Producer of sweet and sour onions
A project, the stubbornness of a young woman from Alife, a handful of seeds given to her by an 83-year-old lady, this is how Antonietta Melillo breathed new life into the cultivation of the ancient variety of the Alife onion.
The Alife onion is a very old variety already known, it seems, by Roman gladiators, who used onions to rub their bodies to firm up their muscles; at the time of the Lombards, onions were even used as currency.
An inheritance that Antonietta has taken up and modernised, giving the humblest of vegetables a dignity of its own, becoming a Slow Food presidium, and its cultivation has returned to the fertile Alifana plain. Traditional and picturesque is the 'nzerta', the braid made by braiding the dried leaves of 12 to 20 onions, ready for family consumption thanks to its marked aptitude for preservation for up to seven or eight months.
