Breeding apricot in northern Italy

An apricot breeding programme was started at the University of Bologna (northern Italy) at the beginning of the 1980's and it's now co-led by the University of Milan. The basic goal of the project is to provide the southern Po Valley region with adapted cultivars to be grown in an environment featuring fluctuating temperatures at the end of the winter and the beginning of springtime, often ending in poor yield. Other goals are to obtain apricots of superior eating flavour and overall fruit quality, including appearance and firmness and/or slow ripening. Parents are chosen among germplasm collected from local cultivars (when featuring outstanding fruit flavour or tree hardiness) or from foreign sources, taking advantage of good cooperation with breeding programmes worldwide, aimed at exchanging either pollen or grafting material. One special goal is the resistance to Plum Pox Virus (PPV), as well as to the most common diseases (e.g. brown rot), or to fruit cracking. The project for PPV resistance is run in cooperation with the Italian Universities of Bari and Udine and has brought so far very promising results in terms of several advanced selections and one recently introduced cultivar ('Bora'), all field resistant to the two main PPV strains, D and M. The early ripening 'Ninfa' was the first introduction (1993) and an estimated half a million trees were sold in Italy since then, without mentioning other countries like Greece, Spain and Turkey. Among the more noteworthy recent introductions, in addition to the PPV resistant 'Bora' (large and firm fruit, with nice appearance), 'Petra', 'Pieve' and 'Pieve tardiva' are also to be mentioned because of their outstanding eating quality.