意大利农民在阁楼发现未知种子并种下

Sometime in the early 1990s, Claudio Grossi, a 40-year-old farmer in Parma, in northern Italy, was cleaning his attic when he turned up an old sack full of seeds that he couldn’t identify. The bag, he was sure, had been left by his late great-grandfather, who’d started the farmstead around 1915. Grossi had no idea how long the seeds had been sitting there, deprived of water, soil and sun. Dry and cracked, the kernels looked so old in the palm of his hand that he doubted anything would ever sprout from them. He carried the bag down the stairs, shook the seeds out into a pile of manure and then forgot about them.

To his surprise, the seeds soon sprouted a few different types of wheat. One was particularly striking: At six feet high, its plants were about twice as tall as commercial wheat. But the most remarkable feature came when it developed ears—the grain-studded parts at the top of the plant. All of the wheat types Grossi had previously seen grew only one such ear. But the tall wheat grew a full seven ears, always in the same pattern: a long one with six shorties bunched up around it like little fingers. Even the kernels themselves were bigger than those of average wheat. And unlike the typical pale-yellow wheat kernels, they came in a rainbow of colors—yellow, black, red, white and even green, sometimes all on the same stem. Grossi, a grain farmer his whole life, had never seen anything like it. “I thought it was a freak of nature,” he says. He couldn’t find a mention of it in agricultural books.

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This article is a selection from the November 2026 issue of Smithsonian magazine

For Grossi, a practicing Catholic, the next insight came from a different book altogether. Leafing through a Bible at church one Sunday, he found a passage in the Book of Genesis describing a stalk with seven ears, in a dream that Joseph interprets for the Pharaoh: “And he slept and dreamed the second time: And, behold, seven ears of grain came up upon one stalk, rank and good. And, behold, seven thin ears and blasted with the east wind sprung up after them. And the seven thin ears devoured the seven rank and full ears.” To Grossi, that sounded just like the mysterious crop in his manure pile.

“I connected the dots,” Grossi says. That grain must be really ancient, he thought. And if people were farming this odd-looking wheat in biblical times, why does no one today?

Back on his farm, Grossi harvested the grain, milled it into flour and baked a loaf of bread in his kitchen. Compared with commercial wheat, the dough didn’t rise well, but as the loaf sat in the oven, it filled the kitchen with a surprisingly nutty and delicious aroma. Once finished, it had a rich, satisfying taste. “You get these notes of sweetness that you can’t find in regular commercial flour,” he says.

Did you know? More miracles of grain in the Bible

In 2 Kings 4:42-44, Elisha multiplies 20 barley loaves in order to feed 100 men—anticipating Jesus’s “Feeding of the 5,000” in the gospels.

In 1 Kings 17:8-16, Elisha helps a widow at Zarephath to outlast a drought and famine with only a handful of flour and a little oil.

In Judges 7:9-15, a Midianite soldier recounts a dream in which a barley loaf tumbles into the camp and overturns a tent. Gideon, the judge and military leader, recognizes the dream as a sign that God will deliver the Midianites into Israel's hands.

In 2 Kings 4:38-41, during a famine, someone gathers wild gourds and cuts them into a pot of stew. The diners discover that the stew is dangerous and cry out to Elisha. He calls for flour and throws it into the pot—and the stew becomes miraculously safe to eat.

Grossi discovered it had other advantages: It was hardier and more self-sufficient than commercial varieties. It fared better during droughts, growing so tall that it overshadowed the weeds. It didn’t need fertilizer or herbicides. Indeed, it seemed so superior to its industrial cousins that he thought of it no longer as a freak of nature but as a wonder. He dubbed it grano del miracolo—“miracle grain” or “miracle wheat.”

Grossi’s discovery came at just the right time. In Italy in the 1990s, a burgeoning slow-food movement aimed to preserve traditional farming practices and promote natural diets.

Grossi hoped that miracolo could ride this slow-food wave, becoming both a portal to the past and a passage to a future. Perhaps, he thought, miracolo could help other farmers bring back ancient grains, leading the movement that is changing how we make bread, a staple of the human diet. And today, as climate change makes droughts, heat waves and plant disease outbreaks more frequent and intense, a grain that has shown it can fend for itself would help keep that bread on the table.

Farmers began cultivating wheat about 10,000 years ago, in the Fertile Crescent—the area of the Middle East known as the Cradle of Civilization. Thousands of years ago, the hardy and adaptable plant took hold in Europe and Asia. Compared with our modern crops, these ancient wheats were much taller, outperforming other grasses in the field.

Over the millennia, humans bred different varieties of wheat, some yielding less grain and others more. As human populations grew, the strains of wheat that brought plentiful harvests became more desirable. That pattern accelerated amid the upheavals of the early 20th century. By the early 1920s, Italy was still recovering from World War I and unable to grow enough grain to sustain itself; the country was importing roughly a third of its wheat. When fascist leader Benito Mussolini became prime minister in 1922, he launched a campaign to “free the Italian people from the slavery of foreign bread,” by pushing for wheat varieties that yielded greater harvests. The Italian government promoted and planted these “elite” varieties, then distributed the seeds to farmers. Named la Battaglia del Grano, or the Battle of Wheat, this campaign became a global model for agrarian development.

In the United States, wheat harvests were then still plentiful, but not for long: By the early 1930s, amid unprecedented droughts, American farmers found the land was exhausted. The result was the Dust Bowl, during which the previously fertile soils of the Great Plains turned into a desert. American farmers had to look for more drought-resistant varieties that still yielded enough grain.

The midcentury Green Revolution, a movement launched by the American agronomist Norman Borlaug, focused on selective breeding and boosted crop production. This work spread worldwide, feeding countless people. The wheat that was created was indeed more plentiful, yet it came with trade-offs. The petite plants couldn’t always outcompete weeds and were susceptible to disease, so growers used weed killers, fungicides and fertilizer to sustain the crops. Little did they know that these practices would only weaken the health of the soil—while making the wheat even less resilient to changing climate and extreme weather events.

In the 1990s, Grossi sensed that anxiety over wheat harvests was building. That’s why, after he grew wheat from those seeds in the attic, he set out to put the hardy ancient grain back on the table. First, he realized he’d have to solve a big problem: Bread made from the wheat leavened poorly, rising only to fall again. In the early 2000s, he began discussing this challenge with an old local baker who shunned modern machines and still kneaded his dough by hand. The baker was intrigued. The two men started experimenting.

They tried letting the dough rise in smaller batches, using wicker baskets that were taller and helped the dough keep its shape. Soon, the two found another secret: Less kneading made miracolo leaven even better. “The dough was rising, and it was holding its shape,” Grossi says.

One new fan of the bread was Beniamino Perobelli, a student in food science at the University of Parma, who tasted the miracolo bread at a local farm