SAN GIMIGNANO, Italy (AFP) — Purple crocuses, the source of the precious spice saffron, are abloom once again in Italy's Tuscan hills, centuries after they vanished.
It is midday at the Vecchio Maneggio (Old Riding School) farm near Florence, and five people are seated at a table covered with hundreds of the flowers.
Picked in the early morning while still closed, they are now slowly beginning to open.
For the rest of the day, nimble fingers will extract the tiny red filaments which will become saffron, used chiefly in cooking but also for colouring and in some medicines.
"A machine could never do this laborious, delicate and above all lengthy work of extraction," said Paolo Pieraccini, who runs the farm with his sister Tiziana.
"You realise it takes 125,000 flowers to produce one kilogramme (2.2 pounds) of saffron!"
Each flower yields three pistils, or stigmas, which provide the reddish-coloured saffron, used as currency in the Middle Ages and still hugely expensive today.
After the fragile pistils have been removed, they are dried overnight at a temperature of 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit), a process that removes 80 percent of their weight.
Then they are put into little sachets weighing a tenth of a gramme, a tiny fraction of an ounce, sold for 3.50 euros (4.50 dollars) each, making saffron worth 35,000 euros (45,000 dollars) a kilo, more expensive than gold.
Indeed, in the Middle Ages it was known as "red gold".
In those days, the fields of "crocus sativus" stretched out of sight around San Gimignano, and saffron was used as a currency in trading and property dealing.
It was money from saffron that helped build the famous towers that rise from the walls of the city and can be seen for miles (kilometres) around, a magnet for tourists.
But in the 17th century, when cheaper, though inferior, saffron could be imported from France, cultivation withered and all but died.
Even so, some families continued to produce saffron for their own consumption, using the traditional methods.
At the Vecchio Maneggio farm, Tiziana Pieraccini, now in her 40s, decided in 2001 to increase production and revive taste for the condiment.
Seven years on, she is San Gimignano's leading producer with half a hectare (a little more than an acre) under cultivation.
Twenty other small local farms have followed her example.
In 2005, Italian saffron even received an official label of recognition for its purity, strong taste and colouring properties.
"We have huge demand, our production goes quickly," Tiziana Pieraccini said. "For six months we have had nothing in stock."
She warned that saffron is "the world's most counterfeited spice, especially when it is in powdered form: people merrily add anything at all, even clay."
This year's harvest, which takes place over several weeks in October and November, should be quite good, brother Paolo predicted, "even if we don't beat our absolute record of 1.38 kilogrammes (48 ounces)."
The farm has recruited some unusual outside help in the form of prisoners at the San Gimignano jail. Paolo has taught them the art of producing saffron, and several rows of crocuses have been planted within its walls.
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