Tradizioni e saperi attorno ad alcune varietà locali di Cucumis melo L. in Salento (Puglia)

In the last years, demand for typical products and local varieties considerably increased, leading agricultural research institutes at detection and retrieval germoplasm to define the agricultural biodiversity in relevance area. Most of the characteristics of locally grown vegetable varieties do not match the food industry requirements. More over these varieties are old farmers' prerogative, who like to taste the flavor of a past time. The agricultural land abandon risks to induce these varieties to disappear quickly. This paper describes a preliminary investigation carried out to identify the inter-variety diversity of Cucumis melo, a vegetable exclusive of the Bari and Salento area (Apulia), which recently is affecting the market with its production also at national level. The present work tries to estimate how many and what varieties they still continue to be cultivated and preserved by farmers. Regional exploration have been carried out in order to find germoplasm of Cucumis melo in the different districts of Salento but, above all, to learn more about the farmers who are working to keep alive these varieties, renewing annually seed production with techniques environmentally preserving the rural context. The germoplasm collected has allowed us to initiate studies on the morphological characterization of varieties. Already from a morphological examination of the seeds, it was obvious that an incredible diversity of phenotypes and genotypes exist of the same vegetable. For each sample open field cultivation have been carried out to obtain the morphometric characterization of seeds, leaves, stems, flowers and fruit. Production parameters and the quality of fruits from each variety were also evaluated. Finally, the germoplasm found out corresponded to 3 different varieties of sweet melon and 13 meloncelle (2 of which didn’t germinated); the 11 varieties in production corresponded to 6 well distinct cultivars. The loss of intraspecific biodiversity represents a serious risk to the great variety of Cucumis melo, the result of thousands of years of genetic improvement and domestication.