Preserving Tomatoes and Traditions

It’s hard to keep up with Sabato Abagnale. For one thing, he is a tall guy, with long legs and strides to match. For another, it seems he is being propelled forward by the unstoppable force of his own enthusiasm.

I follow him through rows of staked vines on a steep, terraced hillside across the valley from Mt. Vesuvius, south of Naples. He stops and parts a curtain of prickly green leaves to show me the subject of his ardor: tomatoes. They aren’t ripe yet and won’t be for another month. Still, I can tell from their elongated teardrop shape and pointed end that they are the famed San Marzano variety, sweet and meaty and purported to make the best sauce in the world. These are called antico pomodoro di Napoli, a variety of San Marzano—but better, Abagnale says, because they are not cultivated for industrial production.

This is a subject about which Abagnale knows a lot. He grew up right down the hill from these tomatoes, in Sant’Antonio Abate, a gritty suburb of Naples, where he still lives. He comes from a family of large-scale tomato producers and used to be in the business himself. About 15 years ago, he made a switch after becoming disillusioned with the process.

“Industrial machines ruin tomatoes,” he says. “So producers cultivate tomatoes with thicker skins and less juice. That’s progress? I decided that I had to go backward.”

Abagnale started experimenting with family heirloom seeds, saving and propagating the best specimens. He and his wife, Concetta D’Anillo, a professor of industrial chemistry at the University of Naples, began working with the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, which supports efforts to preserve local plant varieties and traditional processing methods around the world. Now they run a local Slow Food office in Sant’Antonio Abate, where they produce and sell high-quality canned and bottled whole tomatoes, pomodorini (small tomatoes), and tomato puree.

It took a while, Abagnale says, to establish his small company. “For the first three or four years the only thing I brought home was poetry,” he jokes, using a local expression. Supermarkets were not interested in canned artisanal tomatoes. Now he sells to chefs and international food importers such as New York–based Gustiamo.com. But the business remains small by design. Abagnale collaborates with about a dozen farmers who grow his tomatoes on 7½ acres of the lower slopes of the Monti Lattari, the mountain range to the south of Vesuvius. The soil, the breeze from the nearby Mediterranean Sea, and the cooler mountain air all contribute to the quality of the crops grown here.

“Agriculture was what our grandparents did,” Abagnale says. “It was the economic foundation of this area until 40 years ago, when industrialization took hold and people began to abandon the countryside. We want to revive the agricultural economy and traditions as a way of building a future for our children. Sometimes we have to go back to go forward.”