Il Museo Vivente del Mandorlo

The most characteristic plant components of the agricultural landscape of the Valley of the Temples are its olive and almond trees. It is a landscape which reminds us of an important page in the history of Sicilian agriculture: the time which, at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, saw the addition of fruit trees to the hills of the estates previously dominated by pasture and arable land. The almond tree, which blooms in the middle of winter – from December to March – with colours ranging from pure white to various shades of pink, is one of the elements that fed the myth of the eternal Sicilian spring, like that of Aragona, of which Bartels wrote (in the eighteenth century) as having “as many almond trees as stars in the Milky Way”. Together with the monumental 'Saracen olive trees', the almond tree gives life to the landscape defined as dry arboriculture because of its resistance to aridity and to the Valley's “forest of almond and olive trees”, as defined by Luigi Pirandello in his novel 'The Old and the Young'.

Today, despite the gradual abandonment of almond orchards because of competition from varieties considered more profitable, the landscape of the Valley of the Temples still remains a repository of considerable biological wealth, of ancient knowledge and of a material culture in the process of disappearance. In 1997, in an effort to save and preserve the biodiversity of the almond, The Living Museum of the Almond Tree was created, named after Prof. Francesco Monastra, with the support of the Soprintendenza  BB.CC.AA. of Agrigento and the Regional Province of Agrigento. A field collection that preserves about 300 varieties of ancient traditional Sicilian almond growing, recently enriched by Sicilian varietal collections of pistachio, carob and olive tree. The design follows the appearance of a traditional almond grove in which, mingled with the almond trees, there are also olive, carob, pistachio, mulberry and rowan trees, and other shrubs characteristic of the non-irrigated orchards of Sicily. The almond grove, as well as conserving biodiversity, also has the function of demonstrating, for educational purposes, traditional agricultural cultivation techniques. It will serve as a germplasm bank, for evaluating the varieties according to their landscape value up to diffusing them in order, for example, to offer continuous blooms of white or shades of pink from December to April. This may stimulate the promotion of craft productions, such as the making of pastries, related to the almond tree and its products. In the final analysis, it must not only conserve the genetic resources of the species, but also provide useful guidelines for preservation of the traditional agricultural landscape of the Valley, a unique example of an outdoor museum.

A laboratory for the categorisation and conservation of germplasm, recently built in an old nineteenth-century farmhouse known as 'Case Fiandaca', is playing a fundamental role in the study of biodiversity and landscape restoration of degraded agricultural and natural systems for the protection and enhancement of the cultural landscape of the Valley of the Temples in the broadest sense. This is a joint project of the Archaeological and Landscape Park of the Valley of the Temples and the Department of Arboreal Cultivation of Palermo. The housing of an ethno-anthropological section is planned in the old rural house, which will collect material historical and cultural evidence, covering not only the agricultural but also the processing and transformation phases, thereby also taking traditional handicrafts and pastry-making into account. It must ultimately not only conserve the genetic resources of the species, but also provide useful information for the preservation of the traditional agricultural landscape and its values.