Meet the Italian ‘Fruit Detective’ Who Investigates Centuries-Old Paintings for Clues About Produce That Has Disappeared From the Kitchen Table

When Isabella Dalla Ragione assesses a Renaissance painting, she doesn’t immediately notice the brushstrokes or the magnificence of the imagery. The first thing she notices is the fruit.

On a spring day earlier this year, I stride with Dalla Ragione into the National Gallery of Umbria, in a 14th-century stone castle built atop the hillside city of Perugia. Umbria, a region in central Italy next to Tuscany, is known more for its lush green spaces, hillside cities and Etruscan and Roman ruins than for its art. But the painters of Renaissance Italy traveled between regions, and some of the works on display in Perugia are as awe-inspiring as those in Florence. We breeze through room after room, passing a blur of masterworks by the likes of Gentile da Fabriano and Benozzo Gozzoli, until Dalla Ragione stops before a radiant painting that fills an entire room of its own. 

The arresting work is by Piero della Francesca, an artistic giant of the 15th century. It shows the Madonna, wrapped in a deep blue robe, cradling a towheaded baby Jesus. But Dalla Ragione points me to what looks like a small bunch of translucent marbles in Jesus’s tiny hand: cherries! They’re pale red with a white tint—acquaiola cherries, a variety that has almost disappeared in Italy but back then was quite common. Their juice was seen as symbolic of Christ’s blood. The vaulted ceiling, the spiritual imagery, the murmurs and footfalls of other museumgoers give the scene a sacred feeling. 

But before we can linger, Dalla Ragione, at 67 fast-talking and spirited, with chic glasses and stylishly short gray hair, rushes us past the painting and on to somewhere else. “Come on, let’s go, there’s another one you must see!” she insists as we take off down another long corridor. 

She steers us to one more Madonna with Child, the center of an altarpiece painted by Bernardino di Betto, better known as Pintoricchio, in 1495 or 1496. It is all glimmering blues and reds and golds. “Look, there,” she exclaims, pointing to the bottom of the painting. At the Madonna’s feet, just off the gold hem of her azure robe, are three gnarly looking apples—oddly shaped varieties you’d never see in a market today. 

For most viewers, they would be an afterthought. For Dalla Ragione, the apples, including a variety known in the fruit science lexicon as api piccola, represent a key to restoring Italy’s disappearing fruit agriculture, with characteristics not found in today’s apples: Crunchy and tart, they are capable of being stored at room temperature for about seven months and maintain their best qualities outside the fridge. And these ungainly apples are just one variety among scores of others that Dalla Ragione, who is among Italy’s foremost experts on tree fruits, has identified as being widely cultivated in the 16th century—and largely gone by the 21st, as genetic diversity among all of Italy’s major fruit trees continues to plunge. 

In fact, Dalla Ragione has spent more than a decade scouring the masterpieces of 15th- and 16th-century art for answers to one of the great questions of Italian agriculture: Whatever happened to the boisterous selection of fruits that, for centuries, were a celebrated part of Italian cuisine and culture? Slowly and indefatigably, she has been rediscovering those fruits, first in archives and paintings and then, incredibly, in small forgotten plots across Italy. Her nonprofit, Archeologia Arborea, is helping farmers and governments around the world preserve and even bring back into cultivation all manner of forgotten fruits. In the process, Dalla Ragione has become a globally renowned fruit detective, by recognizing in her country’s Renaissance artworks not only exceptional examples of cultural patrimony but also hidden messages from a bygone era of genetic abundance that can offer clues about how to recover what was seemingly lost.

Six centuries ago, Italy boasted hundreds of varieties for every fruit, each adapted to specific ecological niches. Apple, pear and cherry varieties across Umbria were different, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, from Venetian, Florentine or Piedmontese varieties. At the turn of the 20th century, the country was home to at least 1,000 pear varieties, according to Dalla Ragione. Today, Italy is one of Europe’s foremost producers of pears. Yet for both pears and apples, a mere four varieties each now compose more than 70 percent of the country’s production, compared with the hundreds of varieties that were common a century ago. A 2020 Atlas of Biodiversity commissioned by the Ministry of Agriculture—to which Dalla Ragione contributed—documents how dozens if not hundreds of varieties of peaches, cherries, grapes and apricots once cultivated in Italy’s many regions have shrunk to a handful of uniform varieties for each fruit nationwide.

The loss of those varieties isn’t just a question of lost deliciousness. It also means that we’ve lost centuries of adaptability encoded in the genes of the fruits of yesteryear. According to Mario Marino, an agronomist working with the Climate Change Division of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, who serves on the board of advisers for Archeologia Arborea, rediscovering the descendants of those old fruits will be crucial for Italy’s ability to withstand the unpredictable and increasingly dramatic effects of climate change. 

One of the few places where you can find some of these ancient fruits is 35 miles from the city of Perugia, high in the hills above the Tiber River, in the orchard surrounding Dalla Ragione’s family home. It takes some grinding of the gears in my rented Fiat to get up the dirt road leading to it. Eight centuries ago, the house was a Romanesque stone church. In the 1400s, the church became a monastery. The living quarters now house Dalla Ragione’s kitchen and workspace. 

From a window, you can see the orchard, covering about seven and a half acres that undulate softly down toward the river. It’s thick with more than 600 trees and plants encompassing 150 varieties; the orchard boasts 43 varieties of pear alone. Dalla Ragione’s desk, really a six-foot-long wooden slab, is piled with books and research materials, including a 600-year-old book about agriculture, centuries-old reports by municipal authorities on the fates of various crops, and oversized pictorial books of the Renaissance masters. 

“Here’s a book on Bellini,” she exclaims, flipping to a page that includes the famous painting often called Madonna col Bambino or sometimes Madonna della Pera (“Madonna With Child,” or “Madonna of the Pear”). “But it’s not a pear—it’s an apple!” She’s often finding such mistakes. Dalla Ragione identifies it as a “cow-nose” apple, quite common 600 years ago, extremely rare today and so named because its shape recalls an elongated snout. (The painting’s mistaken name almost certainly did not originate with Giovanni Bellini, but rather with later art historians, likely seeking to distinguish between the many “Madonna With Child” paintings of the time.) 

Dalla Ragione’s deepest connection to this land is through her father, Livio Dalla Ragione, born in Tuscany in 1922 and raised down the road from here in the medieval village of Città di Castello. After fighting in these hills as a partisan against the fascist Mussolini government, and then against the Nazis during the German occupation of Italy, he became part of the Arte Materica movement, centered in Rome, that favored using wood, textiles and other tactile ingredients for making art. He moved back to Umbria in 1960, bought the former monastery and turned it into a home for his family. While teaching art at a local university, Livio began researching the implements and practices of rural life in the region, which were already beginning to disappear as industrial farms replaced local farmers and those displaced farmers abandoned country life and moved to the cities. Livio was a pioneer of what is now a dynamic rural farm and food movement in Italy—and he planted this precious family orchard with local varieties that he’d seen farmers abandon. He also founded a folk art museum that still operates in Città di Castello. 

Dalla Ragione received her undergraduate degree in agronomy from the University of Perugia while also studying theater and acting with various troupes. She even took courses with a teacher from a renowned clown school in Paris. She describes living two lives during the 1980s—one in theaters as a performer, the other in the fields as an agronomist. At the time, the rise of industrial-scale farming in Italy and around the world was driving a rapid decline in crop diversity, as generic seeds that could be grown over vast areas replaced those adapted to specific regions. Local fruit varieties disappeared from the fields and the market; thousands of local breeders were bought out or were unable to compete. By her early 30s, Dalla Ragione recognized her true passion. “I had to decide whether to be a real actress, and go all around the world like an actress, without roots. Instead, I saw I needed my roots, my territory, my stories. And I left theater and focused my life on the fruit trees.” 

At the beginning, she followed her father around as he interviewed local farmers about lost and disappearing fruit varieties: “It was like an adventure for me, a little bit of a divertissement,” she recalls. “But nobody in those days talked about biodiversity or genetic erosion.” In 1989, when she was 32, she and her father founded Archeologia Arborea, the organization that would serve as an umbrella for their largely self-funded research into these lost species. Each still had a full-time job, Livio as a teacher, Isabella as an agronomist consulting with nearby regions on their biodiversity and agro-ecology strategies. 

Livio had combined his interests in art and farming into a kind of improvised anthropology, and Dalla Ragione says it was her father who inspired the multidisciplinary approach she pursues today, combining the tree sciences with art history, archival detective work and even the storytelling she learned from theater, which she says helps her communicate her findings to students, researchers and the public. After her father died in 2007, she says, “I continued his research, but I give it a more scientific dimension.” 

She also continued working as an agronomist on nationwide biodiversity conservation strategies, which included searching out the descendants of old regional fruit varieties. In 2006, her research led her to a palazzo, barely ten miles from her home, that once housed the Bufalini family, major Umbrian landowners in the 16th century. There, in a room filled with boxes of old paper records off the second-floor loggia, or balcony, Dalla Ragione pored through inventories of crops owed to the family by their tenant farmers, gardeners’ reports, records of centuries-old real-estate deals and other documents, many of them in ornate 16th-century handwriting. One inventory listed some 65 varieties of fruits the Bufalinis grew 600 years ago, including more than two dozen varieties of pears and apples, with such inviting names as pera del Duca di Cortona (a pear named after the duke of Cortona) and mele incarnate di Sestino (an apple named for its inward redness). It was a gold mine of names and descriptions of plants and trees.

But Dalla Ragione soon found that digging through centuries-old figures on a page could only get her so far. Then she had a revelation that quickened her hunt for ancient fruit trees. Inside the palazzo, she’d regularly pass stone walls hung with paintings evoking battles, religious iconography and mythical scenes. One day, she stopped and looked more carefully at the ceiling in the “Prometheus Room”—so-called because it features a 16th-century fresco by Cristofano Gherardi of Prometheus delivering fire to humans. Now she noticed for the first time that the pears and apples and plums and other fruits she had been reading about in the archive upstairs were scattered throughout the scene above her head. “At this moment, I understood the circle of connection between the documents, the frescoes and the real fruits,” she says. “I put together that the art was at the same period of time as the documents. For me, it was an incredible connection.” 

Fruits, when she started looking at paintings, were everywhere. She realized that paintings were not just art, they were evidence, and not only evidence of fruit from hundreds of years ago. They were also evidence that the fruits growing in her own orchard—the elongated pear, the snub-nosed apple, the yellowish-green plum—were probably descendants of those rendered in the frescoes and paintings she encountered. 

She also came to understand how lucky she was to be working in Italy, in many ways the center of Renaissance painting. Before the 15th century, almost all European artwork was focused on mythical or religious imagery. But in a shift away from the formal and thematic rigidity of the medieval period, many artists, often immersed in their own rural societies, began to paint nature and its bounty with increasingly devoted precision. Even more important, Dalla Ragione says, fruits often carried symbolic meaning—cherries the blood of Christ, pears the symbol of paradise after death, and so on. Painters needed to be precise in their renderings so that “the messages from the paintings had to arrive to everybody, rich and poor alike.” That lifelike precision means that Dalla Ragione can tell, by the placement of a fruit’s stem, or its shape, or the colors of its skin, not only the species of fruit but also the variety—that is, not only the difference between an apple and a pear, but the difference between one kind of apple or pear and another. Later artistic movements that prized imagination over figurative accuracy don’t offer remotely the same degree of precision. 

In the years since her eureka moment at Palazzo Bufalini, Dalla Ragione has turned Archeologia Arborea into a nonprofit research and educational foundation to support her scientific research, documenting fruit traits and the variety of environmental stresses trees can withstand—or cannot. In addition, Archeologia Arborea now accepts grants from philanthropists, mostly in Italy and the United States, and it works with scientific organizations like the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the University of Perugia. 

In 2017, Dalla Ragione obtained a PhD in biodiversity from the University of Perugia. For her doctoral thesis, she analyzed the genomes of hundreds of pear varieties, which led to a radical discovery: Older pears, dating back to the 15th century and earlier, have many more alleles—meaning more genetic diversity—than 21st-century varieties. “That diversity,” says Lorenzo Raggi, a researcher in agricultural genetics and biotechnologies at the University of Perugia, “can translate into a greater capacity to adapt to different conditions.” This genetic diversity also meant that there were huge differences among the fruits themselves, even those from the same roots. “One year the trees would produce fruits of one color, then the next year, another color,” Dalla Ragione says. It also gave these varieties the capacity to adapt to shifting conditions, generation after generation. 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. 

Those diverse traits are on brilliant display in the piles of multicolored and idiosyncratically shaped pears and apples inside what was once the nave of the 13th-century church that is now Dalla Ragione’s home. She calls the room her “apple chapel,” because it’s cold and dry enough to store fruits from her orchard for up to a year without refrigeration. Many of them are smaller than the fruits we’re accustomed to—slightly gnarled and misshapen, with occasional oblongs where we’re used to circles. Some taste tarter, others very sweet, and several are quite mushy; she usually turns them into jams or vinegars for her friends. But they are recognizable as pears and apples, the relatives of those we commonly encounter today. Without chemical boosters, however, many modern varieties “may have limited response to pests or weeds or diseases,” says Raggi. The older fruits may not be as big or as uniform as those today, he says, but they were selected by humans and the environment to survive—and conserving those diverse characteristics is a critically important part of Dalla Ragione’s work.

The importance of agricultural biodiversity, Dalla Ragione says, can be explained with a very human metaphor—language. She likens biodiversity on a farm to expanding a vocabulary. Conventional agriculture, with its limited genetic range, relies on a narrow vocabulary: “Industrial agriculture created a few varieties that are very productive in very precise conditions, with a lot of chemicals and a lot of water. The new varieties may be bigger and have more consistent color, but they have very few genes—few words. Their genetic patrimony is very simple. If you present the right question, they can answer, because maybe they have four or five or maybe ten words. But if you present other questions—like drought or climate change or other situations—they have no words to answer. They can’t answer because they do not have enough genetic variability inside to answer these questions. Old varieties have a big vocabulary. They have many words to answer these new questions.” 

In order to make use of those genetic “answers,” however, they need to be rediscovered not only in paintings or musty old feudal inventories but also in the ground. “Biodiversity is dynamic, it cannot be preserved like an object, like a piece of furniture,” Dalla Ragione says one afternoon as we drive the winding country roads of Umbria in search of fruit. “You can’t restore an ecosystem by putting seeds in a refrigerator!” 

Fortunately, central Italy, one of the country’s most fertile regions, has been host to a high concentration of Catholic saints: St. Benedict, St. Francis and St. Rita all lived in Umbria. As a result, the area is especially rich in monasteries that, Dalla Ragione knew, had old gardens and orchards that had escaped the farm consolidations over the past half-century thanks to their isolated locations—and their unwillingness to sell their land to agribusiness. (The monasteries retain considerable autonomy from the Vatican in how they manage their land.) So Dalla Ragione began visiting the still-active monasteries and convents where she had once walked with her father. There, she found her long-sought trees, originally planted centuries ago. Often untended for years, they had aged and survived for generations. Many were the direct descendants of the trees in Dalla Ragione’s beloved paintings. From their branches hung abundant quantities of fruit—often pockmarked and misshapen, but nevertheless real and sometimes even delicious. 

In many cases, Dalla Ragione found records and notes about the plants and trees in the gardens. “The friars, monks and nuns had time to write,” she says. “They documented their cultivations, what they bought, what foods they offered to guests, everything.” The modern monastic residents were curious about her interest in old fruits and generous when she asked to take sample cuttings back from their gardens and orchards. “I declared immediately that I was not there to pray!” she says, chuckling. She returned to her orchard with cuttings from the holy gardens, three or four each from a selection of figs, plums and pears, which she grafted onto her own stalks. 

Dalla Ragione hopes that those humble stalks, in turn, with their age-old resilience, will point toward a sustainable future for Italian tree fruits in a changing climate. At current emission levels, the average temperature in Italy, already breaking records, is headed toward a rise of 2 degrees Celsius or more by 2050 from its preindustrial average, according to a Europe-wide Climate Risk Atlas. Heat waves will continue to grow hotter and last longer, while the frequency of agricultural droughts at that temperature could increase in Italy by 50 percent. Last summer foreshadowed those conditions. Searing temperatures and drought devastated many farmers in the area where Dalla Ragione does much of her work. Meanwhile, dangerous new fungi, diseases and pests follow the heat. And the flip side of drought—the product of excess evaporation levels during heat waves—can lead to intense rains and serious floods, as occurred in Tuscany and surrounding regions last spring.

Such extremes are bound to accelerate in what scientists warn is a convergence between a climate crisis and a biodiversity crisis. The two are interlinked: Biodiverse ecosystems, enriching and bolstering to soil, are far more resilient to extremes. But Italian biodiversity, like that in the United States and elsewhere, is currently in free fall. Some 42 percent of Italian plant species in threatened environments face a risk of extinction, according to the Convention on Biological Diversity, a global agreement that calls for the protection of genetic resources from further ecological degradation. The more genetic erosion, the less we are able to respond to those changes, says Kent Nnadozie, executive secretary of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. “The current system breeds seeds for a set of conditions that are no longer,” he says. “The first rain used to be a sign to till and plant. Now it could be the first and last rain. Or the opposite—too much rain. Climate variability is why we need diverse varieties, those old, ancient varieties.”

To that end, Dalla Ragione’s work with Italian regional commissions to boost agricultural biodiversity—in Marche (which neighbors Umbria and Tuscany), Lazio (home to the city of Rome) and Emilia-Romagna (where you will find Bologna)—is a response to both crises. In that role, she studies threatened crops, collaborates on ways to conserve varieties and updates lists of regional crops. She also works with agricoltori custodi—custodian farmers—who receive subsidies to continue growing the old crops, helping to select robust varieties to preserve and cultivate, and helping them tend their traditional orchards and gardens. 

Meanwhile, she helps others around the world searching for their own ancient varieties. Twice a year she travels to Lebanon, during flowering and harvest times, to help resurrect local heritage cherries and apricots. (“So sweet!” she marvels.) She was there most recently this July but had to leave early because of rising tensions between Lebanon and Israel. In Jordan, she has consulted with the agriculture ministry on cultivating indigenous aloe vera plants, and she has helped train farmers in the West Bank in agro-ecology techniques for resurrecting ancient date palms. In years past, before Russia invaded Ukraine, she also made several research visits to the ancestral homes of the Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, after their estates requested her help reintroducing local apple varieties.

Back in Italy, Dalla Ragione is working to resurrect historic gardens at several 15th- and 16th-century villas and palazzos in Umbria and Marche. At the Palazzo Bufalini, where she had her epiphany that paintings offer critical insights into disappeared fruit varieties, I was able to see the literal fruits of her work. The balcony next to the archives where she commenced her research overlooks trees she planted about a dozen years ago, now flourishing with apricot, peach, apple and pear varieties descended from the varieties that grew there during the Bufalinis’ 16th-century heyday. What she’s trying to create, she says, are “living catalogs of biodiversity in the field.”

In her own orchard, as we walk along terraced rows of trees lined with wildflowers and cover crops and buzzing with pollinating bumblebees and other insects, Dalla Ragione makes it clear that bringing back agro-biodiversity is a meticulous, tree-by-tree, fruit-by-fruit, seed-by-seed endeavor. “It takes patience,” she says. “It’s kind of like the work of an ant—ants make tiny, very small steps, but they build a kingdom.” 

This place is her realm, and through persistence and obsession she has more than doubled the size of the orchard her father planted. There’s an apricot tree that could be the same one we’d seen evoked in a fresco attributed to Gentile da Fabriano and his students, The Seven Ages of Man, painted in 1412 across one wall of a corridor at the Palazzo Trinci in the Umbrian town of Foligno. In the work, each stage of life is represented by a different fruit. And so we stroll slowly past some of those stages. There’s a pear tree with thin branches holding tiny fruit barely emerged from the buds, representing infancy. And across from that, a peach tree, heavy with small roundish puffs that in the fresco symbolize old age. 

On the far edge of a small hill, another pear tree, its fruits more elongated, matches the Bufalini fresco. Farther down the slope, in the old part of the orchard planted by Dalla Ragione’s father, we find apples—young buds forming for the snub-nosed apples that look like pears (as in the mistakenly labeled Bellini), and the oblong apples at the feet of the Madonna in the Pintoricchio painting, now dangling midway to ripening from several trees. And here, on the path back toward her house, rests a low-slung bustle of hazelnuts, which apparently represented mature adulthood in Fabriano’s day. Nearby are cherries, reddish-white like those we saw in Jesus’s tiny hand, growing as tiny buds flickering on the branches. 

“I’m proud of my roots here in the countryside,” Dalla Ragione tells me as we walk the grounds. “These plants are our history. These plants will be our future. Twenty years ago, nobody thought about biodiversity. They kidded me, they said, ‘You are very romantic to work with these ancient varieties.’ Now people understand: We need these old varieties to answer for the problems of the future. Without them, without roots, we are just leaves in the wind.”