out of the world with the decade. It came through because a handful of growers kept sav- ing seed, and in 2015, it went onto Tuscany's register of native varieties at risk of extinction. When tomatoes reached Europe from the Americas in the sixteenth century, they came as a curiosity for noble- men's gardens and a puzzle f o r n a t u r a l i s t s : P i e t r o Andrea Mattioli published the first description of it in 1544, the botanical garden at Pisa was collecting speci- mens by the 1550s, and the naturalists who cataloged it across Italy, Germany and THURSDAY, AUGUST 20, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 26 L'Italo-Americano The strangest tomatoes in Italy, and why they almost disappeared CHIARA D'ALESSIO Clusters of traditional Italian tomatoes hang to ripen and keep through the winter; inset, a selection of richly colored heritage varieties reflects the extraordinary range of shapes, sizes and textures preserved by growers across Italy (Image generated using Adobe Illustrator AI) LIFESTYLE FASHION FOOD ARTS ADVICE

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