Quantitative botanical characterization of Saragolla wheat landraces from Abruzzo and Puglia Regions of Italy

Since the 1600s, a pasta wheat locally known as Sargolla, Saragollio or Saragollo has been cul-tivated in central and southern regions of Italy, including Abruzzo and Puglia. To identify ifdistinctive Saragolla landraces are present in Abruzzo and with a view to registering them asConservation Varieties in the Abruzzo Regional Register of Genetic Resources, a quantitativebotanical characterization of 11 farm-saved seed samples from Abruzzo and a previouslydefined Saragolla landrace from Puglia was performed. All twelve samples were grown fortwo years at the CREA-CI field station in Foggia, Puglia (Italy), and were morphologicallycharacterized according to the criteria used by the botanist Johan Percival in 1921. In the12 samples, we identified 9 taxonomically different botanical types, the most frequent ofwhich were the italicum (32%), found in every population from Abruzzo. The leucurumand the affine were the main components of the previously defined Saragolla from Puglia.Results of the multivariate analysis indicated that the samples collected from farms inAbruzzo are more similar to each other than to the landrace of Saragolla from Puglia and sup-port the registration of a specific Saragolla landrace for the Abruzzo region. The diachroniccomparison of the botanical diversity of the currently cultivated Saragolla, with that observedin Sicily and Algeria at the beginning of 1900, suggests that a high degree of genetic diversitystill exists in the 11 Saragolla populations from the Abruzzo Region.