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Solina wheat of the Abruzzo Apennines

Slow Food Presidium · PAT · Fruit, vegetables and pulses · Abruzzo

Apulica editorial team · Sources checked:

In brief

History and origin

In inland Abruzzo, when people say wheat they often mean solina. Proverbs bear this out: solina mends every flour, and a farmer who wants to go to the mill must sow solina. In the past it was valued above all for the steadiness of its harvest, which kept bread on the table of farming families even in hard years.

It is a very old soft wheat. Notarial deeds of sale drawn up at the Lanciano fair record its cultivation in Abruzzo as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century. In the early twentieth century the geneticist Nazareno Strampelli used it in experiments and crosses with other local varieties.

Today a group of mountain farmers, organised in a cooperative and supported by the Slow Food Presidium, grows it at the best-suited altitudes using organic methods and promotes its flour among local bakers and pasta makers. Solina is also on the list of traditional food products of Abruzzo.

Sources: Fondazione Slow Food — Presidio Grano solina dell'Appennino abruzzese · Masaf — Elenco nazionale dei prodotti agroalimentari tradizionali, XXVI revisione (2026)

Area and method of production

It is the wheat of the mountain areas of the Gran Sasso, above all the inner side of the massif in the province of L'Aquila, and of the areas on the opposite side above 750 metres. It withstands long periods under snow and intense cold and is grown from 600 to over 1,400 metres: the higher it grows, the better the quality. On the side facing Pescara and Teramo, where the Adriatic makes the climate milder, it is never grown below 750 metres.

Sowing is in autumn only: from mid or late September on the highest fields to the second or third ten days of October in the lower inner valleys. It is harvested in late July. It is very hardy and adapts to the poor, stony soils of high ground.

Growing it is demanding: the fields are hard to reach, solina has to be rotated with maize and potatoes and then with legumes such as chickpeas and lentils, it ripens slowly and average yields stop at about twenty quintals per hectare.

Sources: Fondazione Slow Food — Presidio Grano solina dell'Appennino abruzzese

How to recognise it

Solina is a soft wheat. Its flour has low tenacity, meaning it forms a weak gluten network: this makes it ill-suited to modern industrial processing, which looks for gluten-rich wheats, but very well suited to working by hand.

In baked goods and homemade pasta it brings flavours that many had forgotten. The plant is very hardy, copes with mountain snow and cold, and gives its best at the highest altitudes.

On the national list of traditional products, for Abruzzo, solina also appears through the bread made from it, solina bread or solina loaves.

Yields remain low, at about twenty quintals per hectare.

Sources: Fondazione Slow Food — Presidio Grano solina dell'Appennino abruzzese · Masaf — Elenco nazionale dei prodotti agroalimentari tradizionali, XXVI revisione (2026)

In the kitchen

Solina flour is made for the hands: its ideal use is country bread and homemade pasta.

Two preparations show it well. The first is rolled pasta sheet cut into squares, used for timballi, layered baked pasta. The second is scrippelle, the thin pancakes typical of the Teramo area, served in broth.

Today it is used above all by the area's artisan bakers and pasta makers, whom the Presidium seeks to involve so that wheat grown in the mountains reaches the table as local bread and pasta.

For centuries solina flour was the basis of bread for mountain families, valued more for the reliability of its harvests than for their size.

Sources: Fondazione Slow Food — Presidio Grano solina dell'Appennino abruzzese

Where to taste it

Solina is grown in the Gran Sasso area, particularly in the province of L'Aquila, and on the slopes facing Pescara and Teramo above 750 metres. It is a landscape of upland fields among mountain villages and pastures.

The fields tell the most in summer, when the wheat ripens and is cut in late July.

It is mainly found through the bread and pasta of the area's bakeries and artisan workshops. Visitors to L'Aquila, Santo Stefano di Sessanio or the villages of the Gran Sasso cross the same mountains where this ancient wheat is still sown.

The cooperative leading its recovery grows it at the highest altitudes, using organic methods.

Sources: Fondazione Slow Food — Presidio Grano solina dell'Appennino abruzzese

Protection

When

  • The sources consulted give no months.

Where

Abruzzo