The Orchard

The real mountain fruits..

... are wild chestnuts and strawberries but in the farm, with the cure of the man, you can find plums, pears and apples particularly resistant to the climates of these places. The fruit that grows spontaneously on the trees is smaller and irregular than the ones you may find in the stores, but much more tasty.

Plums..

give generous harvests, even five times per year, from June till October. Do you know how to measure the maturity of a plum? Easy: give a light touch and decide: it’s more practical! The Italian word for plum is SUSINA which seems to derive from SUSA, the possible origin place in Mesopotamia, or from an Italian dialect SUCCIARE (to suck) or from Latin SUCINA which means amber color.

Apple..

cultivated all over the world, in Europe it above all comes from Italy and France. In Italy 80% of the production comes from Trentino. The apple tree resists well to very rigid temperatures, until -25°C. The apple is very rich in symbolism. In the celtic tradition, the apple is symbol of science and magic and is a wonderful food: who eats it will no more be hungry neither thirsty, neither will know diseases (from here the saying: “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”). The Merlino Wizard teaches under an apple tree. The apple is the symbol also of youth, renewal and freshness. It’s told that Alexander The Magnificent, in his search of the water of life in India, found apples that held the monks alive till the age of 400. The spherical shape of the apple means the satisfaction of human desires. The fact that God in the garden of Eden had forbidden to eat apples, is a warning from letting these desires predominate.
In the mountains, where it’s colder and the winter is longer, the fruits mature even a month later than in the flatland, but they have another taste!