Every September, the old kitchen ceiling of San Lorenzo di Lerchi turns to gold. Tantalising clusters of moscatello, trebbiano and malvasia grapes hang above an open fire, drying out for four months until February, when the sugary fruit is pressed to make vin santo. There was a time, explains Isabella dalla Ragione, when every house in this part of Umbria made the amber-coloured digestif. Gently smoked by the fire, the grapes would also absorb the fumes and flavours of whatever was cooked on it. The spectacle is a rare one now, ‘But I think it's the most beautiful ceiling you could ever see,’ says Isabella, who greets February as regretfully as someone taking down the Christmas decorations.
This passion for keeping alive tradition is one that Isabella, a trained agronomist, shared with her father, Livio, who bought San Lorenzo in the 1960s. Set on a hilltop in the High Tiber Valley in northern Umbria, the foundations of the house date to the 12th century, when it was an isolated pieve, or rural church. Later serving as a small monastery in the 16th and 17th centuries, it was celebrated locally for the fruit trees cultivated by its friars. When Livio dalla Ragione took it on, it had been derelict for two decades; all that was left in the old terraced vineyard were a few almonds and plums, and a large walnut tree. Father and daughter’s desire to safeguard the knowledge of the past has seen San Lorenzo's orchard thriving again, planted with an ever-growing collection of Umbrian and Tuscan fruit varieties rescued from the brink of extinction.
A particular fig eaten with a chunk of bread was to Livio, it seems, as a tea-dunked madeleine to Proust. The origins of the project Isabella calls ‘arboreal archaeology’ began, over 40 years ago, with a quest to rediscover the flavours of Livio’s childhood, when he would pinch briaca pears or fiorentina apples from a neighbour’s plot. Where were these old varieties now? With the countryside largely abandoned postwar, and much of the land turned over to large-scale agriculture, most of these trees – which had for centuries provided not only food but also firewood, shelter, boundary markers, even shoes – had disappeared. Worse, Isabella explains, it was common for tenant farmers at the end of their work contract to cut down their fruit trees: if they couldn’t have them, no-one would.
Following clues from locals old enough to remember specific trees and their locations, Isabella and her father hunted through family estates, monasteries, convents and abandoned farms – anywhere likely to retain vestiges of that rich past. Over the years they were rewarded with the rediscovery of forgotten fruits such as the brutta e buona (‘ugly and good’) pear; the rosa in pietra (‘rose in the stone’) apple; and the giant fig of the Zoccolanti friars, who used to make clogs from the tree’s wood. From each mother tree they took a scion, or shoot, grafted it to new rootstock, and planted it at San Lorenzo, where the sloping, south-facing orchard looks out across an unchanged valley towards Tuscany.
Since Livio’s death in 2007 Isabella has continued their mission alone, travelling to San Lorenzo every day from Perugia, where she and her daughters are based, often sleeping over during the busy pruning and harvesting seasons. The house itself remains more or less as her father left it, decorated with much of what he ‘harvested’, as Isabella puts it, from the agricultural past – ‘He collected everything’. Outside, their peculiarly vital archive is now 350 trees strong (‘Yes, I know exactly how many because I prune each and every one myself!’), and includes 150 varieties of apple, pear, plum, peach, cherry, fig and almond, as well as sorb apples, medlars, cornelian cherries and quinces. Does she have a favourite? ‘That’s like asking a mother which is her favourite child!’ wails Isabella, with all the drama of the one-time actor she is. There are, however, two varieties especially close to her heart. The mela del castagno was the first discovery she and Livio made together, and is a good example of how a particular variety occurs in the first place. Probably a mutation of a wild apple, it had self-seeded in the hollow trunk of an old chestnut tree (hence its name), and had been cultivated by the farmer who found it there.
More recently, Isabella’s rediscovery of the elusive pera fiorentina was, she says, ‘like finding an unexpected treasure’. This was a pear she’d read about in the archives of a local noble family, the Bufalini, teasing references to it cropping up through the centuries: ‘The eleventh day of December 1635 we sent our landlord in Rome 500 fiorentina pears.’ She’d given up hope of finding it until a visit to the nearby hills around Pietralunga a few years ago: there, an octogenarian friend named Sergia, who had helped Isabella’s father when he was a partisan defending these same hills against the Germans, happened to mention the legendary pear – and that it was best baked whole with a few spices in red wine. After that it was only a matter of time before Isabella tracked down the tree itself.
The hard-won collection at San Lorenzo was only given official foundation status by the region in 2014, which entitles Isabella to some much-needed funding. But most interest still comes from abroad. She’s due to speak in Minneapolis about the connections between Renaissance art and contemporary fruit cultivation: poring over the archives at the Castello Bufalini, Isabella soon noticed links between the written descriptions of what had been grown in the castle gardens and the fruit represented in the 16th-century frescoes on the walls around her. She’ll also return to Kolomna in Russia, where she is assisting a project similar to her own – a much bigger challenge, she explains, because of the systematic destruction, post-1917, of records, properties, memories. ‘But this is the kind of situation I love: even if you only find small things, in this context it’s like finding paradise.’
Recently, American actor Bill Pullman, a fellow rare-fruit enthusiast, stayed at San Lorenzo for a couple of days: ‘He says he wants to work!’ a delighted Isabella told me before his arrival. Those not in a position to offer (such dashing) manual labour can adopt a tree from the collection. But sponsors who do make it for the annual harvest are under strict instructions: to honour a long-held tradition they must leave three gift fruits hanging on the tree: one for the sun, one for the earth – and one, of course, for the tree itself, in gratitude for all its hard graft.
For more information about Isabella dalla Ragione’s project, or to adopt a tree, visit archeologiaarborea.org
A version of this article appears in the August 2014 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
