Farming News - FAO: The Amalfi Lemon and its layered resilient landscape
The Amalfi lemon grows in a landscape as distinctive as its flavour. For nearly a thousand years, farmers have worked in harmony with nature to carve arable land from the sheer slopes of Italy's Amalfi Coast, planting lemon groves, olives and vines along narrow ribbons of stone-walled terraces that cling to the mountainsides.
Farmers climb across wooden trellises, or pergolas, to tend to their lemon crops, earning the nickname "flying farmers" for their gravity-defying harvesting. Coveted for its heady fragrance and sweet, juicy flesh, the Amalfi lemon is both a culinary treasure and the cornerstone of a living heritage.
Refined over centuries, the lemon gardens are a model of Mediterranean mountain agriculture – blending ingenuity and tradition, protecting against landslides, sustaining livelihoods and binding people and land together.
Author's summary: Amalfi lemons thrive in Italy's unique landscape.