At the outset of this piece I feel the need to make a small clarification, perhaps needless for the majority of readers. More than once, in the course of my work, I have gone in search of seeds. I have looked for them and gathered them in uncultivated ground, in farmers’ fields, in warehouses, in cellars (sometimes preserved in the most bizarre ways) and even in city shops. It was precisely in the shops, arranged in the most sophisticated packaging, that I found, labelled “legumes”, seeds that had nothing whatever to do with legumes: inside the bag there was, for instance, farro or other cereals. So the first distinction to be drawn when speaking of seeds for food is this: cereals and legumes. These two categories of food have been, and still are, the basis of the nutrition of humans and animals. Cereals and legumes represent an example of an excellent pairing typical of the Mediterranean diet. Legumes contain relatively low amounts of an essential amino acid, methionine, which is found in high amounts in cereals. Cereals, by contrast, contain relatively low amounts of lysine, which is contained in legumes.
The word “legume” is thought to derive from the Latin legumen, from the verb legère (to gather, to bring together, to put together) (Pratap and Kumar, 2011). This suggests that legumes were generally, in the past, gathered by hand. Although I prefer the sense in which the seeds are “brought together, put together” within the pods (legumes, precisely), as happens with beans, peas, broad beans and so on.
Since antiquity, the high energy value of dried seeds and their capacity to keep for long periods have made legumes a key element of human nutrition. They were grown by the ancient Romans, who ate the seeds both raw and cooked, on their own or dressed with vinegar, as Cato advised, or mixed into rustic soups (pulmentaria) together with cereals (wheat, farro or barley) and flavoured with pork fat. The dried seeds were ground into a flour, used in blends for bread-making or to obtain a kind of polenta (puls). Between the first century BC and the first century AD, authors such as Virgil, Varro, Pliny the Elder, Galen and Columella bore witness to the use of legumes, bringing out the importance of their role in enriching the soil (the practice of green manuring). Throughout the Early Middle Ages legumes were grown intercropped with cereals, so as to make the best use of their ability to fix elemental nitrogen in the soil and thus restore its fertility. The produce was intended mainly for consumption by the farming family, yet it featured in the diet of every social class. After the thirteenth century, with the rise of communal life and the emergence of an urban class, the cultivation of legumes expanded enormously, and the produce, until then confined to kitchen gardens and suburban fields, found a place in the city markets. This was the period of the widest diffusion of many legumes, considered until the fifteenth century an excellent basis for nutrition (Montanari, 1988).
“the range of legume varieties grown in the periods under study……the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries in the historical territory of Gubbio ……is truly exceptional, so much so that today one can scarcely imagine the causes of the almost total abandonment of their cultivation… (Nardelli, 2006). Professor Nardelli wrote that in the Gubbio area, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, “fave, cecere (cicerchie), bisello (piselli) and ceci were widespread legumes of fundamental importance, so much so that they were named in the Municipal Statute where it lays down the “penalties for damage caused by illicit harvesting”.
Still in Umbria, another example of legume cultivation is found in the Chiugi. Since the Middle Ages the term Chiugi Perugino has been used to denote the stretch of territory west of Lake Trasimeno (Petrucci, 2005). The area coincides (apart from certain territories, lying partly to the north and partly to the south, which in the past belonged to it) with the present extent of the municipality of Castiglione del Lago, some 205 km² divided between the diocese of Perugia and, to a lesser extent, that of Città della Pieve (Chiacchella, 1984)
Thanks to the centuries-long, skilful work of the peasants, the landscape of the Chiugi changed its face from the thirteenth century onwards, and where thickets of wild oak once dominated, fields began to take hold. The predominant cultivation was cereal, with wheat, rye, oats, fodder grains, barley, millet and farro. Other important crops, above all for the peasants’ daily diet, were legumes (broad beans, mochi (bitter vetch), lupins, cicerchie (grass peas), beans and small beans); nor should the presence of the vine and the olive be overlooked (Petrucci, op. cit.). It is essential to recall that town and country had two different dietary regimes: wheat bread was reserved for the townsfolk, while in the countryside people ate bread made from inferior cereals and, indeed, a great many legumes (Tosti, 1984)
With the introduction, in the sixteenth century, of the new bean species imported from the Americas, many of the ancient legumes almost entirely vanished from the tables of the wealthy and declined markedly on those of ordinary people, becoming above all food destined for livestock (fodder). Over the past few decades, however, there has been a substantial revival in the consumption of many of those legumes, thanks to the so-called Mediterranean diet, which promotes a way of eating that is low in animal fats and rich in fibre, carbohydrates and plant proteins.
When we speak of legumes for human food we mean grain legumes. This group of plants belongs to the family Leguminosae, an important taxonomic grouping with about 700 genera and 18,000 species. Roughly 13% of the world’s total cultivated area (190 million ha) is given over to grain legumes (Pratap and Kumar, 2011). Most species belonging to the legume family are predominantly autogamous (self-fertilising), or else fertilisation occurs by way of insects. As with other plant species, entomophilous (insect) pollination is accompanied by adaptations in the host plant, such as the development of specific morphological traits and the production of attractive volatile substances. The morphological features include: specific inflorescence types, racemes and pseudoracemes, and zygomorphic flowers.

An important role in safeguarding bees, for instance, is played by the forage legumes once found in the hill pastures of the Umbria region, such as sainfoin, red clover, sulla and birdsfoot trefoil. Another forage legume (regarded as the queen of forage crops) is alfalfa, which is likewise visited a great deal by bees.
Returning to grain legumes, let us ask the following question: which are the most widespread grain legumes in our region of Umbria?
Perhaps the most famous grain legume in Umbria is the lentil (Lens culinaris Medicus).
The lentil of Castelluccio di Norcia is one of the best-known Umbrian typical products in the world and the only Umbrian legume to hold PGI status. The lentil is one of the most anciently domesticated grain legumes (9000 BC) and among those that played an important part in the civilisations that developed around the Mediterranean basin. Its cultivation is generally confined almost exclusively to poor, marginal soils. In countries such as Turkey, India and Pakistan it still plays an important role in human nutrition, whereas in the more industrialised countries its importance has declined. In Italy, from the middle of the last century to the present, the area under cultivation has fallen drastically, from about 24,000 to 2,000 ha. Production has gone from 12,000 to 2,000 t. In parallel with production, there has been a striking drop in lentil consumption. The most important regions for this crop, besides Umbria, are the Marche, Lazio, Abruzzo, Molise, Puglia and Sicily. In these regions local populations, or local varieties (landraces), are still grown, marked by a genetic variability that allows them to adapt to organic or low-input cultivation. Many of these local populations of Italian lentil are, however, at serious risk of genetic erosion, since they are being “swept away” by foreign varieties.
As already mentioned, in Umbria the lentil is grown almost exclusively on the marginal soils found at Castelluccio di Norcia, although good yields can also be obtained on the Colfiorito plateau. In recent decades, thanks to the growing interest of consumers in typical local products, this grain legume has been given fresh impetus. At Castelluccio many farmers have signed up for the inspections required to certify the lentil as an organic and PGI (Protected Geographical Indication) product. At Castelluccio the growing technique adopted for the lentil consists of sowing at a seed rate of about 100-120 kg/ha; the high seed quantity is dictated by this legume’s poor competitive ability against weeds.

As a rule no hoeing is carried out, and cultivation is done using methods typical of organic farming. This growing technique makes possible the “Flowering of Castelluccio”, a natural phenomenon that occurs each year towards the end of June and the beginning of July (depending on the seasonal pattern).

The weed species that are the protagonists of the “Flowering”, which draws tourists from all over the world, are precisely the weeds of the lentil, such as the poppy, wild mustard, the cornflower and so on. At harvest time the lentil is mown (when the pods have set and the plants are still green) and gathered into windrows. The material, once dried in the sun, is then carried to a common threshing floor and threshed with a stationary thresher. As a rule each farmer jealously guards his own seed, which is reused for the following year’s sowings. Even where grading, packaging and marketing are handled cooperatively, the individual packs bear the name of the producer. The seed of the Castelluccio lentil is marked by a mixture of colours ranging from light green to dark brown. Bozzini et al. (1988) identified 10 subpopulations differing in seed-coat colour, type of mottling and cotyledon colour.

Another distinctive feature is the size of the seed, smaller than that of the other lentil populations grown in Italy; this characteristic allows rapid cooking without the seeds having to be soaked beforehand.
Another grain legume that holds a place of note in our region is the fagiolina of Lake Trasimeno (Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp. subsp. unguiculata). It is widespread in the Trasimeno district, in particular in the municipalities of Castiglione del Lago, Passignano sul Trasimeno, Tuoro sul Trasimeno, Magione, Città della Pieve, Piegaro, Corciano, Panicale and Paciano. This legume, known by the common name fagiolo dall’occhio (black-eyed bean), is native to Africa and was introduced to our continent in ancient times. It was already widespread in Italy in Roman times: it is in fact the phaseolus mentioned by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis historia. The only kind of bean grown in those days. Indeed, it is the only bean species cultivated in Europe before the advent of the American varieties.

The first written record of the cultivation of the fagiolina of Trasimeno dates back to 1876: in the survey of Umbrian agricultural production published in 1876 by the Perugian engineer Luigi Monaldi in the Giornale Agrario Italiano, we find explicit mention of the fagiolina of Trasimeno with regard to the legume varieties grown in the region: «Near Lake Trasimeno the so-called fagiolina del lago is grown in abundance, which I believe to be a variety of dolichos cathiang». The fagiolina del lago, rediscovered in the mid-1990s, had until then been sold by a single shop in Perugia to a handful of buyers at a high price, 25,000 lire a kilo; there were only two producers, and it was called risina. Later, thanks also to the work of the Faculty of Agriculture, spurred by the province in its search for typical products, it was reintroduced more substantially, though still on a niche scale, in the lake area but also in non-lakeside parts of Umbria. Despite the increase in supply, demand has risen sharply and the price has stayed very high, a little under 30 euros a kilo. So in this case the legume undergoes a class transformation, from the meat of the poor to a delicacy for the rich.
The common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) is another grain legume of particular importance in Umbria. The genus Phaseolus is of American origin and comprises more than 30 species; yet only five of these, P. acutifolius A. Gray, P. coccineus L., P. lunatus L., P. polyanthus Greenman and P. vulgaris, have been used for cultivation (Gepts and Debouck, 1991). Of these, the common bean is the most widely grown species. A survey conducted at the Department of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Sciences (University of Perugia) identified several bean types that were, and in some cases still are, grown in Umbria: the fagiolo di Cave di Foligno; the fagioli secondi of the Orvieto plain; the fagioli della stoppia (stubble beans; or fagioli di Colpetrazzo, Massa Martana); and the fagiolo di Camerata di Todi. The first three types are very similar to one another, are of determinate growth and were grown in rotation after wheat. The fagiolo di Camerata, by contrast, is of indeterminate growth. Other bean types were once grown in Umbria. During a seed collection carried out in the 1990s, I recall that a farmer from around Lake Trasimeno handed me a type of bean (of the tabacchino kind) and told me they were called fagioli della Vigna (beans of the Vineyard). In the past the vineyards were worked with the spade, and the strength to dig was supplied by these beans!! Legumes were indeed regarded in the past as the meat of the poor.

In Umbria there is a long tradition of growing broad beans. As attested by a note taken from: Famiglie Perugine (1742-1750), “note of the broad beans given for sowing to the various labourers in 1742. On the 12th of November let there be given to Cristofino Landi of Mandoleto 2 stara of broad beans for sowing. On the 29th of July 1743 the said Cristofino brought, in two goes, 12 stara and six coppe as his share. And further he brought two broad beans that had been given to him for sowing”.
Vicia faba L. was domesticated about 8000 BC in the Near East; the oldest remains were found at Jericho and dated to 6000 BC. From the Near East the crop spread: (i) into central Europe and Russia by way of Anatolia, the Danube valley and the Caucasus; (ii) into the eastern Mediterranean regions along the Mediterranean coast and the islands; from Egypt and the Arabian coast (Arabia Felix) into Abyssinia; and through Mesopotamia into India and China. In the sixteenth century the crop was introduced into the Americas by the Spanish, and only towards the end of the twentieth century did it reach Australia.
Broad bean seeds are generally credited with good nutritional value, which is why they have a long history in both human and animal nutrition. Broad bean populations generally show wide genetic variability in their content of starch (mean value 41.4%), protein (32.3%) and fibre (16.8%) (Duce et al. 2011), which shows that there is a certain scope for the genetic improvement of this grain legume from a nutritional standpoint.
Of broad beans, as is well known, there are three types, classified according to seed size: (i) V. faba minor (favino), used to feed animals, the black one, also called ‘palombino’, being used to feed pigeons; (ii) V. faba equina (mezza fava); (iii) V. faba major, generally eaten fresh (shelled).
In the past, in the Todi area, the mezza fava was used to prepare “fave con le animelle”… the norcino, while cleaning out the belly and washing it with cold water, would take from the sides of the pork belly little pieces of fat and lean meat (animelle) and give them to the housewife, who diligently placed them in a large earthenware pan… with the melted fat the broad beans were dressed, while the seasoned and prepared animelle were eaten afterwards. It was as good as anything one could wish for!! (Paolucci, 2005). In 1984, at Collevalenza di Todi (PG), the “Festa dell’animella” was organised for the first time, and it is still held punctually in the month of February to keep and commemorate local traditions.
Today the mezza fava, or ‘fava cottora’, is particularly prized and grown as a typical product of the Amerino, and it has been awarded Slow Food presidium status.
The broad beans were soaked the day before and cooked in a black earthenware pot. In the peasants’ houses there was always a pot beside the hearth in which broad beans were gently bubbling away. Around nine in the morning they were ladled out onto a plate and dressed with good oil… an unforgettable flavour… sometimes the cooked broad beans were passed through a sieve and reduced to a purée, spread on home-made bread “toasted” over the fire with a little garlic… indescribable flavours!!! This made up breakfast, a meal that gave back to the field workers much of the energy they had spent since the earliest hours of the morning.

The roveja (Pisum sativum subsp. sativum var. arvense L. (Poir.)) is a wild pea with a coloured seed ranging from dark green to brown. The species, widely found in the wild, was extensively grown until the first half of the last century all along the Apennine ridge, in particular in the Umbrian-Marchigian Apennines, where wild forms and remnants of cultivation can still be found today. The roveja, also known by the names field pea, corbello and rubiglio (in all likelihood from the ruby-red colour of the flower), was grown as a fodder plant, both fresh and dried, while the use of its grain for food was very limited. It was instead used for fattening rams, pigs and poultry. There are historical references attesting to the presence and use of this legume in Umbria. In 1545 the Statute of Montesanto di Sellano required the cultivation of various civiae (legumes), among them the roveja, to which 2 m of every kitchen garden had to be devoted (Giacchè and Menghini, 2000). Another mention is found in a classic agronomic text, La Divina Villa by Corniolo della Cornia, written at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the 1923 article “A general glance at the high Umbrian mountains and their economy”, contained in Umbria Verde, Francolini and Buzi report that, besides the lentil and the chickpeas, “among the crops worthy of mention on the Castelluccio plateau […] (there is) the roveglia (Pisum arvensis), of which a large export is made to Rome”. It is interesting to note that in the neighbourhood of Preci (Perugia), in the locality of Colmezzo, there is a spring, the “Fonte di Acquaviva”, which in the past was called “Fonte dei rovegliari” (the spring of the roveja growers).
At present the cultivation of roveja has been all but abandoned; there is, however, a small enterprise in the locality of Civita di Cascia (Cascia, PG), where a few farmers have brought this ancient legume back into cultivation, and in a short time, thanks to their ingenuity and skill, it has become one of the typical products of our region.

This ancient legume has excellent nutritional characteristics: a low content of carbohydrates (18-20%) and lipids (about 23%) and a high protein content, comfortably exceeding 20% (22-23%). In addition, fibre amply exceeds 30% (34-36%). The fibre content is certainly the element that most sets this legume apart, since it is two to five times higher than that of all the other conventional legumes. Of interest, too, is the high content of phenolic compounds, present above all in the skin, and of antioxidant compounds, present above all in the germ.
The characteristic flavour of this grain legume means that it can be used to prepare excellent dishes, such as farrecchiata, a kind of polenta with an intense, faintly bitterish taste, obtained from the flour produced by grinding the grain in the same stone mills used for farro (hence the name farrecchiata), which is traditionally dressed with a mince of garlic, oil and anchovies; it is also excellent the next day, sliced and toasted in the pan. Today roveja is taking on the character of a typical product. It features with success on the menus of several Umbrian and Marchigian restaurants and farm stays, where one can find polenta of roveja flour sautéed in the pan with onion and pecorino, pasta e roveja, and crostoni with roveja purée.

Renzo Torricelli

Reference bibliography

Bozzini A., Iannelli P. e Rossi L., Valutazione di germoplasma di lenticchia di recente introduzione. Informatore Agrario 44: 39–45, 1988

Chiacchella R., “Terra e proprietà nel catasto del Chiugi Perugino del 1682”, in R. Chiacchella, M. Tosti, Terra, proprietà e politica annonaria nel Perugino tra Sei e Settecento, Maggioli Editore, Rimini 1984 (pp. 15-17.)

Falcinelli M., Albertini E., Castellani G., Concezi L., Dalla Ragione I., Desantis F., Falistocco E., Fatichenti F., Ferranti F., Giampiccolo C., Mauceri S., Micheli M., Pagiotti P., Paldini C., Porfiri O., Prosperi F., Rossi F., Scerna G.C., Standardi A., Reale L., Torricelli R., La biodiversità vegetale in Umbria e la sua conservazione. La valorizzazione delle risorse genetiche agrarie della regione Umbria, Edizioni 3A-PTA, Pantalla (PG) 2005

Giacchè L., Menghini A., La coltivazione dello zafferano, Ed. EFFE, Perugia 2000

Grassi E., Caratterizzazione genetica della roveglia, Tesi di Laurea, Università degli Studi di Perugia, 2005

Montanari M., Alimentazione e cultura ne medioevo, Laterza, Bari 1988

Nardelli M.G.. Biodiversità risorse cultura : itinerario di recupero degli agroecosistemi nel territorio storico di Gubbio tra XVI e XIX secolo, Edizioni L’artegrafica, Gubbio (PG) 2006

Paolucci G., Vita contadina, costumi e storie di un paese, ISBN 88-87472-48-3, 2005

Petrucci E., La terza parte del fruttato, TP Edizioni, Città della Pieve (PG) 2005

Pratap A., Kumar J., 2011. Biology and Breeding of Food Legumes, Cabi, ISBN-13: 978 1 84593 766-9

Righi V., Caratterizzazione genetica della roveja (Pisum sativum sativum var. arvense (L.) POIR.) di Civita di Cascia, Tesi di Laurea, Università degli Studi di Perugia, 2014

Tosti M., “Città e Campagna e il problema del pane. La politica annonaria di Perugia nel Settecento”, in Terra, proprietà e politica annonaria nel perugino tra Sei e Settecento, Maggiore Editore, Rimini 1984 (p. 168)

On 10 November 2015 the FAO proclaimed 2016 the International Year of Pulses, following the International Year of Quinoa in 2013, the Year of Family Farming in 2014 and the Year of Soils in 2015. This trend shows the concern of the world organisation to raise the critical points of our survival on the planet, singling out important matters to bring, or bring back, to general attention. Indeed, however much the merits of legumes for nutrition and for the safeguarding of the environment are stressed, their consumption is suffering a heavy stagnation.
It should, however, be made clear on which sore point the FAO has laid its finger. “Legumes” is too broad a term, one that would include crops needing no promotion whatsoever; the FAO specified “pulses”. Pulses stands for those legumes consumed as human food, consisting of seeds rich in reserve substances and, in great abundance, protein, easily preserved and stored. This new definition clears the field of all those legumes that serve to feed livestock as fodder (alfalfa and clover), but above all of those legumes that produce oil-rich seeds and are for that reason not easily stored, such as the peanut and, above all, the soybean, which is indeed a legume but certainly needs no promotion, being one of the most widely grown crops in the world.
The crops that are the object of the FAO’s concern are the bean, chickpea, lentil, broad bean and pea, among those grown here; ancient crops, crops that yield a rich and nourishing food, that are protein-rich thanks to their ability to use atmospheric nitrogen by means of the rhizobium (which lives in symbiosis in their root system), thus not impoverishing the soils but actually enriching them, and that for these reasons lie at the foundation of the history of humankind (Esau sold his birthright for a plate of lentils).
The cultivation of these seeds has undergone great vicissitudes for a number of reasons, first of all because it did not benefit much from the Green Revolution: gaining no great advantage from nitrogen fertilisation, these crops did not achieve the astonishing increases in yield shown by the cereals; their mechanisation is less straightforward than that of the grasses; and demand for them is limited.
The organisation of society and the demands of the population tend to steer the mass consumption of legumes towards an elite consumption reserved for special occasions; a typical case is the one cited by Torricelli, that of the fagiolina del lago, which by now is eaten only on grand occasions as an accompaniment to main dishes. The main drawback of legumes is the time needed to prepare them; there are no longer the housewives whose sole occupation was the home and the children and who could therefore devote a great deal of time to cooking, layering it over other tasks about the house. Coming home in the evening and preparing a meal in a short time sits ill with the preparation times of legumes.
The collapse in production is documented by a paper from Confagricoltura that reports the figures of the disaster: from 1961 to 2015 the consumption of dried legumes halved, while production fell by more than 80%, thus considerably increasing imports. A faint sign of recovery is recorded for the chickpea and, but at negligible levels, for the lentil.
In reality this trend is not that of the whole world, nor even of the whole of Europe. This fall in production is in fact observable only within our continent, in the Mediterranean countries, while European production remains stable thanks to the notable increases in France and England; someone, after all, will have to sell us our imports.
The rest of the world shows considerable increases in the Americas, Africa and Oceania, while Asia is markedly reducing the area under pulses; it must be said that in certain areas of the world, I am thinking of South America but not only, the bringing into cultivation of previously uncultivated areas has enormously increased the growing of all plants, and so a careful assessment of the phenomenon would be needed. In Italy the exact opposite is probably to be observed: the decrease in the acreage under legumes reflects also the abandonment of the cultivation of many soils, the most marginal ones, and, at the same time, of the crops with the highest labour requirements and the lowest economic return.
The gist of this brief report is, in any case, that the one paying the price is the environment, and perhaps our very survival: on the one hand we increase the areas under cultivation by taking them away from the great lungs of the planet, and on the other, as in Italy, we reduce the areas under cultivation by sealing the soil. Environmental changes, rising temperatures, natural disasters that the environment is no longer able to buffer: this is what the future holds out to us. Perhaps, rather than the problem of legumes, we ought to tackle the problem of land use; yet green Umbria too is ever greyer.

Francesco Damiani

A PhD in Plant Biology and Agri-environmental Biotechnology, Renzo Torricelli worked for more than 40 years at the Department of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Sciences of the University of Perugia, in the field of Agricultural Genetics and the Breeding of Agricultural Plants. He took part in numerous national and international research projects concerning genetic improvement, germplasm collection, molecular genetic characterisation and the conservation of agricultural genetic resources and plant biodiversity.

Francesco Damiani is a Researcher at the National Research Council and head of the Perugia Operational Unit of the Institute of Biosciences and Bioresources.