Artichoke production in Italy Artichoke production in Italy Artichoke production in Italy has a long history. Italy is the world's largest producer of artichokes. With Spain and France, the three countries produce more than 80% of the world's artichokes. There are two theories as to its origin: artichokes may have come from the Levant, derived from the cardoon or thistle through a cross-fertilization process, while others attribute it to the work of Italian horticulturists. The first record of artichoke cultivation in Italy was during the fifteenth century in Naples, where it was considered a new food species. In 1466, Filippo Strozzi brought the first
Fano variety Fano variety In algebraic geometry, a Fano variety, introduced in , is a complete variety "X" whose anticanonical bundle "K" is ample. In this definition, one could assume that "X" is smooth over a field, but the minimal model program has also led to the study of Fano varieties with various types of singularities, such as terminal or klt singularities. The existence of some ample line bundle on "X" is equivalent to "X" being a projective variety, so a Fano variety is always projective. For a Fano variety "X" over the complex numbers, the Kodaira vanishing theorem implies that the