There is one statistic that tells the story of the island's transformation better than any other: in 1900, wheat occupied 900,000 hectares of Sicilian land. By 2010, that figure had fallen to 300,000. Today, it doesn't even reach 150,000. A collapse that has unfolded over the course of just a few generations, accelerated in recent years by increasingly long and unpredictable droughts.

Near Catenanuova, in the province of Enna, a farmer saw 15 hectares of wheat burn in the field in 2024, after it had rained only once between January and June. An event that climate attribution studies indicate is much more likely today than in the pre-industrial era—almost one and a half times more so.

Looking back to move forward

Faced with this emergency, some Sicilian researchers and farmers have chosen a path that seems paradoxical: looking to the past to build the future. An agronomist from the University of Catania carries with him, literally in the trunk of his car, a "personal library" made of wheat ears: dozens of ancient grain varieties, each with a different history and character.

There is the Bufala, appreciated (perhaps too much) by birds. There is the Trentino, which owes its name to the thirty grains it produces per ear. There is the Tuminia, whose origins date back to the Greek era. These are hardy varieties, capable of surviving where modern cultivars fail, and which offer a more digestible gluten—even if with significantly lower yields, about half that of contemporary wheat.

This is not an isolated case. Not far from Agrigento, beneath the columns of the Temple of Concordia, a unique agricultural garden houses olive, pistachio, carob, and almond trees planted as far back as the 17th century. Here, several Italian universities are experimenting with grafting ancient varieties onto more resistant rootstocks, in a project designed to last five years.

A land accustomed to reinventing itself

Sicily has always known how to adapt its crops to changing times. In Ribera, a land now famous for its citrus fruits, sugar cane was grown in the 18th century and rice in the 19th, before oranges took over in the 20th. An organic producer in the area has demonstrated that techniques such as soil cover and targeted pruning can lower ground-level temperatures by twenty degrees on the hottest days.

This capacity for transformation, rooted in the history of the island—a crossroads of Greeks, Romans, and Arabs, each of whom brought new seeds and techniques—is today the most valuable card that agricultural Sicily has to play against an increasingly hostile climate.

Why choose ancient grain, today

Ancient varieties are not just a nostalgic chapter of Sicilian history. They are a genetic heritage that carries with it centuries of adaptation to an extreme Mediterranean climate—the very climate that the rest of Europe will have to learn to cope with in the coming decades. Choosing ancient grain means supporting more resilient agriculture, a more digestible gluten, and a biodiversity that intensive farming has progressively erased.

On an island where wheat burns in the fields and farmers talk about "feeling climate change on their own skin," cultivating—and choosing—ancient grains is not an identity-driven affectation. It is a concrete bet on the future.