MAPs in Sicily: cultivation, uses, and potentiality

In Sicily, MAPs have been used and cultivated for centuries, with many uses ranging from the preparation of fresh or stored food items, flavoring of foods and beverages, home-made human or animal therapy or even aesthetical purposes. Many of them grow spontaneously into such areas, and are claimed to play a significant role inside land biodiversity. The widespread belief that only under “natural” conditions MAPs find their optimum quality features has driven in many cases to their uncontrolled collection from the wild, and as a result many of them are nowadays at a risk of extinction. The field cropping of such spontaneous species could play an important role in safeguarding biodiversity, and could also help in solving some of the major land-use problems, giving raw matters and intermediate products dealing with a significant economical value to many productive sectors even external to agriculture. Much work has been already done in such direction, but much work is still to do, and more resources and combined efforts are required in order to explore the genetic variability inside those plants and to choose, for each plant or plants group, the most suitable cropping technique.