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
Ruled variety Kodaira dimension −∞ but is not separably uniruled. It is not known whether every smooth Fano variety in positive characteristic is separably uniruled. Ruled variety In algebraic geometry, a variety over a field "k" is ruled if it is birational to the product of the projective line with some variety over "k". A variety is uniruled if it is covered by a family of rational curves. (More precisely, a variety "X" is uniruled if there is a variety "Y" and a dominant rational map "Y" × P – → "X" which does not factor through the projection to "Y".) The