Fagiolo Secondo del Piano di Orvieto

The itinerant agricultural teachers were writing about this bean in the late 1800s. Its odd name is its calendar: it goes in at the start of summer, between the end of June and the first days of July, after the wheat comes off, so it is the second sowing. It grows on the plain below the rock Orvieto stands on, along the banks of the Paglia. Older farmers remember the beans running over the fertile, permeable alluvium there, and in the 1950s it was called the white gold of the Paglia; growers sold it or traded it for oil.