ANNALS OF AGRICULTURE
Renaissance Pears

Saviung the favorite fruits of the Medici

From The New Yorker
September 5, 2005

The Fiorentina is a squat and hippy pear, its dark-green skin blemished with black freckles. It is to supermarket fruit as real people are to supermodels. Until recently, the pear was thought to have disappeared from central Italy, where it once flourished. But Isabella Dalla Ragione, a forty-seven-year-old agronomist in Perugia, continued to look for it.

Dalla Ragione has straight brown hair and crooked teeth; she can look twenty years younger than her age or ten years older, depending on the angle of her head. She is a fast driver and an even faster talker, with a gift for making archeologia arborea, as she calls her vocation—the pursuit and recovery of old varieties of fruit—sound thrilling. She finds clues in many places: Renaissance paintings, obscure books, and the records that were kept by former owners in Umbria and Tuscany, where the climate is peculiarly advantageous for many kinds of fruit. Last year, while studying the catalogue of a large estate that once belonged to the Bufalini family, on the northern tip of Umbria, she came upon a reference to the Fiorentina. The Bufalini maintained villas with extensive gardens and orchards, from the fifteenth century on up to the nineteen-eighties, when the final landlord left the property to the state.

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Copyright © John Seabrook 2005. All rights reserved

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